uld have pronounced for his beloved collection.

Pons was of the opinion of Chenavard, the print-collector, who laid it
down as an axiom--that you only fully enjoy the pleasure of looking at
your Ruysdael, Hobbema, Holbein, Raphael, Murillo, Greuze, Sebastian del
Piombo, Giorgione, Albrecht Durer, or what not, when you have paid less
than sixty francs for your picture. Pons never gave more than a hundred
francs for any purchase. If he laid out as much as fifty francs, he was
careful to assure himself beforehand that the object was worth three
thousand. The most beautiful thing in the world, if it cost three
hundred francs, did not exist for Pons. Rare had been his bargains; but
he possessed the three qualifications for success--a stag's legs, an
idler's disregard of time, and the patience of a Jew.

This system, carried out for forty years, in Rome or Paris alike, had
borne its fruits. Since Pons returned from Italy, he had regularly spent
about two thousand francs a year upon a collection of masterpieces of
every sort and description, a collection hidden away from all eyes but
his own; and now his catalogue had reached the incredible number of
1907. Wandering about Paris between 1811 and 1816, he had picked up
many a treasure for ten francs, which would fetch a thousand or twelve
hundred to-day. Some forty-five thousand canvases change hands annually
in Paris picture sales, and these Pons had sifted through year by year.
Pons had Sevres porcelain, _pate tendre_, bought of Auvergnats, those
satellites of the Black Band who sacked chateaux and carried off the
marvels of Pompadour France in their tumbril carts; he had, in fact,
collected the drifted wreck of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;
he recognized the genius of the French school, and discerned the merit
of the Lepautres and Lavallee-Poussins and the rest of the great obscure
creators of the Genre Louis Quinze and the Genre Louis Seize. Our modern
craftsmen now draw without acknowledgment from them, pore incessantly
over the treasures of the Cabinet des Estampes, borrow adroitly, and
give out their _pastiches_ for new inventions. Pons had obtained many a
piece by exchange, and therein lies the ineffable joy of the
collector. The joy of buying bric-a-brac is a secondary delight; in
the give-and-take of barter lies the joy of joys. Pons had begun
by collecting snuff-boxes and miniatures; his name was unknown in
bric-a-bracology, for he seldom showed himself i