perish in garrets, had left their traces
here in this vast bazar of human follies. Here, beside a writing desk,
made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold for a hundred pence, lay a
lock with a secret worth a king's ransom. The human race was revealed
in all the grandeur of its wretchedness; in all the splendor of its
infinite littleness. An ebony table that an artist might worship,
carved after Jean Goujon's designs, in years of toil, had been purchased
perhaps at the price of firewood. Precious caskets, and things that
fairy hands might have fashioned, lay there in heaps like rubbish.

"You must have the worth of millions here!" cried the young man as he
entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt by
eighteenth century artists.

"Thousands of millions, you might say," said the florid shopman; "but
you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall
see!"

The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a poem
of Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates, wonderful
cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman's skill
palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art itself became
hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a Madonna by Raphael,
but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the
glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry carved
round about with pictures of the most grotesquely wanton of Roman
divinities, the pride of some Corinna, scarcely drew a smile from him.

The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; he sickened
under all this human thought; felt bored by all this luxury and art. He
struggled in vain against the constantly renewed fantastic shapes that
sprang up from under his feet, like children of some sportive demon.

Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concentration of
all her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas; as modern chemistry, in its
caprice, repeats the action of creation by some gas or other? Do not
many men perish under the shock of the sudden expansion of some moral
acid within them?

"What is there in that box?" he inquired, a