oo, like Pons, was even more addicted to
bric-a-brac than to art proper; and after many vicissitudes, he and
Madame Hanska seem to have succeeded in getting together a very
considerable, if also a very miscellaneous and unequal collection in
the house in the Rue du Paradis, the contents of which were dispersed
in part (though, I believe, the Rochschild who bought it, bought most
of them too) not many years ago. Pons, indeed, was too poor, and
probably too queer, to indulge in one fancy which Balzac had, and
which, I think, all collectors of the nobler and more poetic class
have, though this number may not be large. Balzac liked to have new
beautiful things as well as old--to have beautiful things made for
him. He was an unwearied customer, though not an uncomplaining one, of
the great jeweler Froment Meurice, whose tardiness in carrying out his
behests he pathetically upbraids in more than one extant letter.

Therefore, Balzac "did more than sympathize, he felt"--and it has been
well put--with Pons in the bric-a-brac matter; and would appear that
he did so likewise in that of music, though we have rather less direct
evidence. This other sympathy has resulted in the addition to Pons
himself of the figure of Schmucke, a minor and more parochial figure,
but good in itself, and very much appreciated, I believe, by fellow
_melomanes_.

It is with even more than his usual art that Balzac has surrounded
these two originals--these "humorists," as our own ancestors would
have called them--with figures much, very much, more of the ordinary
world than themselves. The grasping worldliness of the _parvenue_
family of Camusot in one degree and the greed of the portress, Madame
Cibot, in the other, are admirably represented; the latter, in
particular, must always hold a very high place among Balzac's greatest
successes. She is, indeed a sort of companion sketch to Cousine Bette
herself in a still lower rank of life representing the diabolical in
woman; and perhaps we should not wrong the author's intentions if we
suspected that Diane de Maufrigneuse has some claims to make up the
trio in a sphere even more above Lisbeth's than Lisbeth's is above
Madame Cibot's own.

Different opinions have been held of the actual "bric-a-bracery" of
this piece--that is to say, not of Balzac's competence in the matter
but of the artistic value of his introduction of it. Perhaps his
enthusiasm does a little run away with him; perhaps he gives us a
l