A VINCI. No trained eye could
have mistaken it for anything else. I therefore bought it and made it
the very jewel of this superb collection. England, however, always
envious and acquisitive, in matters of connoisseurship dense, and now
mad with rage to think that I alone had sufficient culture to discern
the true and beautiful, at once set up the cry that the bust was the
work not of LEONARDO in the fifteenth century, but of an Englishman
named LUCAS in the nineteenth. They stopped at nothing in defence of
this claim. The English sculptor's son was even produced to remember his
father at work on it; while it was affirmed that a piece of his father's
waistcoat had been used as an internal support for the bust. The
campaign of calumny and mis-information, in short, was as thorough as if
WOLFF'S Bureau--I mean it was very thorough.'

"'And what happened?' I asked.

"'We had no doubt ourselves,' said my companion. 'Had Mr. TUSSAUD
himself sworn that he was the modeller only yesterday we should have had
no doubt, so indelibly, to the competent German eye, was the genius of
LEONARDO stamped upon it. But we permitted the bust to be opened from
the back, and true enough a piece of modern cloth was found within.
That, however, as I say, could not affect the authenticity of the work,
for it might easily have been sent to LUCAS for renovation, and it is
well known that a renovator often stuffs something inside the shell of
these busts to keep it from falling in while he is at work.'

"'Still it was, perhaps, awkward for you?' I asked.

"'In the contemptible English art circles some cry of triumph was
raised,' he replied, 'but no one in Germany was shaken. Moreover, they
knew--what I knew--that England raised these doubts merely to cover her
own original stupidity and ignorance. She was now convinced that it was
by LEONARDO, because she knew I could not err, and her game was to
belittle the bust. How barbaric! how devilish! but how characteristic!
And why did she belittle it?" he continued.

"'Why, indeed, go to that trouble?' I said.

"'Because'--his words were slow and impressive--'_because she wanted
it_! She wanted it, hungered for it, thirsted for it. She had let it go
and she could not forgive herself. How much she wanted it no one will
ever know!' He paused.

"'What then did she do?' he resumed. 'Finding that her bitter attack on
the bust was useless, and served only to make us prize it the more, she
began to plot t