when my Red Sea is refused, I will throw
myself out of the window of despair. But they little know the heart of
man, if they think to take me thus. I will not wait for the opening of
the Exhibition. From today, my work shall be a picture of Damocles,
eternally suspended over their existence. I will send it once a week to
each of them, at his home in the bosom of his family; in the very heart
of his private life. It shall trouble their domestic joys; they shall
find their roasts burnt, their wines sour, and their wives bitter! They
will grow mad rapidly, and go to the Institute in strait-waistcoats. Ha!
Ha! The thought consoles me."

Some days later, when Marcel had already forgotten his terrible plans of
vengeance against his persecutors, he received a visit from Father
Medicis. So the club called a Jew, named Salomon, who at that time was
well known to all the vagabond of art and literature, and had continual
transactions with them. Father Medicis traded in all sorts of trumpery.
He sold complete sets of furniture from twelve francs up to five
thousand; he bought everything, and knew how to dispose of it again, at
a profit. Proudhon's bank of exchange was nothing in comparison with the
system practiced by Medicis, who possessed the genius of traffic to a
degree at which the ablest of his religion had never before arrived. His
shop was a fairy region where you found anything you wished for. Every
product of nature, every creation of art; whatever issued from the
bowels of the earth or the head of man, was an object of commerce for
him. His business included everything; literally everything that exists;
he even trafficked in the ideal. He bought ideas to sell or speculate in
them. Known to all literary men and all artists, intimate with the
palette and familiar with the desk, he was the very Asmodeus of the
arts. He would sell you cigars for a column of your newspaper, slippers
for a sonnet, fresh fish for paradoxes; he would talk, for so much an
hour, with the people who furnished fashionable gossip to the journals.
He would procure you places for the debates in the Chambers, and
invitations to parties. He lodged wandering artistlings by the day,
week, or month, taking for pay, copies of the pictures in the Louvre.
The green room had no mysteries for him. He would get your pieces into
the theater, or yourself into the boudoir of an actress. He had a copy
of the "Almanac of Twenty Five Thousand Addresses" in his head, and