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 in salesrooms or in the shops of well-known dealers; Pons was not aware that his treasures had any commercial value.

The late lamented Dusommerard tried his best to gain Pons’ confidence, but the prince of bric-a-brac died before he could gain an entrance to the Pons museum, the one private collection which could compare with the famous Sauvageot museum.  Pons and M. Sauvageot indeed resembled each other in more ways than one.  M. Sauvageot, like Pons, was a musician; he was likewise a comparatively poor man, and he had collected his bric-a-brac in much the same way, with