the same love of art, the same hatred of rich capitalists with well-known names who collect for the sake of running up prices as cleverly as possible.  There was yet another point of resemblance between the pair; Pons, like his rival competitor and antagonist, felt in his heart an insatiable craving after specimens of the craftsman’s skill and miracles of workmanship; he loved them as a man might love a fair mistress; an auction in the salerooms in the Rue des Jeuneurs, with its accompaniments of hammer strokes and brokers’ men, was a crime of lese-bric-a-brac in Pons’ eyes.  Pons’ museum was for his own delight at every hour; for the soul created to know and feel all the beauty of a masterpiece has this in common with the lover—­to-day’s joy is as great as the joy of yesterday; possession never palls; and a masterpiece, happily, never grows old.  So the object that he held in his hand with such fatherly care could only be a “find,” carried off with what affection amateurs alone know!

After the first outlines of this biographical sketch, every one will cry at once, “Why! this is the happiest man on earth, in spite of his ugliness!” And, in truth, no spleen, no dullness can resist the counter-irritant supplied by a “craze,” the intellectual moxa of a hobby.  You who can no longer drink of “the cup of pleasure,” as it has been called through all ages, try to collect something, no matter what (people have been known to collect placards), so shall you receive the small change for the gold ingot of happiness.  Have you a hobby?  You have transferred pleasure to the plane of ideas.  And yet, you need not envy the worthy Pons; such envy, like all kindred sentiments, would be founded upon a misapprehension.

With a nature so sensitive, with a soul that lived by tireless admiration of the magnificent achievements of art, of the high rivalry between human toil and the work of Nature—­Pons was a slave to that one of the Seven Deadly Sins with which God surely will deal least hardly; Pons was a glutton.  A narrow income, combined with a passion for bric-a-brac, condemned him to a regimen so abhorrent to a discriminating palate, that, bachelor as he was, he had cut the knot of the problem by dining out every day.

Now, in the time of the Empire, celebrities were more sought after than at present, perhaps because there were so few of them, perhaps because they made little or no political pretension.  In those days, besides, you could set up for a poet, a musician, or a painter, with so little expense.  Pons, being regarded as the probable rival of Nicolo, Paer, and Berton, used to receive so many invitations, that he was forced to keep a list of engagements, much as barristers note down the cases for which they are retained.  And Pons behaved like an artist.  He presented his amphitryons with copies of his songs, he “obliged” at the pianoforte, he brought them orders for boxes at the Feydeau, his own theatre, he organized concerts,