give were it of any interest to do so—­and proposed to sell it to him for a large sum.  Eventually, a bargain was struck on this basis:  The dealer, with perfect knowledge of the origin and authorship of the work, was to pay one thousand francs for the bust, and to pay the seller another thousand if and whenever he, the dealer, should succeed in reselling it for more than a certain price named.  Thereupon, in accordance with the usual practice in such cases, the bust disappeared from sight.  It was stored in the secret repositories of the antiquario till the circumstances attending its creation should be a little forgotten, and dust and dirt should have corrected the brand-new rawness of its surface, ready to be produced with much mystery as a recent trouvaille when a likely purchaser should loom over the Apennine which encircles “gentile Firenze.”  In due time, one of the largest and brightest of those comets whose return is so accurately calculated and eagerly expected by the Florentine dealers in ancient art made his appearance in the Tuscan sky—­no less than a buyer for the Louvre.  Those were the halcyon days of the Empire, and money was plenty.  Poor Bastianini’s bust was brought out with all due mystery, duly admired by the infallible French connoisseur, and eventually purchased by him for the imperial collection for, I think, five thousand francs—­at all events, for a sum sufficiently large to give the man who had bought the bust from the poor artist the right to demand his supplementary payment.  He did so.  But the greed of the dealer prevailed over his prudence, and he refused to give his accomplice in the fraud the promised share in the plunder.  Of course that ensued which might have been expected.  The defrauded rogue “split.”  The bust sold to the Frenchman was easily identified with that which Bastianini had made, and which had been known to all artistic Florence, and the authorities at the Louvre were duly certified by many a loud-tongued informer that they had been gulled.  The information, as is usually the case with information of the kind, came too late to be of service to the buyers, but not too late to give them serious annoyance.  The bust had been exhibited at the Louvre in a prominent place; it had excited considerable notice; none of the savants presiding over that establishment had conceived the smallest suspicion of its genuineness; and it was excessively disagreeable to have to admit that they had all been deceived by a work made the other day by an unknown Florentine artist.  It was so disagreeable that the gentlemen in question had not the courage to face the truth.  They pooh-poohed their informants, professed to adhere without a doubt to their own first opinions, and the bust, to the great amusement of all the Florentine art-world, remained in its place of honor at the Louvre, exhibited as a cinque-cento terra-cotta for a long time after all Florence was perfectly cognizant of its real history, and after the young artist had produced three or four