I
OF THE PLENITUDE AND INTOXICATING EFFECT OF EUROPEAN ANTIQUE-SHOPS—OF
THE LARGE SHOPS AND OF THE SMALL ONES SMELLING OF CHEESE-RIND—AND
OF THE NUMEROUS STORIES WHICH ARE USED AS ENCOURAGEMENT FOR AMATEUR
ANTIQUE-HUNTERS
————
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Charles A. Doolittle, F.R.A.C.S., because of his wide
knowledge of European antiques, was made Furniture Polisher to King
Ferdinand of Bulgaria early in 1913, retaining his high position for
several years. He was decorated with the Order of the Holy Quail, first
class, for exemplary bravery during the Rumanian attack on Tirnova,
when for three consecutive days, under heavy shell fire, he remained
under a Louis Quatorze sofa, polishing it with as much care as could
have been used under normal conditions.
* * * * *
Whatever one’s bent in antiques may be, he will find it encouraged
in Europe to a point undreamed of in America. Antique-shops are as
plentiful in every large European city as were saloons in South Boston
not long ago; and their contents, in many cases, have an equally
intoxicating effect.
Uncultured persons who go into them with the intention of purchasing
just one small Louis XV eggcup will frequently emerge with increased
learning and laden down with a Provençal dough-trough, a pair of
stirrup-irons, half a dozen French prints, an old leather purse, four
pewter plates, and a large painting of a vaseful of wild flowers.
The streets of Paris are punctuated with shop-signs which read
_ANTIQUITÉS_; the streets of Rome and Florence and Milan and Venice
are spotted with _ANTICHITA_ signs; just around every corner in
Vienna and Berlin is an _ANTIQUITÄTEN_ shop. The word for antiques is
approximately the same in all languages, as a result, of course, of an
international agreement between antique-dealers who wish the tourists
to enjoy their travels.
[Illustration: PLATE VII
PROFESSOR KILGALLEN’S MAGNIFICENT COLLECTION OF EARLY AMERICAN
UTENSILS, ALL HAND-WROUGHT, AND SOME OBTAINED FROM THE
DESCENDANTS OF THE FAMILIES IN WHICH THE ARTICLES HAD BEEN HANDED
DOWN FROM FATHER TO SON
1. Instrument used in making early furniture. 2. A colonial
plastron, used in disciplining the cattle. 3. Old mantel
ornament. 4 and 5. Instruments used in disposing of undesirable
pottery. 6. Colonial calambosa; early Spanish-American instrument
for seeding turnips.
]
The shops start in the expensive shopping districts with the large,
impressive, brightly lighted establishments where important-looking
salesmen remove individual treasures from safes and cupboards, exhibit
them proudly and learnedly, and quote prices on them that cause a pale
green flush to steal over the face of the unsuspecting quester after
antiques.
They end in the little side streets with small dark shops smelling of
a peculiar blend of cheese-rind, fish-glue and unfinished subways, in
which the pallid proprietors wait with old-world patience for customers
to come and fight indefinitely to get a four-dollar article reduced to
sixty-five cents.
The latter shops, of course, are of the greatest importance to the
itinerant or catch-as-catch-can antique-hunters; for it is only in
them that one stumbles on something rare and costly that has lain
hidden in a shop-corner, regarded by the shopkeeper as a mere piece
of junk—something, for example, like one of Marie Antoinette’s crown
jewels or a piece of genuine fifteenth-century arras tapestry or one of
Henry the Eighth’s marriage certificates or a coal scuttle which was
used by Madame du Barry—something that can be bought for a dollar and a
quarter and sold for ten thousand.
It is scarcely necessary to point out that the antique-dealer is
usually thoroughly conversant with the value of his possessions, that
being his chief business in life. Still, he sometimes makes a mistake,
as do such highly respected oracles as Senator William E. Borah, David
Lloyd George, and Benito Mussolini; and it should be the aim of every
true antique-hunter to encourage him to make all that he can.
Wherever one moves about in European antique-circles, one is apt to
hear the story of the helpless amateur who stumbled into a Marseilles
antique-shop and bought an amber necklace for twenty-five dollars. When
he got it home, he took it to a large jewelry shop to have it valued.
The jeweler, after examining each bead with great care, offered its
owner a thousand dollars for it. This aroused the owner’s suspicions,
so he took the beads to an expert and thereupon learned that each bead
was engraved _N à J_ in very small letters, and that it was a string
that Napoleon had given to Madame Pompadour as a little token of his
esteem.
Some of those who tell the story declare that the lucky owner sold
the beads for ten thousand dollars. Others say that he sold them for
twenty-five thousand dollars. The most enthusiastic antiquers claim
that he received fifty thousand for the string. But a little matter
of fifteen or twenty-five thousand dollars should be nothing to
amateurs in antiques, especially when such sums are merely matters of
conversation and cost the converser nothing at all.
The foregoing story, and the thousands of others like it that
constantly go the rounds in Paris and Rome and other antique centres,
are all true; but certain of the ignorant view them with suspicion.
They should never be viewed with suspicion because all the people who
tell them almost always state that they happened to friends of personal
friends of theirs; and this, as is well known, is always symptomatic of
rock-bottom facts.