_Done into English by the Editor_
I had idly entered the shop of one of those curiosity-venders who, in
that Parisian lingo which is so perfectly unintelligible to the rest of
France, are called _marchands de bric-à-brac_.
You have doubtless glanced through the windows into one of those shops
which have become so numerous since it is the mode to buy antique
furniture, and since the pettiest stockbroker thinks he must have his
“mediæval room.”
There is one thing that clings alike to the shop of the old-iron
dealer, the wareroom of the tapestry-maker, the laboratory of the
alchemist, and the studio of the artist: in these mysterious dens
through whose window-shutters filters a furtive twilight, the thing
that is the most manifestly ancient is the dust; there the spider-webs
are more authentic than the gimps, and the old pear-wood furniture is
younger than the mahogany which arrived yesterday from America.
The wareroom of my bric-à-brac dealer was a veritable Capernaum; all
centuries and all countries seemed to have rendezvoused there: an
Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet whose ebony panels
were brilliantly inlaid with filaments of brass; a Louis XV half-lounge
carelessly stretched its fawn-like feet under a massive table of
the reign of Louis XIII, with heavy oaken spirals, and carvings of
intermingled foliage and chimeras.
In one corner glittered the striped cuirass of a damascened suit of
Milanese armor; bisque cupids and nymphs, grotesques from China,
_céladon_ and _craquelé_ vases, Saxon and old Sèvres cups, encumbered
what-nots and corners.
Upon the fluted shelves of several dressers glittered immense plates
from Japan, with designs in red and blue relieved by gilt hatching,
side by side with several Bernard Palissy enamels, showing frogs and
lizards in relief work.
From disembowelled cabinets escaped cascades of Chinese silk lustrous
with silver, billows of brocade, sown with luminous specks by a
slanting sunbeam, while portraits of every epoch, in frames more or
less tarnished, smiled out through their yellow varnish.
The dealer followed me with precaution through the tortuous passage
contrived between the piles of furniture, fending off with his hand the
hazardous swing of my coat-tails, watching my elbows with the uneasy
attention of the antiquary and the usurer.
It was a singular figure, that of the dealer: an immense cranium,
polished like a knee, and surrounded by a meagre aureole of white hair
that brought out all the more vividly the clear salmon tint of the
skin, gave him a false air of patriarchal simplicity--contradicted,
on the other hand, by the sparkling of two little yellow eyes, which
trembled in their orbits like two _louis d’ors_ on a surface of
quicksilver. The curve of the nose presented an aquiline silhouette
which recalled the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands--thin, bony,
veined, full of sinews stretched like the strings on the neck of a
violin, and armed with talons resembling those which terminate the
membranous wings of a bat--shook with a senile movement disquieting
to see. But those feverishly nail-bitten hands became firmer than
lobster-claws or steel pincers when they lifted some precious piece--an
onyx carving, a Venetian cup, or a plate of Bohemian crystal. This old
rascal had an aspect so profoundly rabbinical and cabalistic that three
centuries ago they would have burned him merely from the evidence of
his face.
“Will you not buy something from me to-day, Monsieur? Here is a Malay
kris with a blade undulating like a flame: see those grooves to serve
as gutters for the blood, those teeth fashioned and set inversely so as
to rip out the entrails when the dagger is withdrawn. It is a fine type
of ferocious weapon, and would look very well among your trophies. This
two-handed sword is very beautiful--it is a José de la Hera; and this
_colichemarde_ with perforated guard, what a superb piece of work!”
“No, I have plenty of arms and instruments of carnage. I want a
figurine, something that would do for a paper-weight, for I cannot
endure those stock bronzes which the stationers sell, and which may be
found on any desk.”
The old gnome, foraging among his antiquities, finally arranged
before me several antique bronzes--so called, at least; fragments of
malachite; little Hindu or Chinese idols, a kind of poussah toys made
of jade, showing the incarnation of Brahma or of Vishnu, marvellously
well-suited for the sufficiently ungodlike purpose of holding papers
and letters in place.
I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon all starred with warts,
its jaws adorned with tusks and bristling whiskers, and a highly
abominable little Mexican fetich, representing the god Vitziliputzili
_au naturel_, when I noticed a charming foot which I at first took for
a fragment of an antique Venus.
It had those beautiful tawny and ruddy tints which give to Florentine
bronze that warm and vivacious look so preferable to the grayish
green tone of ordinary bronze, which might be taken for statues
in putrefaction. Satiny lights frisked over its form, rounded and
polished by the loving kisses of twenty centuries; for it seemed to
be a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era, perhaps a casting by
Lysippus!
“This foot will be the thing for me,” said I to the merchant, who
regarded me with an ironical and saturnine air as he held out the
desired object for me to examine at will.
I was surprised at its lightness; it was not a foot of metal, but
indeed a foot of flesh, an embalmed foot, a foot of a mummy; on
examining it still more closely one could see the grain of the skin,
and the lines almost imperceptibly impressed upon it by the texture
of the bandages. The toes were slender, delicate, terminated by
perfect nails, pure and transparent as agates; the great toe, slightly
separate, and contrasting happily with the modelling of the other
toes, in the antique style, gave it an air of lightness, the grace of
a bird’s foot; the sole, scarcely streaked by several almost invisible
grooves, showed that it had never touched the earth, and had come in
contact with only the finest matting of Nile rushes and the softest
carpets of panther skin.
“Ha, ha! You wish the foot of the Princess Hermonthis!” exclaimed the
merchant, with a strange chuckle, fixing upon me his owlish eyes.
“Ha, ha, ha!--for a paper-weight! Original idea! Artistic idea! If
any one would have said to old Pharaoh that the foot of his adored
daughter would serve for a paper-weight, he would have been greatly
surprised, considering that he had had a mountain of granite hollowed
out to hold the triple coffin, painted and gilded and all covered
with hieroglyphics and beautiful paintings of the Judgment of Souls,”
continued the singular little merchant, half aloud, and as though
talking to himself.
“How much will you charge me for this mummy fragment?”
“Ah, the highest price I am able, for it is a superb piece: if I had
its counterpart, you could not have it for less than five hundred
francs; the daughter of a Pharaoh, nothing is more rare!”
“Assuredly it is not common; but still, how much do you want? In the
first place, let me tell you something, and that is, my entire treasure
consists of only five louis: I can buy anything that costs five louis,
but nothing dearer. You might search my innermost waistcoat pockets,
and my most secret desk-drawers, without finding even one miserable
five-franc piece more.”
“Five louis for the foot of the Princess Hermonthis! That is very
little, very little, in truth, for an authentic foot,” muttered the
merchant, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
“All right, take it, and I will give you the bandages into the
bargain,” he added, wrapping it in an ancient damask rag. “Very fine:
real damask, Indian damask, which has never been redyed; it is strong,
it is soft,” he mumbled, passing his fingers over the frayed tissue,
from the commercial habit which moved him to praise an object of so
little value that he himself judged it worth only being given away.
He poured the gold pieces into a sort of mediæval alms-purse hanging at
his belt, as he kept on saying:
“The foot of the Princess Hermonthis to serve as a paper-weight!”
Then, turning upon me his phosphorescent eyes, he exclaimed in a voice
strident as the miauling of a cat that has swallowed a fish-bone:
“Old Pharaoh will not be pleased--he loved his daughter, that dear man!”
“You speak as if you were his contemporary; old as you are, you do not
date back to the Pyramids of Egypt,” I answered laughingly from the
shop door.