Now, he was even more desperate as a collector and fancier of z' e/ofs than he was as a speculator; and while the one mania was nearly as responsible for his pecuniary troubles and his need to overwork himself as the other, it certainly gave him more constant and more comparatively harmless satisfac tions. His connoisseurship has, of course, been questioned one connoisseur would be nothing if he did not question the competence of another, if not of all others. It seems certain that Balzac frequently bought things for what they were not and probable that his own acquisitions went, in his own eyes, through that succession of stages which Charles Lamb (a sort of Cousin Pons in his way too) described inimitably. His pictures, like John Lamb's, were apt to begin as Raphaels, and end as Carlo Marattis. Balzac too, like Pons, was even more addicted to brz'c-d-bmc than to art proper; and after many vicissitudes, he and Madame Hanska seem to have suc ceeded in getting together a very considerable, if also a verv miscellaneous and unequal, collection in the house in the Rue du Paradis, the contents of which were dispersed in part (though, I believe, the Rothschild who bought it, bought most of them too) not many years ago. Pons, indeed, was too poor, and probably too queer, to indulge in one fancy which Balzac had, and which, I think, all collectors of the nobler and more poetic class have, though this number may not be large. Balzac liked to have new beautiful things as well as old - to have beautiful things made for him. He was an unwearied customer, though not an uncorriplaining one, of the great jeweler Froment Meurice, whose tardiness in carry ing out his behests he pathetically upbraids in more than one extant letter.

Therefore, Balzac did more than sympathize, he felt as it has been well put - with Pons in the rz'c-d-bwe matter; and it would appear that he did so likewise in that of music.

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