into its place, unsuspected by any one. "Uno avulso non deficit alter aureus,-or nearly aureus." clock which, he says, "completely took you in at a little distance. With a slight effort you might have imagined it the work of a bastard of Caffieri. To the English vis- As might be expected, the itors it represented all that Musée d'Armée teems with was finest in art. The young relics of Napoleon; whether misses would frequently pause true or false, few care to queswhile consuming their tea and tion out of the thousands tostes to gaze with admira- whose hearts have "burned tion at the clock. The old within them" at the sight of mistresses would exclaim, 'Ah, the table and two chairs that beautiful indeed!' and there formed the sole furniture of his was invariably present some room at Brienne, which he ancient esquire to inquire of the shared with his brother Louis. landlord whether the clock was At Sens you can see the green for sale. As invariably the coat he wore as Colonel of landlord flew into a rage- the Chasseurs de la Garde, 'What! a family relic? A at Val de Grâce the sword clock given by the Queen to he gave at Eylau to the surher head cook, and cherished geon Larrey, while in the by his descendants for over house of the Prince de la a century? Really, foreigners Moskowa are religiously prethought money would buy served the cloak, pistols, and anything.' But the next Field-Marshal's baton of Ney. morning, just as the omnibus As we gaze criticism is silent, was coming to the door, the and when the spell is removed, landlord's wife appeared, and if doubts take possession of us, drew the gentleman of the let us refer to M. Perdriel, an party aside. The clock was old chemist of the Faubourg hers, she said, and her husband Montmartre, who made his had nothing to do with it; and collection in the days when as she had been married under collectors were as rare as they the Married Woman's Property are common now. "Nothing Act (séparation de biens), she that he possesses is contestwas able and willing to sell able or contested. But now the clock at a reasonable he does not buy, neither does figure. The 'reasonable fig- he sell, for fear of giving rise ure' was 2000 francs, and to forged reproductions. nine times out of ten the ever you are in doubt as to Englishman paid it. Twice," the authenticity of an object, concludes M. Eudel, "during consult M. Perdriel. You canthe twenty-one days that my not do better." baths lasted did I witness the sale of the Caffieri clock given by the Queen to her cook. And twice did another example of the Master glide If But for the public there is a plethora of helmets, sabres, shakos especially shakos,— labelled with great names, and forming the glory of many worthy people who accept implicitly everything they are told; and you could not do them a worse turn than to open their eyes. And why should you (unless your opinion is asked), merely to display your own superior knowledge? The Russian Archduchess who bought for 360,000 francs the clavecin with the inscription testifying that it came from the Petit Trianon and had belonged to Marie Antoinette, owed, we may be sure, a deep grudge to the expert who pricked her bubble. And the English girls, who bend with misty eyes over another clavecin in the Queen's drawing-room in her favourite playhouse, and are shown by the custodian the letters P. T., which stand, he says, for Petit Trianon, are happy in their ignorance that Marie Antoinette, according to Madame Campan, never touched any instrument but the piano; that the clavecin (which is not, properly speaking, a clavecin at all) was made a year after she had taken her last walk in the Trianon, and that P. T. are the initials of the maker, Pascal Taskin. As to the furniture that belonged to the unfortunate Queen, truly many crimes are committed in her name, and the royal palaces of the whole of Europe would hardly hold the specimens offered to us. We must all have been struck with the vast size of the Mayflower, which contained such a number of potential "ancestors"; and the population of Normandy was surely far larger than one would have imagined if any knights remained there at all after those who "came over with William the Conqueror," and are the fathers of so many noble English families. But besides those who buy-and sin-in the good faith of ignorance, there are many who will always set a disproportionate value on their own possessions, and graft on them every name and quality that can add to their value. M. Eudel tells an amusing story of how he fell in love with a beautifully carved and painted Gothic seat which was snatched away from him by & celebrated painter. The artist declined to part with it, and for long refused permission to have it copied, on the ground that everybody would declare M. Eudel possessed the original and he himself the imitation. At length, however, he consented, and the work was intrusted to & clever sculptor with carte blanche as to expense. M. Malard justified his employer's confidence. For 1400 francs he executed a perfect reproduction: the marks of the chisel, the patina on the painting, the worn look of the seat, all were there; and for ten years the chair remained in M. Eudel's house without its authenticity being suspected, though he counted among his friends many noted archaeologists. At the end of that time he arranged for a sale of his furniture, and his collection was visited by & famous connoisseur, M. Emile Molinier. His language about of the cup, stating that James I. of England had given it in the year 1604 to the Constable of Castile, Don Juan de Velasco, as a memento of the peace just signed." He says nothing as to how it came to be in the possession of the English Crown. the chair might almost be described as gushing; but M. Eudel held his peace, til at the moment when the catalogue was going to press he remarked to M. Molinier, "Perhaps it would be as well not to indicate the epoch." The connoisseur did not need twice telling. The description was toned down, and the "chayre à dosseret of the fifteenth century" was sold at about the cost of its making. Had M. Eudel held his peace it would probably have fetched 50,000 francs. The account given by M. Eudel of the famous Gold Cup in the British Museum (not for a moment to be confounded with the Gold Cup of Ascot so mysteriously stolen) differs materially from that printed in the British Museum catalogue. The cup is a wonderful piece of workmanship, representing the life of St Agnes told in translucent enamels, and bearing a cover finely wrought with figures, the whole dating from the end of the fourteenth century. It was originally given by the Duke of Berri to Charles VI.; by him to John, Duke of Bedford, who bequeathed it to Henry VI.1 M. Eudel ignores this early part of its history, though it is of special interest and importance, and only alludes to "a seventeenthcentury inscription at the foot The Constable of Castile either did not appreciate the gift bestowed on him, or valued it so highly that he feared it might be stolen. At any rate, it was handed over by him in 1610 to the convent of Santa Clara at Medina Pomar, near Burgos. There it remained till 1883, when, as M. Eudel truly states, it was sent in the custody of a trusty agent to be sold in Paris, so as to supply the nuns with money which they urgently needed. It was received by the most famous archæologists with sniffs of contempt. "Modern, quite modern," they said, and jeered at Baron Pichon, who decided to buy it for 9000 francs-3000 francs above its actual weight in gold. His courage justified itself, for at his sale in 1891 it was purchased for £8000 by Wertheimer, and sold by him for the same amount to some amateurs, who presented it to the British Museum. Since that, it has always been in the Gold Room, except for a brief absence, when, as many of us will remember, it was carried away by Raffles in his hat 1 Sir Cecil Harcourt-Smith, of the Victoria and Albert Museum, kindly supplies me with the pedigree of the cup. It was presented to Charles V. of France, and by his brother, the Duc de Berri, to Charles VI. From him to Bedford and Henry VI. It occurs in the inventories of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. to present to Queen Victoria on her Diamond Jubilee. M. Eudel gives many amusing anecdotes of the forgeries of modern pictures, and how the artists met themselves, to their own great surprise, in subjects wholly foreign to their brushes. We have, unluckily, no space for these, but there is one curious adventure of a work of Roybet's which merits telling. The celebrated collector M. V. invited some friends one day to see two historical paintings, signed by the artist, which M. V. had just bought, one entitled "Benediction at the Court of Louis XIII.," and the other, "Richelieu awaiting the King." The guests placed themselves in the best light for appreciating the pictures, and then burst out into fits of laughing, to the amazement, and rather to the disgust, of the owner. "Mlle. d'Hautefort!" cried one. "Well, that is a good joke! It is Thérèse Humbert!" "Richelieu!" exclaimed the other simultaneously, "why, it's Romain Daurignao." It was true. The pictures were the two halves of one canvas ordered in 1886 by Frédéric Humbert, which had obtained a medal in the Salon of that year, under the name "Louis XIII. and Mlle. d'Hautefort," and Roybet had taken Mme. Humbert and her brother as models. The picture completed, by some oversight the heir of Crawford's money had omitted to sign the cheque in payment, and after the Confidence Trick had been played out and the safe opened, Roybet sought to indemnify himself by buying back his historical work at a low price, and selling it as two signed pictures. It is impossible to close even this brief survey of M. Eudel's most amusing and instructive book without some reference to the Grande Bévue of a large proportion of the archæological world in 1903, known among experts as "the year of the Tiara.” The tiara made its début in Paris in March 1896, a wonderful golden egg-shaped coiffure, covered with ornaments and figures in relief, and bearing an inscription to the effect that the tiara had been presented about 200 B.C. by the ancient Greek colony of Olbia, in the Taurid, to the Scythian king Saïtapharnes, as the price of his protection. A month previously, in Vienna, the tiara had been intrusted by a Jew from the Crimea, named Hochmann, to the two dealers in antiquities who brought it to the Louvre, after first trying to dispose of it in Vienna, where the price was considered prohibitive. It was then, though the fact is not mentioned by M. Eudel, offered (by letter) the British Museum, but Mr A. S. Murray, at that time the head of the classical department, replied that no one need trouble to send it over. In Paris, however, the entire body of savants (including the eminent M. Salomon Reinach), who were assembled at the Louvre to examine the proposed object of purchase, were unanimous berts and the Druces in their as to its beauty and value, and day, and in spite of two letters 200,000 francs were readily which appeared immediately voted for its acquisition. But after the Montmartre declarif the Parisian public remained ation. These letters affirmed "more than usual calm” when that both writers had seen the tiara was exhibited in the the tiara in process of makglass case, a wave of astonish- ing in Odessa in 1896, by ment swept over foreign ar- a man named Rouchomowski. chæologists at the credulity of Thanks to the patient inthe French officials, and lurid vestigations of M. Clermonttales were told as to the date Ganneau, Member of the Inand place of its manufacture. stitute and Professor of the Correspondence and conster- Collège de France, Rouchonation became general, but the mowski was ultimately proved Director of the Hermitage Mu- to be the real delinquent, and seum of St Petersburg, and the tiara was swiftly and the greater number of the silently withdrawn from the French experts, put their public gaze. glasses to their blind eyes— and kept them there for seven years. Then the unexpected happened, for an artist in the suburb of Montmartre claimed to have fashioned the Scythian King's tiara! He had been given, he said, a drawing to copy by M. Spitzer in 1894. A gold leaf weighing 458 golden grains had been used in the production of the tiara; it had taken several months to make, and the price paid was 4500 francs. The artist confessed that, feeling very curious as to its destination, he had marked it in three different places with indelible black spots, and had employed the modern method of soldering the joints. To be sure a certain difficulty lay in the fact that M. Spitzer had died four years before he was said to have ordered the tiara, but who pays attention to such trifles? The tiara occupied the same position in conversation, in journalism, and in caricature as the Hum the According to Rouchomowski himself, he had no idea that a fraud was intended. Some cheap German illustrations of ancient Greek gold-work had been sent him to copy, at the same time as a set of designs of a late Roman triumphafter Giulio Romano, whole work being designed as a gift to an aged professor. The Russian worked conscientiously from the models given him, and the experts of France, undeterred by German warnings, took modern copies of late Italian art for Greek work of the second century. That seems to be the authentic history of the tiara, though why the Montmartre artist claimed it as his own is one of the "games we do not understand." And so we reluctantly bid farewell to M. Eudel, with deep gratitude for the hours of happiness and laughter he has given us. |