One Sunday afternoon, when, I remember, as the result of an accident, we had failed to see Zola, Philippe Burty drove me down to Auteuil--to the Villa Montmorency, with its wild poetic garden--to spend a couple of hours with Edmond de Goncourt and his treasures. Jules, the beloved brother, was already dead, and Edmond, surrounded by his collections, lived lonely at Auteuil, in the house arranged for both. Stately and distinguished, melancholy, and yet interested, a descendant of the old _noblesse_, with many memories in the dark brown eyes that lay under black eyebrows and silver-grey hair, Edmond de Goncourt moved about amongst his portfolios, saying a word here, and there directing a glance. The history of his life surrounded him--the treasures he and his brother had amassed and studied, before the ‘_Dix-Huitième_’ was fashionable, and very much as a recreation from those ‘_noires études de la vie contemporaine_’--the words are his own--which had given us _Germinie Lacerteux_ and _Manette Salomon_. No such collection of that fascinating French ‘_Dix-Huitième_’ as belongs to Edmond de Goncourt has ever been made. His _Maison d’un Artiste_ is a book which is written for the most part about it, and in comparison with its treasures my humble score of chosen prints--chiefly, after all, by the Eighteenth Century’s more serious masters--becomes absolutely insignificant. Still, they remind me, pleasantly enough, of a delightful period, a delightful people, and of an art that was masterly when it was Watteau’s, more lightly gracious when it was Pater’s, and, when it was Chardin’s, was sedate and simple and almost austere.