Now, he was even more desperate as a collector and fancier of bibelots 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 satisfactions. His connoisseurship 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 bric-a-brac than to art proper; and after many vicissitudes, he and Madame Hanska seem to have succeeded in getting together a very considerable, if also a very miscellaneous and unequal collection in the house in the Rue du Paradis, the contents of which were dispersed in part (though, I believe, the Rochschild 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 uncomplaining one, of the great jeweler Froment Meurice, whose tardiness in carrying out his behests he pathetically upbraids in more than one extant letter. Therefore, Balzac "did more than sympathize, he felt"--and it has been well put--with Pons in the bric-a-brac matter; and would appear that he did so likewise in that of music, though we have rather less direct evidence. This other sympathy has resulted in the addition to Pons himself of the figure of Schmucke, a minor and more parochial figure, but good in itself, and very much appreciated, I believe, by fellow _melomanes_. It is with even more than his usual art that Balzac has surrounded these two originals--these "humorists," as our own ancestors would have called them--with figures much, very much, more of the ordinary world than themselves. The grasping worldliness of the _parvenue_ family of Camusot in one degree and the greed of the portress, Madame Cibot, in the other, are admirably represented; the latter, in particular, must always hold a very high place among Balzac's greatest successes. She is, indeed a sort of companion sketch to Cousine Bette herself in a still lower rank of life representing the diabolical in woman; and perhaps we should not wrong the author's intentions if we suspected that Diane de Maufrigneuse has some claims to make up the trio in a sphere even more above Lisbeth's than Lisbeth's is above Madame Cibot's own.