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.