Jacob Spoon, a doctor of medicine and an intelligent but odd individual who died in the year 1685, declares that in his native city of Lyons every one is collecting something or other. Then, and perhaps as a physician he was in a position to know, he says that collecting is a disease, contagious though not fatal. There is no need of special documents to say that faking must have worked with a certain ease in such a world. Brienne tells us that when Cardinal Mazarin received objects from Italy, Jabach and Magnard were charged to examine them and very often more than one piece of faking was discovered, very successful counterfeits (_Memoires de Brienne_, Chap. IX). There is no instance to my knowledge of any sentence passed by tribunal upon fakers at this time when everything seems to have been decided by the almighty, power of Louis XIV or the ever-ready Parliament. Yet the police of Louis XIV seem to have one interest in the collecting of art. They must watch that the books, prints and paintings, etc., offered for sale contain nothing immoral or what we should call nowadays subversive. By this duty the police of Louis XIV become specialists, going in chiefly for medals. In the year 1696 Pontchartrain wrote to M. de la Reynie “to send a man to watch the sale of Abbé Bizot and be on the look out for the _médailles insolentes_ of the said _cabinet_.” After other injunctions, he then adds: “It is His Majesty’s wish that the medals incurring suppression should be put into a sack, this to be sealed and taken to the mint....” It is clear from this that over and above interest in bad coins and faked medals the police of the _Roi Soleil_ were on the look out for a particular historical coin bearing some unfriendly allusion to the King of France, and their earnest efforts to suppress it had naturally made it so rare that it kindled the ambition of numismatists and collectors at large. The eighteenth century might be called the period of sales of art collections. Everywhere auctions were held of well-known collections; in Holland alone we can register 185 catalogues of art sales from 1700 to 1750. This may be called a sort of record, however, as France in the same period of time counts only thirty catalogues. Following the art sales in Paris we find that from 1751 to 1760 an average of four sale catalogues a year is reached. From 1761 to 1770 the average increases to thirteen; from 1771 to 1775 to twenty-eight, and from 1776 to 1785 to forty-two each year. This is the climax; at this point art sales were social functions and the auction room a place where society met. Collections are dispersed and new ones formed, and the transference of masterpieces from one collection to another through the auction room acquires unusual rapidity. Such a state of affairs inspires Thibaudeau with the following reflection. (Thibaudeau. _Préface du Trésor de la Curiosité._)