“It is like a game of shuttlecock in which the bourgeoisie and nobility throw masterpieces to each other and with such swiftness that one really does not know to whom they belong.” The eighteenth century, from the very beginning, numbers collectors such as Crozat, who had a palace in Rue Richelieu and a collection of 19,000 drawings, 400 paintings and 1400 cameos, etc., Comtesse de Verrue and Baudelet. The Duke of Orleans’ gallery includes 478 paintings, of which three were by Leonardo da Vinci, 15 by Raphael, 31 by Titian, 19 by Paul Veronese, 10 by Correggio, 12 by Poussin, and many others of the Dutch, Spanish and other schools. This collection of the Duke of Orleans, one of the finest in France after that of Cardinal Mazarin, seems to have been pursued by the same ill-luck as the latter. The Regent’s son, with deplorable prudery, destroyed all the paintings with nude figures; as for the rest of the collection, it was sold later to some English amateurs by Philippe-Egalité. CHAPTER XII SOME NOTABLE FRENCH COLLECTORS Speculation, financial disasters--Many collections change hands-- Fakers busy for newly-enriched collectors--Voltaire plays the silent partner to art and curio dealers--Wonderful unearthings of Dr. Huber--Collectors of the time: Mme. Pompadour, Cardinal Soubise, Malesherbes and others--Interspace of the Revolution --Napoleon revives some of the speedy methods of the Romans-- Italian museums and galleries plundered by his Imperial agents. From this early period we enter that of the art sales, which, as we have already said, seem characteristic of the eighteenth century. Financial disasters and speculations disperse more than one fortune and usher new-comers into the world of finance. This is the time when masterpieces begin to change hands so rapidly. The spirit of collecting is superceded by that of commerce, and faking appears under new forms, those with no other trickery beyond what commerce with its intrigue and deceit can supply. “All amateurs,” writes a contemporary in the _Chronique Scandaleuse_, “are now mixed up with _brocantage_ (bric-à-brac). There is not a collector who does not sell or exchange (_troque_), either on account of unstable taste, or for the sake of gain, or to retaliate his own bad bargain upon some one greener than himself.” Even Voltaire, between an epigram and a satire, found himself implicated in _brocantage_, only, more shrewd than Cicero, he saved appearances by an associate, the Abbé Moussinot, he remaining the sleeping partner.