I have seen the fine collections of Master Bernard’s handiwork in the Louvre, the Hôtel Cluny, the Sèvres Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the other collections of note, public and private, at home and abroad, but the little _saucière_ which my friend Cleon permitted me to gaze upon--nay, dear reader, to hold in my hands!--there was not a finer bit anywhere. Master Bernard must have given a chuckle of contentment when he drew it from the kiln! One might, with a princely purse, collect a few examples of Palissy ware in the course of a lifetime keenly devoted to collecting! But so rare is Palissy ware that even in Cleon’s house I had not expected to see such a treasure. Strangely enough, it had been discovered, not just bought; discovered in London, and, unromantically enough, though exultingly, in a shop whose keeper ought to have known what it was, who ought to have known enough not to let it go for the mere pittance of--but that is Cleon’s secret! My own flair for collecting has often fed my pride, but it is tempered with a happy contentment from an interest in the things I cannot have, may never hope to have! I cannot, perhaps, describe to you the delight I experienced in coming upon that _saucière_ at Cleon’s or the joy I felt in being permitted to take my time in gloating over it unhurried by a museum curator, whose official anxiety must of necessity ever play false to his kindly attempt to conceal it. When I came home I looked over all my photographs of Palissy ware, and took down from its shelf in my library a volume in French of the Works of Master Bernard, a volume of the date of 1636, followed by one of 1777 and one of 1884. Master Bernard was not only a notable potter, but, as both Lamartine and Anatole France observed, he holds a high position among French writers in the field of natural philosophy, agriculture, and religion. Master Bernard’s early life is wrapped in mystery. We know nothing of his parentage or of his early education. Probably, as Henry Morley observed, “As a child he rolled upon the moss and ripened with the chestnuts.” In later life Palissy himself declared that he had had “no other books than heaven and earth, which were open to all.”