an Goghs. For this happened years before anybody had begun
to buy Van Gogh--years before anybody had begun to hear of Van
Gogh--years before Post-Impressionism had been invented and had launched
its crop of Cubists and Futurists and Vorticists as direct descendants
of Van Gogh and Cezanne who would assuredly have been the first to
repudiate them. The Publisher had gone unsuspectingly, confidingly, with
J. to _Montmartre_ and there, among other haunts, into the now
celebrated little shop where the paintings Van Gogh used to give in
exchange for paints littered the whole place, and where the dealer
thought it a bargain if, for a few francs, he could get rid of canvases
that now fetch their hundreds and thousands of pounds. J. would have
invested had he had the few francs. Not having them, he persuaded the
Publisher to, and to buy three of the best into the bargain, and never
did his own empty pockets stand in the way of a more profitable
investment, for had he bought not all but only a few in this wilderness
of Van Goghs, and had he sold them again as he would never have done, we
might now, if we chose, dine every night at the LaPerouse or Voisin's
and prepare for the reckoning without a tremor. If I write of the
buying of these pictures as if they were stocks and shares, it is
because that is the way the creators of the "Van Gogh-Cezanne-Gauguin
boom" have appraised them, appealing to the modern collector who
collects for the money in art, not the beauty. That night at the
LaPerouse the Publisher was dazed by his unexpected rashness as art
patron; to-day, when he points to the one of the three paintings still
hanging on his walls, he flatters himself that he discovered Van Gogh
before the multitude.

Bob Stevenson took us to dine at Lavenue's in Montparnasse, and if he
had not of his own free will we should have compelled him to. He
belonged there. At Lavenue's he and Louis Stevenson dined when they were
young in Paris, it was always cropping up in Bob's talk of the old days,
it plays its part--"the restaurant where no one need be ashamed to
entertain the master"--in the opening chapters of _The Wrecker_, which I
think as entertaining as any chapters Louis Stevenson ever wrote in that
or any other book. The dinner, of which I recall nothing in particular,
did not interest me as much as the place itself. To see Bob Stevenson at
Lavenue's was like seeing Manet at the _Nouvelle Athenes_ or Dr. Johnson
at the Cheshire Cheese