em
again.

I used the opportunity to put forward my request in behalf of M.
Charnot. He listened attentively.

"I will give orders. You shall see everything--everything."

Then, considering our interview at an end, he bowed and withdrew to his
own apartments.

I looked for the Countess Dannegianti. She had sunk into her great
armchair, and was weeping hot tears.

Ten minutes later, M. Charnot and Jeanne entered with me into the
jealously guarded museum.

Museum was the only name to give to a collection of such artistic value,
occupying, as it did, the whole of the ground floor to the right of
the hall. Two rooms ran parallel to each other, filled with pictures,
medals, and engravings, and were connected by a narrow gallery devoted
to sculpture.

Hardly was the door opened when M. Charnot sought the famous medals with
his eye. There they were in the middle of the room in two rows of cases.
He was deeply moved. I thought he was about to make a raid upon them,
attracted after his kind by the 'auri sacra fames', by the yellow gleam
of those ancient coins, the names, family, obverse and reverse of which
he knew by heart. But I little understood the enthusiast.

He drew out his handkerchief and spectacles, and while he was wiping the
glasses he gave a rapid and impatient glance at the works that adorned
the walls. None of them could charm the numismatist's heart. After he
had enjoyed the pleasure of proving how feeble in comparison were the
charms of a Titian or a Veronese, then only did M. Charnot walk step by
step to the first case and bend reverently over it.

Yet the collection of paintings was unworthy of such disdain. The
pictures were few, but all were signed with great names, most of them
Italian, a few Dutch, Flemish, or German. I began to work systematically
through them, pleased at the want of a catalogue and the small number of
inscriptions on the frames. To be your own guide doubles your pleasure;
you can get your impression of a picture entirely at first hand; you
are filled with admiration without any one having told you that you
are bound to go into ecstasies. You can work out for yourself from a
picture, by induction and comparison, its subject, its school, and
its author, unless it proclaims, in every stroke of the brush, "I am a
Hobbema," "a Perugino," or "a Giotto."

I was somewhat distracted, however, by the voice of the old numismatist,
as he peered into the cases, and constrained his daught