isian _argot_, so
absolutely unintelligible elsewhere in France.

You have no doubt often glanced through the windows of some of these
shops, which have become numerous since it is so fashionable to buy
antique furniture, that the humblest stockbroker feels obliged to have a
room furnished in medieval style.

Something is there which belongs alike to the shop of the dealer in old
iron, the warehouse of the merchant, the laboratory of the chemist, and
the studio of the painter: in all these mysterious recesses, where but a
discreet half-light filters through the shutters, the most obviously
antique thing is the dust: the cobwebs are more genuine than the laces,
and the old pear-tree furniture is more modern than the mahogany which
arrived but yesterday from America.

The warehouse of my dealer in bric-a-brac was a veritable Capharnauem;
all ages and all countries seemed to have arranged a rendezvous there;
an Etruscan terra cotta lamp stood upon a Boule cabinet, with ebony
panels decorated with simple filaments of inlaid copper: a duchess of
the reign of Louis XV stretched nonchalantly her graceful feet under a
massive Louis XIII table with heavy, spiral oaken legs, and carvings of
intermingled flowers and grotesque figures.

In a corner glittered the ornamented breastplate of a suit of
damaskeened armor of Milan. The shelves and floor were littered with
porcelain cupids and nymphs, Chinese monkeys, vases of pale green
enamel, cups of Dresden and old Sevres.

Upon the denticulated shelves of sideboards, gleamed huge Japanese
plaques, with red and blue designs outlined in gold, side by side with
the enamels of Bernard Palissy, with serpents, frogs, and lizards in
relief.

From ransacked cabinets tumbled cascades of silvery-gleaming China silk,
the shimmering brocade pricked into luminous beads by a slanting
sunbeam; while portraits of every epoch smiled through their yellowed
varnish from frames more or less tarnished.

The dealer followed me watchfully through the tortuous passages winding
between the piles of furniture, warding off with his hands the perilous
swing of my coat tail, observing my elbows with the disquieting concern
of an antiquarian and a usurer.

He was an odd figure--this dealer; an enormous skull, smooth as a knee,
was surrounded by a scant aureole of white hair, which, by contrast,
emphasized the salmon-colored tint of his complexion, and gave a wrong
impression of patriarchal benevolence, c