or of Buffon. Like a
certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan propriety
he copied, without possessing either his money or his shrewdness,
Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the famous collection,
consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which had died on their way
to Soulanges), all the rodents of the department, mice and field-mice
and dormice, rats, muskrats, and moles, etc.; all the interesting birds
ever shot in Burgundy, and an Alpine eagle caught in the Jura. Gourdon
also possessed a collection of lepidoptera,--a word which led society
to hope for monstrosities, and to say, when it saw them, "Why, they are
only butterflies!" Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil
shells, mostly the collections of his friends which they bequeathed to
him, and all the minerals of Burgundy and the Jura.

These treasures, laid out on shelves with glass doors (the drawers
beneath containing the insects), occupied the whole of the first floor
of the doctor's house, and produced a certain effect through the oddity
of the names on the tickets, the magic effect of the colors, and the
gathering together of so many things which no one pays the slightest
attention to when seen in nature, though much admired under glass.
Society took a regular day to go and look at Monsieur Gourdon's
collection.

"I have," he said to all inquirers, "five hundred ornithological
objects, two hundred mammifers, five thousand insects, three thousand
shells, and seven thousand specimens of minerals."

"What patience you have had!" said the ladies.

"One must do something for one's country," replied the collector.

He drew an enormous profit from his carcasses by the mere repetition
of the words, "I have bequeathed everything to the town by my will."
Visitors lauded his philanthropy; the authorities talked of devoting
the second floor of the town hall to the "Gourdon Museum," after the
collector's death.

"I rely upon the gratitude of my fellow-citizens to attach my name to
the gift," he replied; "for I dare not hope they would place a marble
bust of me--"

"It would be the very least we could do for you," they rejoined; "are
you not the glory of our town?"

Thus the man actually came to consider himself one of the celebrities of
Burgundy. The surest incomes are not from consols after all; those our
vanity obtains for us have better security. This man of science was, to
employ Lupin's superlatives, happy!