els on which was read
in black letters on a gold ground:

Rubens
Dance of fauns and nymphs

Rembrandt
Interior of a dissecting room. The physician van Tromp
instructing his pupils.

In all, there were one hundred and fifty pictures, varnished and dusted.
Some were covered with green baize curtains which were not undrawn in
presence of young ladies.

Pierre Grassou stood with arms pendent, gaping mouth, and no word upon
his lips as he recognized half his own pictures in these works of art.
He was Rubens, he was Rembrandt, Mieris, Metzu, Paul Potter, Gerard
Douw! He was twenty great masters all by himself.

"What is the matter? You've turned pale!"

"Daughter, a glass of water! quick!" cried Madame Vervelle. The painter
took pere Vervelle by the button of his coat and led him to a corner on
pretence of looking at a Murillo. Spanish pictures were then the rage.

"You bought your pictures from Elie Magus?"

"Yes, all originals."

"Between ourselves, tell me what he made you pay for those I shall point
out to you."

Together they walked round the gallery. The guests were amazed at the
gravity in which the artist proceeded, in company with the host, to
examine each picture.

"Three thousand francs," said Vervelle in a whisper, as they reached the
last, "but I tell everybody forty thousand."

"Forty thousand for a Titian!" said the artist, aloud. "Why, it is
nothing at all!"

"Didn't I tell you," said Vervelle, "that I had three hundred thousand
francs' worth of pictures?"

"I painted those pictures," said Pierre Grassou in Vervelle's ear, "and
I sold them one by one to Elie Magus for less than ten thousand francs
the whole lot."

"Prove it to me," said the bottle-dealer, "and I double my daughter's
'dot,' for if it is so, you are Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Gerard Douw!"

"And Magus is a famous picture-dealer!" said the painter, who now saw
the meaning of the misty and aged look imparted to his pictures in
Elie's shop, and the utility of the subjects the picture-dealer had
required of him.

Far from losing the esteem of his admiring bottle-merchant, Monsieur
de Fougeres (for so the family persisted in calling Pierre Grassou)
advanced so much that when the portraits were finished he presented them
gratuitously to his father-in-law, his mother-in-law and his wife.

At the present day, Pierre Grassou, who never misses exhibiting at the
Salon,