A Collector's Portrait 7. ^92 A> CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THIS BOOK IS ONE OF A COLLECTION MADE BY BENNO LOEWY 1854-1919 AND BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY Z992 J92""°" ""'**"">' '■"'™'T Le collectionneur. olin 3 1924 031 034 923 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031034923 A Collector's Portrait OF THIS BOOK TWELVE COPIES HAVE BEEN PRINTED ON IMPERIAL JAPANESE VELLUM, AND TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE ON ENFIELD PAPER. LB COLLBCTIONN^UR A Collector's Portrait Translated from the French of Louis Judicis, by E. F. Kunz. Mar^nal Illustrations by Frank A. Nankivell. NEW YORK THE LITERARY COLLECTOR PRESS 1903 copyrig-ht 1903 By The Literary Collector Press Mi^lS To My Old Friend Colonel V Aegrotans aegrotanti, caecus unoculo. My dear Colonel : Your sister, Madame M , who knows your terrible temper, has challenged me to dedi- cate this little book to you. I risk it. But do not bite off your beautiful moustache, s bleu ! CONTENTS : I. Antiquity of the Collecting Mania. II. How One Becomes a Collector. III. Physical and Moral Portrait of the Collector. IV. Varieties of the Genus Collector. V. The Collector of Old Books. A COLLECTOR'S PORTRAIT ANTIQUITY OF THE COLLECTING MANIA 'npHE first collector of whom his- tory makes mention is Noah. I mention this patriarch, however, only as a suggestion; it has not been proved, indeed, that in assembling in the ark a pair of all known animals he had as sole aim the creation of a zoological museum. But no one will dispute that the collecting mania was the favorite passion, — if I may say so, the hobby, — of the Egyptians. Were they not given to the fad of ancestor collecting? Not only ugly dolls of wax, like those that were later to be found piled up in the patrician cabinets of Rome : Huraeroque minorem Corvinuni, et Galbam auriculis nasoque carentem; but real personages, human beings who had lived, who had laughed, who had w^ept, who had loved. And these sacred relics, properly varnished, swaddled and tied up, in their cases of sycamore, passed on to the state of household goods and figured very properly in a legal stock-taking. Herodotus affirms that in an urgent case their proprietors did not hesitate to take them to a pawnshop. Who knows but that we may find in the tomb of some usurer contemporary with the Pharaohs a papyrus note- book bearing an item of this kind : "Lent to surveyor Metmoses one thousand Theban shekels on the body of his grandfather, somewhat damaged." Another African people, the Car- thaginians, also had the collecting mania. It is certain that after the battle of Cannee Hannibal gathered the gold rings of Roman knights left on the field and filled three Attic medimns with them, — these w^ere the dekalitres of the time. The glorious trophies were buried afterward under the ruins of Carthage. Now and then the Arabs find some of them and make ear-rings of them. One of my friends, a Turkish cavalryman, clever in argument, bought one of these heroic relics from a Jew of Constan- tine; he will die in the persuasion that he possesses the signet-rings of v^milius Paulus and Terentius Varro. It w^as only a little later that the love of collecting spread among the Romans ; but from the very beginning it manifested itself with remarkable intensity. What a furious collector was Verres! Pictures, statues, chalices, tripods and candle-sticks, all the gods and goddesses, all the heroes and all the courtesans of Greece, all the divine works of art in gold, silver and ivory, which the soldiers of Mummius crushed to make crests for their helmets, these creations of genius, these treasures, these marvels, he piled up pell-mell in the atrium of his palace, which resembled the Museum of Cluny in the Quartier des Carines. This was the first and most magnificent triumph of Roman bric- a-brac. Even Augustus, emperor though he was, would not have dared to sweep the world as the simple proconsul had done; and yet he, too, had the love of curiosities. He had collected, in his little house on Mount Palatine, a splendid assort- ment of Corinthian vases ; but he con- fined himself to this specialty. The Romans ridiculed him and perpetrated many a joke on the subject. One day a mischievous wag, attacking with one blow the mania of Caesar and the rather doubtful reputation his father had left, ventured to scribble on the pedestal of one of the imperial statues this irreverent inscription : Pater Argentarius ; ego Corintharius. All tastes, it is said, are to be found in nature. Augustus was partial to Corinthian vases, LucuUus preferred old toggery. He possessed five thousand cloaks. What a custom- er for the Prince Eugene of that epoch ! Such a cloak-room one would expect to find in Bajazet's harem, which, they say, -was peopled by three thousand houris. Cloak-room and harem no doubt contained more than one useless treasure. LucuUus, however, more generous in these things than the sul- tan, willingly lent to his neighbor what he did not use for himself. Man- agers of pageants often borrowed his finery. That was how they managed to fit up those "wonderful scenes which alternated, alas, on the theatre of Mar- cellus with bear and panther shows and occupied three or four hours in the entr'actes of a comedy of Rubrenus Lappa, or a tearful drama of Pupius. But do not be too hard on Lucullus with his trumpery. There was a phil- osopher, the Stoic Seneca, w^ho made himself a present of five hundred tables. Five hundred tables ! Neither more nor less ; Xiphilin says so. And w^hat tables! All of thuja wood! Perhaps you will ask, what is thuja w^ood ? I do not know and it is prob- able that I never will know ; all that I do know is that thuja-wood grew in the gorges of the Atlas and that it cost the very eyes of your head. These tables sold by weight. You put the table in one pan of the balance, silver by the bushel in the other side : -when the scales balanced, the dealer took the money and the buyer the goods. Cicero one day indulged his fancy to the tune of one million sesterces ! But what, in heaven's name, did these peo- ple eat on their wonderful tables ? Parrots' brains, I fancy, and nightin- gales' tongues, like the Emperor Helio- gabalus. I will cite one more example of the collecting mania among the Romans. It is proved by the testimony of Dion Cassius and Suetonius that Domitian collected flies. -^ s II HOW ONE BECOMES A COLLECTOR A LL the modes which characterize and differentiate the human self (pardon, O reader) have their simi- laires, as M. Baudrillart -would say, in other species of the animal kingdom. Thus, as there are animals, Of the ravenous type, — as the shark; Hysterical ones, — as the jack-ass; Plagiarists, — as the monkey ; Thinkers, — as the trout ; Mathematicians, — as the crane ; So there are animal collectors : The ant collects seeds ; The field-mouse, filberts ; The dog, fleas ; The magpie, table silver. But the ant, the fieldmouse, the dog, and the magpie are beasts devoid of fi"ee will, and forced to obey their in- stinct, as a cuckoo, once wound, is forced to mark the hour. Quite different is the condition of man. God has made him free. He thinks, he deliberates, he w^ills, he cannot exe- cute any action, even the most insig- nificant, without being driven to it by some determining motive. Only, for the superficial observer, this motive is not always easy to discover. When you see one of your fellow- beings munching shrimps or spitting in a hole, you never think of asking him the reason of so simpk an action. These are manifestations proper to the sensual stomach and the melan- choly brain. But if you should sur- prise one in the perpetration of some act which cannot be explained by any physical or mental necessity — like thrumming a guitar before the knave of diamonds — youw^ould torture your soul to divine the cause of what would seem to you a mental aberration. Well, this musical pastime to which a Spaniard of my acquaintance devoted himself (whose lamentable history I w^ill some day recount) is not more ex- traordinary in my opinion than the sight of a man, well organized, sound in body and mmd, w^eaned at the right time and properly vaccinated, abandoning himself with all gaiety of heart, wthout being condemned to it, to this singular passion, the collect- ing mania. A wag one day asked by what series of metamorphoses a human being could transform himself into a grocer. It would be more rational to ask what physical or moral catastrophes could lead a man, a creature of a loving God, to transform himself into a col- lector. This problem has occupied me for a long time, and after a laborious and conscientious investigation, I have discovered some of the causes which may produce this curious incarnation. My inquiry -was based on ten collec- tors. I have discovered that they contracted the infirmity in the follow- ing ways : Four — from despairing love ; Two — from political exasperation ; One — fr om chagrin at becoming bald ; One — in consequence of a disagree- ment with his curd. One — ^from having frozen his nose in Kabylie ; One — from having missed the train at Brussels. You see from these cases that the primary cause, the determining reason of the collecting mania is always some deception or some misfortune. As I expected. in PHYSICAL AND MORAL PORTRAIT OF THE COLLECTOR IV TONTAIGNE, following Valerius Maximus, reports that a Roman magistrate, a praetor named Cippus, having gone to bed with the impres- sion left on him by the stirring spec- tacle of a bull-fight, w^as much sur- prised on awaking, to discover on his brow a triumphant pair of horns. This astonishment on the part of the prEetor Cippus was no doubt very natural; what is less so is to find a skeptical philosopher like Montaigne attributing so strange a fact to the power of the imagination. It is not to be denied, however, that an intense, incessant thought can, in time, pro- foundty modify our faculties, and, in consequence, the material envelope w^hich serves them as cage. And please note that it is here not a question of the face, that mirror of the soul, as it was called even before the deluge. No, I am speaking of the gen- eral economy of the body and of all the physical organs which are the in- struments and servitors, but also, — note this point, — the interpreters of our passions. Everybody know^s that certain pro- fessions imprint very distinctive marks on our bodies. It does not take a very skillful observer to recognize at a glance : A tailor, by the convexity of his tibias ; A sailor, by the roll of his shoulders and the balancing svv^ing of his arras ; A danseuse, by the exaggeration of her soleus muscle; A fire captain by the Olympic pose of his head. These marks are only the visible ex- pression of purely physical causes; they are creases which the body ac- quires by the permanence or the very frequent repetition of certain atti- tudes. But the attitudes of the soul, who has ever seen them? And_ hoAV can habits peculiar to it model our body in hollows or in relief, when their im- material essence admits of neither depression nor protrusion? How, further, can the human soul, — whether you assign it a residence in the brain, as Euler has done, or in the spleen, as William Flugge, or in the tip of the nose, as I know not who, — how can it modify in any way the form of a tibia or of an elbow? Grave prob- lem which I do not attempt to solve. And yet it is not to be denied that for him who has learned to read it, the human body, — I mean the entire body, from the left shoulder to the right shoulder, and from the heels to the head, — is a book very legible and sometimes very indiscreet. I know^ a man, not a physician or a philosopher, as you might think, but an optician, a modest manufacturer pince-nez and barometers, -who in his leisure moments has made a profound study of these obscure matters. This man, this savant, is able to diagnose with absolute certainty the disposition, the tastes, the aptitudes of the first comer, seen from the back. Show him any passer-by, — this mon- sieur, for example, who has just elbowed by you and is now jogging along twenty steps ahead, with nose in air and umbrella under his arm, — my optician will tell you whether the individual in question is a drunkard or a gambler, and in the latter case whether he has a preference for bac- carat or bezique. Ask him by what index he forms his opinion and he will say, How^ do I know ? an impercep- tible swelling of the shoulder-blade, a microscopic deviation of the inner ankle. Starting from this, he will readily explain to you his whole system and in ten minutes you will be convinced, as he is, that the knee of a stingy man is very different from that of an ambitious one, and that betw^een the calf of an entomologist and that of a melomaniac there is a veritable gulf. These abstruse considerations may seem rather irrelevant, but they are not really foreign to mj'- subject. I consider them indispensable to make you accept without opposition the physical portrait of the collector, such as I shall present to you. The original of my portrait was commu- nicated to me by my barometer- maker, whose judgment in such mat- ters cannot be questioned any more than axioms. So I begin : The collecting-mania is not a bed of Procrustus. The collector is then in- differently tall, medium, or small of stature. The upper part of his body, the bust, stands forth audaciously and forms with the bones of the pelvis an angle of about thirty-five to forty degrees. A well-rounded collector would be a monstrosity. He has a large, flat foot, slightly turned outward, — an honest, con- templative foot. His hands are long, knotty, hairy, and of doubtful neatness. His neck is like his hands. His brow is bald, smooth and shiny. His eyes large, round, protruding. His eyebrows constantly raised. His ears are spreading and mobile. His nose is prominent ; an embar- rassing, noisy, ambitious nose. As to moral qualities, if one excludes the passion of which he is the slave, the collector distinguishes himself especially by negative qualities. To speak frankly, he has neither vices nor virtues, but simply properties, like inanimate objects. I heard of one whose mucous membrane secreted a calcareous deposit, — a function of the madrepore. Yet this dull, sluggish, flabby brain has an irritable fibre running through it. Irritate that and it will start up with such hissing, shoot forth such shrill, piercing sounds that you will think you have set foot in a nest of marmots. This fibre is the jealous, absolute, ungovernable passion, the hobby of Uncle Toby; it is the fairy Turlutaine, the fixed idea, the idea tyrant, tinder the influence of his monomania the collector becomes transformed. Instead of the apathe- tic creature of a moment ago, you see a fanatic, an enthusiast, a visionary, a demoniac. Let his passion rise to a paroxysm, — as it has been known to — and the collector becomes capable of all heroisms as well as all crimes. Levaillant bivouacked in the midst of lions and faced death a hundred times in the hope of obtaining a spar- row lacking in his collection. Rene Cardillac assassinated cus- tomers to keep his collection of jewels complete. Give Levaillant the passion for trinkets and Rene Cardillac the hobby of humming-birds and each would no doubt do what the other did. Conclusion: Do not cast stones at the collector of jewels, but be careful not to trust him w^ith your w^atch. lY VARIETIES OF THE GENUS COLLECTOR /COLLECTORS may be divided into ^^ two classes: Pacotilleurs, or trash-collectors. Specialists. . Pacotilleurs recognize as founder of their sect the pro-consul Verres, before mentioned. The philosopher Dama- sippus also was a pacotilleur; he turned his house into a store-room for bric-a-brac and bartered his last gold-piece for the foot-bath of the robber Sisyphus. The type of Yerres and Damasippus we now know by the hundred. They collect, they pile up w^ithout choice, without prefer- ence, without system, everything that arouses their cupidity, whether by its antiquity, its rarity or the oddness of its form. They are gourmands also for souve- nirs. By this sentimental term they designate all sorts of gew-gaws which have at some time belonged to some historic personage or have figured as accessories in some romantic adven- ture. Collectors of this class are known by the general name of curiosity-col- lectors. There is nothing so freakish, so crazy, so extravagant, so anarchical. as the museum of a pacotilleur. It is a pandemonium where, stuffed with hair, carved in wood, chiseled in iron, cast in bronze, all the inventions, dreams, nightmares, of all societies, all reigns, all times, all zones, meet, jostle, elbow, irritate and smother each other. Have you ever read Bal- zac's "Peau de Chagrin?'' Have you ever penetrated with Raphael into the gloomy shop of Job ? Well, in the cabinet of the pacotilleur, as in the den of the old antiquary, you will find, side by side, the charming and the horrible, the serious and the ridiculous, the beautiful and the misshapen; crocodiles of the Nile, faiences of Palissy, tankards, ostrich eggs, fossil bones, laces, bludgeons, moccasins, reliquaries, and frigates in ivory. If your friend — I suppose a pacotilleur might have a friend — makes pretences in historical science, he is capable of showing you the pole-ax of Charles Martel, the tooth-pick of the Abbe Sugar, and the gorget of Corbulon. The class of pacotilleurs is relatively small in number. The reason for this is simple: as their collections include all objects known and unknown and recommend themselves only by the quantity and variety of specimens, they are veritable gulfs which all the gold of California could not fill. The class of specialists includes all collectors w^ho, either by taste or by necessity, are interested in a single category of objects. It may be subdivided into two groups : The routiniers, or imitators. The fantaisistes, or vagarians. Routiniers are not corrupt by na- ture ; it is the contagion of example, the spirit of imitation that has un- done them. One might say of most of these unfortunates what Horace said of his contemporary Iccius, a mad lover of Chinese curios and old books : Pollicitus meliora ! The routinier always trudges along in the path beaten by his predecessors, and his ambition is satisfied in collect- ing those things that have been col- lected before by others. There is a series of collectible objects famed in tradition, such as: Pictures, medals, faiences, books, shells. You need not fear that a routinier will ever venture beyond these oft- explored regions. Nay, have I not seen them condemn themselves to nosing about one little comer, an acre, a perch, even a fathom, forever turning about in this narrow circle like a squirrel in his wheel ? I knew one collector who, in the matter of pictures, valued only the canvases of painters born at Magny- en-Vexin. Another, a conchologist, has a pas- sion only for the edible snail. As for the faintaisistes, they are the lost children, the rogues, the zephyrs of curio-hunting. It is almost unbelievable what extravagances of the imagination a monomaniac can indulge in when his mania has no other guide than caprice. There has probably never been a single product of nature or of humap industry that has not been the object of a fantaisiste's search. I have a relative — a grave professor in one of our leading colleges — who has passed twenty years of his life collecting umbrellas. It is not unusual to find persons collecting pipes, musical snuff-boxes, nut-crackers, almanacs, carp-fins. I have heard of one w^ho made a museum of mustard pots. And you, Catherine, my pearl of cooks, was it the master you served before me, the Dutch numismatist, who inspired you with this inordinate fondness for uniform buttons ? Flat buttons and round buttons, buttons of tin and buttons of brass, buttons stamped with a simple number, with two cannon crossed, with an anchor, with a hunting horn, with a star or a grenade, what have I not found in that little chamois bag, which passed, I don't know how, from my loto box to the bottom of your trunk! And each one of these treasures calls up some memory for you, I suppose, Catherine ? Despite of, or, if you choose, by very reason of their excesses, specialists, that is fantaisistes and routiniers, are the only collectors worthy of the name. Pacotilleurs have really not the true manners and habits of the class. Because their mania is directed toward everything it is in reality directed toward nothing. No object is ever lacking in their collection because their collection can never be complete. So they know nothing of the violent desire, the anguish, the itching of the specialist, who is always in expectation, always in search of some tantalizing specimen, some image of Brutus or Cassius w^hich shines only by its absence from his cabinet or his shelf. But this endless search for the un- found object, this constant strain, this moral tetanus of the fixed idea, is in fact the necessary stimulus, the indispensable motive, the raison d'etre, in short, of the collector. It is said that Pope Clement VI., touched by the despair of Petrarch, offered to release him from his vows so that he might marry Laura, but the poet refused because he still had a great many sonnets to write. The collector belongs to the school of Petrarch. For one, love was only a pretext for sonnets ; for the other, the beset- ting passion is a pretext for explora- tions. When the collector has no- thing more to seek, nothing more to discover, he will be like the insect that has spun its cocoon, growing dull and stupid in idleness and ennui. Only, in this particular case, the in- sect has better sense than the man ; it changes to a butterfly, the man to a grub. Y THE COLLECTOR OF OLD BOOKS TDERMIT me now to leave gen- eralities and to complete this monograph by sketching, in broad lines, an individual of the genus. I shall select my individual among the class of specialists. He shall be a bibliomaniac, if you please, and fur- thermore, a particular kind of a bibliomaniac, — a lover of old books, a bouquineur. The bouquineur is distinquished from others of his genus by pecuHar traits. Thus, while other bibUomaniacs will hunt their game almost any- where, in book-shops, at public sales, sometimes in the libraries of their friends, you w^ill never find a bouqui- neur rummaging anywhere except in some little comer display, in the dusty boxes that encumber wharfs and bridges, in the heaps of scrap-iron sold by the Auvergnats, in the w^aste paper under some butcher's or tobac- conist's counter. You might think then that the bou- quineur's finest treasures are more often found in the second-hand shop than at the regular dealer's ? Quite the contrary. Is it economy, then, or lack of money that forces the old book lovers to exert themselves thus ? Not in the least ; I know one who is a lavish millionaire. You do not understand? Listen, then, for now w^e come to the point of the matter. The bouquineur has a peculiarity in common w^ith the w^oman enceinte. Both have strange cravings, and in both cases these cravings can be sat- isfied only under certain conditions. Thus, the w^oman has an intense desire for a bite of rabbit, but this rabbit must be one with a white foot ; it must have been killed in this certain field and not in another ; in the morn- ing and not in the evening; in fair w^eather and not in fog. The bouquineur is equally definite and exacting in his desires. He longs for a certain old book, but it must be hedged about by restrictions. First of all, it must be a renard. f Thus you see that the important point to the bouquineur is not so much the old book itself as the man- ner of acquiring it. It is no great trick to walk into a well-arranged shop, to look through the catalogue, choose an article, pay the marked price and then put the purchase tranquilly in your packet. But to tramp the pavement of the quays for a whole week, to search, to explore, to ransack a hundred musty, Nota : Renard is the term applied to a rare and curious book unearthed by a collector in the display of a second-hand dealer, who does not know the value of the book. dirty boxes ; then finally in a jumble of worn, torn, stained, broken-backed trash, to feel thrilling under your fingers some little typographical jewel unappreciated by the bumpkin Aivho has shamelessly prostituted it, — that is what may be called a streak of fortune, a triumph. It is not surprising, then, that in order to gain such delights, the bou- quineur truly worthy of the name braves all public opinion and exposes himself w^ith equal indifference to the raillery of men as well as to the inclemencies of the sky. I have seen one of them standing for a whole hour under shelter of a carriage-w^ay, in a murderous draught, waiting for a ray of sun to come out and permit a neighboring second-hand man to re-open his boxes which a double oil- cloth was protecting from the rain. All are capable of forgetting their most serious business, their most sacred duties, the birth-day of their wife, the baptism of their first bom, if they meet the seductions of a book display on their route. At the hospital of Dubois they tell of a bouquinomaniac, bedridden and sick unto death, who profited by the momentary absence of his nurse to clothe himself hurriedly and rush to the Quay Voltaire. Would you like to know, now^, w^hat books are so madly pursued by bouquineurs ? Some collectors, — the dilettanti of the genus, — seek editions that have been issued by celebrated typographi- cal presses, such as those of the Aldi, the Juntas, the Estiennes, the Mam- ert-Patissons, the Cramoisys, the El- zevirs. Others run after treatises of some special nature, such as the Manual of the Ablette-Fisber, Guide-book of Jus- tices of the Peace, The Art of Raising Glow-Worms. Others again buy up indiscrimin- ately all kinds of works of which the subjects seem curious or unusual. Here are some sample titles which seem to be specially tempting to this last class of collectors : The Palm-Tree of the Oases, fol- lowed by the Art of Identifying Dates. Considerations of the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Limoges Marine. The Inffuence of Military Music on the Moral Sense of Wool-Bearing Ani- mals. Comparative Study of Idioms of the Comanche Indians and the Dialect of the Cbaillotians. From all the foregoing it would be natural to conclude that the bouqui- neur is a profound student, given to scholarly research in the specialty to which he denotes himself. A grave mistake. The bouquineur is outdone in ignor- ance only by the school-master and the carp. He possesses thousands of books, but he would rather die of thirst — said to be the most cruel of all deaths — than be condemned to read a single one of his books. Why, then, does he heap up these mountains of paper? No one has ever been able to find out.