The Collection of Antiquities | Page 9

or in the faces of the dying
the wan look of certain gray eyes that I remember, nor the dreadful
brightness of others that were black.
"Neither Hoffmann nor Maturin, the two weirdest imaginations of our
time, ever gave me such a thrill of terror as I used to feel when I
watched the automaton movements of those bodies sheathed in

whalebone. The paint on actors' faces never caused me a shock; I could
see below it the rouge in grain, the rouge de naissance, to quote a
comrade at least as malicious as I can be. Years had leveled those
women's faces, and at the same time furrowed them with wrinkles, till
they looked like the heads on wooden nutcrackers carved in Germany.
Peeping in through the window-panes, I gazed at the battered bodies,
and ill- jointed limbs (how they were fastened together, and, indeed,
their whole anatomy was a mystery I never attempted to explain); I saw
the lantern jaws, the protuberant bones, the abnormal development of
the hips; and the movements of these figures as they came and went
seemed to me no whit less extraordinary than their sepulchral
immobility as they sat round the card-tables.
"The men looked gray and faded like the ancient tapestries on the wall,
in dress they were much more like the men of the day, but even they
were not altogether convincingly alive. Their white hair, their withered
waxen-hued faces, their devastated foreheads and pale eyes, revealed
their kinship to the women, and neutralized any effects of reality
borrowed from their costume.
"The very certainty of finding all these folk seated at or among the
tables every day at the same hours invested them at length in my eyes
with a sort of spectacular interest as it were; there was something
theatrical, something unearthly about them.
"Whenever, in after times, I have gone through museums of old
furniture in Paris, London, Munich, or Vienna, with the gray-headed
custodian who shows you the splendors of time past, I have peopled the
rooms with figures from the Collection of Antiquities. Often, as little
schoolboys of eight or ten we used to propose to go and take a look at
the curiosities in their glass cage, for the fun of the thing. But as soon
as I caught sight of Mlle. Armande's sweet face, I used to tremble; and
there was a trace of jealousy in my admiration for the lovely child
Victurnien, who belonged, as we all instinctively felt, to a different and
higher order of being from our own. It struck me as something
indescribably strange that the young fresh creature should be there in
that cemetery awakened before the time. We could not have explained
our thoughts to ourselves, yet we felt that we were bourgeois and
insignificant in the presence of that proud court."

The disasters of 1813 and 1814, which brought about the downfall of
Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was
more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but the
events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the
vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all
contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the personages
so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only begins to
shape itself in 1822.
In 1822 the Marquis d'Esgrignon's fortunes had not improved in spite
of the changes worked by the Restoration in the condition of emigres.
Of all the nobles hardly hit by Revolutionary legislation, his case was
the hardest. Like other great families, the d'Esgrignons before 1789
derived the greater part of their income from their rights as lords of the
manor in the shape of dues paid by those who held of them; and,
naturally, the old seigneurs had reduced the size of the holdings in
order to swell the amounts paid in quit-rents and heriots. Families in
this position were hopelessly ruined. They were not affected by the
ordinance by which Louis XVIII. put the emigres into possession of
such of their lands as had not been sold; and at a later date it was
impossible that the law of indemnity should indemnify them. Their
suppressed rights, as everybody knows, were revived in the shape of a
land tax known by the very name of domaines, but the money went into
the coffers of the State.
The Marquis by his position belonged to that small section of the
Royalist party which would hear of no kind of compromise with those
whom they styled, not Revolutionaries, but revolted subjects, or, in
more parliamentary language, they had no dealings with Liberals or
Constitutionnels. Such Royalists, nicknamed Ultras by the opposition,
took for leaders and heroes those courageous orators of the Right, who
from the very