The collector

“It doesn’t seem possible to me”, says Anatole France, “that one can have a spirit like everyone else’s if he is brought up on the riverbanks of Paris, opposite the Louvre and the Tuileries, near the Palais-Mazarin, in front of the glorious Seine river flowing between the towers, turrets and spires of Old Paris. There, from rue Guénégaud to rue du Bac, the shops of bookstores, antique dealers and print merchants profusely spread out the most beautiful forms of art and the most curious testimonies of the past.”

The 6th “arrondissement” (i.e. district) is the true homeland of a tribe which tends to gradually disappear and that one cannot imagine to see on the avenue de la Grande-Armée, boulevard de Rochechouart, or rue La Fayette.

We are talking about collectors of books, old paintings and trinkets.

The lover of small boutiques can only live between the Luxembourg gardens and the Seine. Saint-Germain-des-Prés […] is the district where five ground floors out of ten are occupied by antique dealers, bookbinders, and “bouquinistes” (i.e. secondhand booksellers).

Uncle Pons still lives here. He is a quiet tenant who does not impose on his concierge. She takes him for a weirdo, for a shy and sweet maniac because she sees him come home every evening with a poorly tied package. […]

He only makes purchases at small merchants and small sales. It is he who, in his ant work, displaces undeserved craze, prepares the series that will follow him, one day finds himself in possession of exquisite jewelry, blindly neglected.

(If) you meet him in the street and ask him what he carries under his arm (wrapped) in an old newspaper, he will blush even behind his ears. Ten years later, you will not be able to get even for a thousand francs what he bought for just a hundred pennies! And the editors of magazines will humbly ask him to let them photograph his bindings with small irons and coats of arms…” This is a classic fellow.

One can imagine him in an old boy’s apartment overlooking some provincial street such as, rue Jacob or rue de Verneuil. It has been years since he can no longer hang anything on his walls; the unframed canvases pile up in every corner, the drawers are full of trinkets, and the wallets full of sketches and prints. Still, every evening he will come home with yet a new acquisition. Whatever can move people of his generation seem irrelevant to Uncle Pons. He only wants what others don’t have.

A woman in his house? He will raise his arms in astonishment. Where would she stay? Lord, what would he do with her? There is no room for a woman in this house. He only has one armchair to sit in, always the same, at the corner of the fireplace. The rest of the seats, except that one, are only used to store pictures, frames, books. In his old wardrobe, he has barely reserved two shelves for his laundry. The rest are filled with bric-a-brac.

His overcoat and hat are not of the latest fashion, but he doesn’t care, preferring a gouache to a tie, and in his anteroom, an old urn is full of canes like neither Brummel possessed, nor any other famous dandy. On some canes one can find knobs of aventurine and lazulite, vermeil capsules, balls of black silver star enamel, and the typical c-type handles. Some canes of blond tortoise shell are signed Verdier. He leaves them in the urn, and even when the weather is nice, he takes his umbrella.