He had come to Paris from Bordeaux, and so long ago as 1835 he had retired from business without making any change for the better in his dress, so faithful is the race to old tradition.  The persecutions of the Middle Ages compelled them to wear rags, to snuffle and whine and groan over their poverty in self-defence, till the habits induced by the necessities of other times have come to be, as usual, instinctive, a racial defect.

Elie Magus had amassed a vast fortune by buying and selling diamonds, pictures, lace, enamels, delicate carvings, old jewelry, and rarities of all kinds, a kind of commerce which has developed enormously of late, so much so indeed that the number of dealers has increased tenfold during the last twenty years in this city of Paris, whither all the curiosities in the world come to rub against one another.  And for pictures there are but three marts in the world—­Rome, London, and Paris.

Elie Magus lived in the Chausee des Minimes, a short, broad street leading to the Place Royale.  He had bought the house, an old-fashioned mansion, for a song, as the saying is, in 1831.  Yet there were sumptuous apartments within it, decorated in the time of Louis XV.; for it had once been the Hotel Maulaincourt, built by the great President of the Cour des Aides, and its remote position had saved it at the time of the Revolution.

You may be quite sure that the old Jew had sound reasons for buying house property, contrary to the Hebrew law and custom.  He had ended, as most of us end, with a hobby that bordered on a craze.  He was as miserly as his friend, the late lamented Gobseck; but he had been caught by the snare of the eyes, by the beauty of the pictures in which he dealt.  As his taste grew more and more fastidious, it became one of the passions which princes alone can indulge when they are wealthy and art-lovers.  As the second King of Prussia found nothing that so kindled enthusiasm as the spectacle of a grenadier over six feet high, and gave extravagant sums for a new specimen to add to his living museum of a regiment, so the retired picture-dealer was roused to passion-pitch only by some canvas in perfect preservation, untouched since the master laid down the brush; and what was more, it must be a picture of the painter’s best time.  No great sales, therefore, took place but Elie Magus was there; every mart knew him; he traveled all over Europe.  The ice-cold, money-worshiping soul in him kindled at the sight of a perfect work of art, precisely as a libertine, weary of fair women, is roused from apathy by the sight of a beautiful girl, and sets out afresh upon the quest of flawless loveliness.  A Don Juan among fair works of art, a worshiper of the Ideal, Elie Magus had discovered joys that transcend the pleasure of a miser gloating over his gold—­he lived in a seraglio of great paintings.

His masterpieces were housed as became the children of princes; the whole first floor of the great old mansion was given up to them.  The rooms had been restored under Elie Magus’ orders, and with what magnificence!