according to its owner’s estimation.  This Jew possesses Titian’s masterpiece, an Entombment painted for Charles V., sent by the great man to the great Emperor with a holograph letter, now fastened down upon the lower part of the canvas.  And Magus has yet another Titian, the original sketch from which all the portraits of Philip II. were painted.  His remaining ninety-seven pictures are all of the same rank and distinction.  Wherefore Magus laughs at our national collection, raked by the sunlight which destroys the fairest paintings, pouring in through panes of glass that act as lenses.  Picture galleries can only be lighted from above; Magus opens and closes his shutters himself; he is as careful of his pictures as of his daughter, his second idol.  And well the old picture-fancier knows the laws of the lives of pictures.  To hear him talk, a great picture has a life of its own; it is changeable, it takes its beauty from the color of the light.  Magus talks of his paintings as Dutch fanciers used to talk of their tulips; he will come home on purpose to see some one picture in the hour of its glory, when the light is bright and clean.

And Magus himself was a living picture among the motionless figures on the wall—­a little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—­there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius.  A Jew surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles which humanity can give.  Robert Medal, our great actor, cannot rise to this height of poetry, sublime though he is.

Paris of all the cities of the world holds most of such men as Magus, strange beings with a strange religion in their heart of hearts.  The London “eccentric” always finds that worship, like life, brings weariness and satiety in the end; the Parisian monomaniac lives cheerfully in concubinage with his crotchet to the last.

Often shall you meet in Paris some Pons, some Elie Magus, dressed badly enough, with his face turned from the rising sun (like the countenance of the perpetual secretary of the Academie), apparently heeding nothing, conscious of nothing, paying no attention to shop-windows nor to fair passers-by, walking at random, so to speak, with nothing in his pockets, and to all appearance an equally empty head.  Do you ask to what Parisian tribe this manner of man belongs?  He is a collector, a millionaire, one of the most impassioned souls upon earth; he and his like are capable of treading the miry ways that lead to the police-court if so they may gain possession of a cup, a picture, or some such rare unpublished piece as Elie Magus once picked up one memorable day in Germany.