The tears stood in Elie Magus’ eyes as he looked from one masterpiece to another.  He turned round to La Cibot, “I will give you a commission of two thousand francs on each of the pictures if you can arrange that I shall have them for forty thousand francs,” he said.  La Cibot was amazed at this good fortune dropped from the sky.  Admiration, or, to be more accurate, delirious joy, had wrought such havoc in the Jew’s brain, that it had actually unsettled his habitual greed, and he fell headlong into enthusiasm, as you see.

“And I?——­” put in Remonencq, who knew nothing about pictures.

“Everything here is equally good,” the Jew said cunningly, lowering his voice for Remonencq’s ears; “take ten pictures just as they come and on the same conditions.  Your fortune will be made.”

Again the three thieves looked each other in the face, each one of them overcome with the keenest of all joys—­sated greed.  All of a sudden the sick man’s voice rang through the room; the tones vibrated like the strokes of a bell: 

“Who is there?” called Pons.

“Monsieur! just go back to bed!” exclaimed La Cibot, springing upon Pons and dragging him by main force.  “What next!  Have you a mind to kill yourself?—­Very well, then, it is not Dr. Poulain, it is Remonencq, good soul, so anxious that he has come to ask after you!  —­Everybody is so fond of you that the whole house is in a flutter.  So what is there to fear?”

“It seems to me that there are several of you,” said Pons.

“Several? that is good!  What next!  Are you dreaming!—­You will go off your head before you have done, upon my word!—­Here, look!”—­and La Cibot flung open the door, signed to Magus to go, and beckoned to Remonencq.

“Well, my dear sir,” said the Auvergnat, now supplied with something to say, “I just came to ask after you, for the whole house is alarmed about you.—­Nobody likes Death to set foot in a house!—­And lastly, Daddy Monistrol, whom you know very well, told me to tell you that if you wanted money he was at your service——­”

“He sent you here to take a look round at my knick-knacks!” returned the old collector from his bed; and the sour tones of his voice were full of suspicion.

A sufferer from liver complaint nearly always takes momentary and special dislikes to some person or thing, and concentrates all his ill-humor upon the object.  Pons imagined that some one had designs upon his precious collection; the thought of guarding it became a fixed idea with him; Schmucke was continually sent to see if any one had stolen into the sanctuary.

“Your collection is fine enough to attract the attention of chineurs,” Remonencq answered astutely.  “I am not much in the art line myself; but you are supposed to be such a great connoisseur, sir, that with my eyes shut—­supposing, for instance, that you should need money some time or other, for nothing costs so much as these confounded illnesses; there was my sister now, when she would have got better again just as well without.  Doctors are rascals that take advantage of your condition to—­”