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 folds of verbiage in which he skilfully enwrapped it.

It was this.

The little valueless drawings on the people's sweetmeat boxes of gilded cardboard had a grace, a colour, and a beauty in them which had caught, at a fair-booth in the village of St. Cloud, the ever watchful eyes of the great dealer. He had bought half-a-dozen of the boxes for a couple of francs. He had said, "Here is what I want." Wanted for what? Briefly, to produce Petitôt enamels and Fragonard cabinets, and perhaps now and then a Greuze portrait—genuine eighteenth-century work. There was a rage for it. René would understand?

René's dark southern eyes lost a little of their new lustre of happiness and grew troubled with a sort of cloud of perplexity. He did not seem to understand.

The old man took more snuff, and used phrases clearer still.

There were great collectors—dilettanti of houses imperial, and royal, and princely, and noble, of all the grades of greatness—who would give any sum for bonbonnières and tabatières of eighteenth-century work by anyone of the few famous masters of that time. A genuine, incontestable sweetmeat box from the ateliers of the Louis XIV. or Louis XV.