A Collector’s Bequest.
“My wish is that my Drawings, my Prints, my Curiosities, my Books—in a word these things of art which have been the joy of my life—shall not be consigned to the cold tomb of a museum, and subjected to the stupid glance of the careless passer-by; but I require that they shall all be dispersed under the hammer of the Auctioneer, so that the pleasure which the acquiring of each one of them has given me shall be given again, in each case, to some inheritor of my own tastes.”—From the Will of Edmond de Goncourt.