Among the curiosities of Aix is the monument of Joseph Sec, which the owner of that harmonious name caused to be erected on the edge of his garden in 1792. It faces the street, and bears the inscription:
Venez, habitants de la terre,
Nations, écoutez la loi!
It includes the figures of Themis and Moses, and among other symbols two bas-reliefs of banknotes for a hundred and two thousand francs. The whole erection is rather absurd, although it was the work of the sculptor Chastel. But probably Joseph Sec was one of those patrons of the arts who know what they want and see that they get it. I have not the smallest doubt that Chastel, who was a sculptor of merit, heard from him the phrase: "I pay the piper, and it is only fair that I should call the tune," or its French equivalent.
Joseph Sec called another very curious tune to Chastel, of which M. Mariéton tells.
He was taken into the deserted garden behind the monument—"the Trianon of the bourgeois of Aix," he calls it—and into a little Louis XVI kiosk littered with tools. In it was an old sofa, the seat of which was lifted for him to see the life-sized figure of a naked man in painted marble, with a bloodstained scar on his forehead—a dreadful, realistic representation of a workman who had been killed by a stone falling from Joseph Sec's monument.
How modern he was, this good bourgeois of Aix, who died over a hundred years ago! A taste for the arts, and money enough to indulge it! I own that I should have tried to get a glimpse of this artistic atrocity of his, if I had known of its existence.