PAIR OF WONDERFUL OLD FRENCH STATUETTES NOW THE PROPERTY OF DR. TWITCHETT
The owner has identified them as Sèvres and pronounces them portrait statuettes—No. 1, Victor Hugo in one of his moods; and No. 2, a certain Marquis de St. Quai, probably a patron of Victor Hugo.
It was my mother who provided me with my inheritance of objets-d’art, or, as my Parisian friends prefer to say, objects of art. In its way her instinct was as infallible as my father’s own, though possibly more limited in scope. Indefatigably she scrimped and saved to bring together the nucleus of my subsequent collection. It would be cruel, in the present era of inflation, to set forth the catalogue. My estimable colleague Van Loot, forewarned as he is, would not survive the list, even if I omitted the prices, but I owe her memory at least the tribute of some little particularity in the connection. It was she who far-sightedly sacrificed our Thanksgiving turkey to procure the figures of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, obtainable then, in the admirable porcelain work of the period, for the trifling sum of three dollars each, and even urged upon the buyer at that price by the agent of the pious firm which held the monopoly of their production. My mother, I remember, shrewdly beat him down to $2.75, and exacted that ten cents of this sum should be paid in trade at my father’s shop—the agent happily requiring his professional attention at the moment.
It was typical of her, this combination of prodigality and thrift—the distinguishing characteristic, as Professor Kilgallen has so often said, of the true antiquer. Without knowing why she did it, my mother could and did perform prodigies of economy to lavish the slow, niggard savings in which they fruited on the gratification of her driving, dominant passion for that which, she must have realized, would be one day an antique. It was what we learned to expect of her, my father and I; he complained only covertly, when our Thanksgiving dinner revealed itself to be the usual baked beans and pork, and cautioned me with emphasis against repeating in my mother’s hearing the remarks he permitted himself on the subject in the relative privacy of the shop.
As zealously as my father his Grant cuspidors, so did my mother cherish and guard the images of the exhorters. They stood like tutelary saints at either extreme of our mantel-shelf, dusted by no hands but her own, at once the pride and solace of her lot. In spite of breath-stopping offers—among them the blank, signed check tendered me by Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot in person—I have never brought myself to part with them, although, having now become obvious antiques, they possess but a purely sentimental interest for me.
So, too, have I preserved the glass cane which our journeyman barber, a roving, sportive soul, brought with him from the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, during the closing days of the fruitful Grant Period. I cannot forget the intensity with which my mother thirsted for possession of this trophy; she gave the adventurous journeyman no peace until he consented to part with it, taking payment in the laundering of his stiff-bosomed shirt, which, indulging a taste for display perhaps out of harmony with his station, he rarely wore more than a week without having it restarched and ironed.
The cane, affixed with a bow of wide red ribbon to our parlor wall, became, presently, a proof that our family had visited the Centennial. I held my tongue in the presence of impressed visitors, learning swiftly to avoid the unstimulating truth and, no doubt, even then in vague, secret sympathy with my mother’s aspirations. She must invent a reason for buying a thing at once so impractical and so little decorative; she did not guess that she saw in it an antique beyond price; perforce she explained her purchase on the disingenuous and unworthy ground that folks would be bound to think we’d went there and bought it right off them glass-blowers our own-selves. But I knew. I understood. Even then, I must believe, I was an antiquer ahead.
For, with my own savings, one Christmas in the Arthur Period, I bought, as a gift to both parents in common, no less a treasure than a genuine Garfield toothpick-container—the miniature, in genuine pressed glass, of a silk hat, which, inverted, stood for a decade in the centre of our table on all occasions of state, and which, with its original content of toothpicks, including four showing signs of actual use, I reluctantly disposed of to the buyer for Queen Mary’s collection at a price which both modesty and my gentleman’s agreement forbid me to confess.
It was only natural that I should react to the twin stimuli of inheritance and environment. My early days were spent in the constant and inspiring contemplation of articles of vertu which the most discerning taste of the contemporary moment would not have recognized as even potentially antiques. I could not, indeed, enter our house without contemplating the statuettes of the Christian Slaves who knelt, one on each side of the steps, mutely supplicating the beholder’s piety and pity. If I would strike a sulphur match in the front hall, to light my way up the stairs to bed, I must do it on nothing less precious than a perfect specimen of the Benjamin Harrison match-holder—the peculiarly rare and exotic type, I mean, wherein a mother hen and a young chick are depicted, the mature fowl’s plumage being formed cunningly of colored sand-paper and the wee chickling being made to say, in a loop issuing from its open beaklet: “Don’t scratch me—scratch Mother.” This, even in those unappreciative days, was held far preferable to the alternative device, wherein a frowzy vagabond is illustrated, his raiment a mosaic of sand-paper fragments, with the legend: “Scratch your matches On my patches.” We possessed a number of these, in addition to the rarer article already described.
Our home, simple though it was, and afflicted always with the pressure of harsh poverty, was veritably a treasure-house of potential antiques. It was impossible to enter any room without coming under their subtly stimulating influence—even the bathroom contained, from my earliest recollection, the most perfect specimen of the Garfield tin tub I have ever seen, and the incidental plumbing, though hidden, according to the mode of the moment, under a mask of painted pine, was in entire harmony with the spirit of this dominating piece. Our mantel, in addition to the figurines already mentioned and illustrated, was laden with the tokens of my parent’s discernment and discretion. There was an all but priceless decalcomania picture on varnished wood, portraying the glories of Niagara Falls; there was a wealth of companion pieces, illustrating the Natural Bridge, Ausable Chasm, the Town-Hall of Darien, Connecticut, and an especially rare piece [circa ’84] purporting to be merely a souvenir of Sulphur Springs Grove, Erie County, New York, and long since unobtainable except at auctioneers’ sales of large and unusually complete collections.