Just then a voice interrupted: “What are you looking at, child?”
“I do not know,” I replied.
“You do not know!” exclaimed Miss Solander in expected disapproval. “Pray, why do you not know?” She moved near, to be serviceable.
Now, Miss Solander never cared for pictures, at least only for painted ones of forget-me-nots and buttercups in water-color and sheep by Mauve in oil, so I hurried on to spell out the title-page. I gave it up.
“P-a-l-i-s-sy,—Palissy. Master Bernard Palissy the Potter,” coached Miss Solander.
“What is a potter?” I asked. And then it began.
In these after years I have always been glad that Miss Solander’s embroidery chenille gave out at the first question, and that a gentle rain kept us indoors. Undoubtedly, too, this little book had been known to her childhood, for she extended it a more approving greeting than it was her wont to vouchsafe many of my other early literary discoveries. At any rate, I have forgiven her much, for that afternoon she read me the story of Master Bernard from beginning to end.
How it all came back to me yesterday when my friend Cleon, at whose house I was dining, took me into his library and showed me, not a book about the old potter but an actual bit of his craft, a sauce-boat in the enameled faience which Palissy struggled through so many years of vicissitude to produce. Tenderly I took it in my hands and gazed intimately upon its lovely soft blues, grays, browns, wonderful greens, and the soft and well-fused marbled colors on the back of the piece, all of which, together with the sharp modeling of the relief and “neatness” of its workmanship gave unmistakable evidence of its authenticity. It had not the crude greens, the glaring yellows or the bright purples that betray imitations of Palissy’s ware.
I have seen the fine collections of Master Bernard’s handiwork in the Louvre, the Hôtel Cluny, the Sèvres Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the other collections of note, public and private, at home and abroad, but the little saucière which my friend Cleon permitted me to gaze upon—nay, dear reader, to hold in my hands!—there was not a finer bit anywhere. Master Bernard must have given a chuckle of contentment when he drew it from the kiln!
One might, with a princely purse, collect a few examples of Palissy ware in the course of a lifetime keenly devoted to collecting! But so rare is Palissy ware that even in Cleon’s house I had not expected to see such a treasure. Strangely enough, it had been discovered, not just bought; discovered in London, and, unromantically enough, though exultingly, in a shop whose keeper ought to have known what it was, who ought to have known enough not to let it go for the mere pittance of—but that is Cleon’s secret!