"Yes, all originals."
"Between ourselves, tell me what he made you pay for those I shall point out to you."
Together they walked round the gallery. The guests were amazed at the gravity in which the artist proceeded, in company with the host, to examine each picture.
"Three thousand francs," said Vervelle in a whisper, as they reached the last, "but I tell everybody forty thousand."
"Forty thousand for a Titian!" said the artist, aloud. "Why, it is nothing at all!"
"Didn't I tell you," said Vervelle, "that I had three hundred thousand francs' worth of pictures?"
"I painted those pictures," said Pierre Grassou in Vervelle's ear, "and I sold them one by one to Elie Magus for less than ten thousand francs the whole lot."
"Prove it to me," said the bottle-dealer, "and I double my daughter's 'dot,' for if it is so, you are Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Gerard Douw!"
"And Magus is a famous picture-dealer!" said the painter, who now saw the meaning of the misty and aged look imparted to his pictures in Elie's shop, and the utility of the subjects the picture-dealer had required of him.
Far from losing the esteem of his admiring bottle-merchant, Monsieur de Fougeres (for so the family persisted in calling Pierre Grassou) advanced so much that when the portraits were finished he presented them gratuitously to his father-in-law, his mother-in-law and his wife.