“From the beginning.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“The owner of a work is never in a hurry to declare that that work is not—or, rather, is no longer genuine.”
“Still, it was the only means of recovering them.”
“I consider that there was another and a better.”
“Which was that?”
“Not to make the secret known, not to frighten my burglars and to offer to buy back the pictures, which they must find more or less difficult to dispose of.”
“How would you communicate with them?”
As the count did not reply, Isidore answered for him:
“By means of an advertisement in the papers. The paragraph inserted in the agony column of the Journal, the Écho de Paris and the Matin runs, ‘Am prepared to buy back the pictures.’”