“How much will you charge me for this mummy fragment?”
“Ah, the highest price I can get; for it is a superb piece: if I had the match of it you could not have it for less than five hundred francs;—the daughter of a Pharaoh! nothing is more rare.”
“Assuredly that is not a common article; but, still, how much do you want? In the first place, let me warn you that all my wealth consists of just five louis: I can buy anything that costs five louis, but nothing dearer;—you might search my vest pockets and most secret drawers without even finding one poor five-franc piece more.”
“Five louis for the foot of the Princess Hermonthis! that is very little, very little indeed; ’tis an authentic foot,” muttered the merchant, shaking his head, and imparting a peculiar rotary motion to his eyes. “Well, take it, and I will give you the bandages into the bargain,” he added, wrapping the foot in an ancient damask rag—“very fine! real damask!—Indian damask which has never been redyed; it is strong, and yet it is soft,” he mumbled, stroking the frayed tissue with his fingers, through the trade-acquired habit which moved him to praise even an object of so little value that he himself deemed it only worth the giving away.
He poured the gold coins into a sort of medieval alms-purse hanging at his belt, repeating:
“The foot of the Princess Hermonthis, to be used for a paper-weight!”
Then turning his phosphorescent eyes upon me, he exclaimed in a voice strident as the crying of a cat which has swallowed a fish-bone:
“Old Pharaoh will not be well pleased: he loved his daughter—the dear man!”
“You speak as if you were a contemporary of his: you are old enough, goodness knows! but you do not date back to the Pyramids of Egypt,” I answered, laughingly, from the threshold.
I went home, delighted with my acquisition.