sacrificing a few crowns to his wife's taste. In point of fact, his
land mania allowed him to think of nothing but the estate of Anzy.

These "antiquities" at that time cost much less than modern furniture.
By the end of five or six years the ante-room, the dining-room, the
two drawing-rooms, and the boudoir which Dinah had arranged on the
ground floor of La Baudraye, every spot even to the staircase, were
crammed with masterpieces collected in the four adjacent departments.
These surroundings, which were called _queer_ by the neighbors, were
quite in harmony with Dinah. All these Marvels, so soon to be the
rage, struck the imagination of the strangers introduced to her; they
came expecting something unusual; and they found their expectations
surpassed when, behind a bower of flowers, they saw these catacombs
full of old things, piled up as Sommerard used to pile them--that "Old
Mortality" of furniture. And then these finds served as so many
springs which, turned on by a question, played off an essay on Jean
Goujon, Michel Columb, Germain Pilon, Boulle, Van Huysum, and Boucher,
the great native painter of Le Berry; on Clodion, the carver of wood,
on Venetian mirrors, on Brustolone, an Italian tenor who was the
Michael-Angelo of boxwood and holm oak; on the thirteenth, fourteenth,
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, on the glazes of
Bernard de Palissy, the enamels of Petitot, the engravings of Albrecht
Durer--whom she called Dur; on illuminations on vellum, on Gothic
architecture, early decorated, flamboyant and pure--enough to turn an
old man's brain and fire a young man with enthusiasm.

Madame de la Baudraye, possessed with the idea of waking up Sancerre,
tried to form a so-called literary circle. The Presiding Judge,
Monsieur Boirouge, who happened to have a house and garden on his
hands, part of the Popinot-Chandier property, favored the notion of