de Balzac is better at figures
than Rothschild!"
In 1846, during a new trip to Italy with Mme. Hanska, her daughter Anna
and the latter's husband, Count Georges Mniszech, he ransacked all
Naples, Rome and Genoa, and no longer confined his attention to
furniture and bric-a-brac, but had his eye open for paintings as well,
because his latest ambition was to found a gallery. This taste for
paintings came to him rather late in life, for his artistic
appreciation had long been limited to the works of Girodet, a taste
which called forth many a sarcasm from the far better informed
Theophile Gautier. In Rome Balzac purchased a Sebastiano del Piombo, a
Bronzino and a Mierevelt, he hunted up some Hobbemas and Holbeins, he
secured a Natoire and a Breughel,--which he decided to sell, as it
proved not to be genuine,--for he wanted "pictures of the first rank or
none at all"; furthermore, he brought back to Paris a Judgment of
Paris, attributed to Giorgione, a Greuze,--a sketch of his wife,--a Van
Dyck, a Paul Brill, The Sorceresses, a sketch of the birth of Louis XIV
representing the Adoration of the Shepherds, an Aurora by Guido, a Rape
of Europa, by Annibale Carrachio or Domenichino,--and there we have the
beginning of his gallery such as he described it in Cousin Pons.
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