Books › Old violins, 1905 › scan 194
Scan 194
Old violins, 1905
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 174. See the scan on archive.org.
1crop of common violins then being made in Germany, would have killed his market nearer home. Then he must have heard when a boy how Napoleon I. had ransacked the art treasures of Italy, and how, under the advice of the cultivated Marquis d'Avèze, who had narrowly enough escaped the guillotine in 1793, the great conqueror had inaugurated a high Art Exhibition for the people.
3The famous bronze-gilt horses from S. Marco, Venice, the Dying Gladiator, the Apollo Belvedere, the Cupid and Psyche from Rome, and Raffaello's Transfiguration itself, had been carried in triumphant procession through the streets of Paris, and installed in a vast hall for the benefit and instruction of the people. Of course a rage for everything Italian was the result, and the shrewd Tarisio may have thought, why not a rage for old Italian fiddles?
5One day in the year 1827 there arrived at the shop of M. Aldric, at that time a famous violin dealer in Paris, a travel-worn man in ragged clothes, who had begged and fiddled his way for days and weeks across country. He carried a huge dustman's sack over his shoulder. He seemed to M. Aldric a very poor sort of pedlar, grimy and unkempt enough to claim kinship with the man who had "used somebody's soap sixteen years ago, since when he had used no other."
7The fashionable violin dealer was at first inclined to show him the door, but probably something in Tarisio's independent manner betrayed that indefinable quality we call character, and, more in amusement or out of
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