Treasure Hunting

An Amateur Collector of Trophies Describes His Adventures in the Markets of the World

PAUL MORAND

GRANTED that all is vanity. But though the vanity fair, the foire aux vanites, yields the largest profits, we can insist that there are other markets which have just as curious a patronage. In France they go by such names as "ham," "scrap iron," and even "flea" markets, and at times are so paltry that they might better be termed "humility fairs." To buy at second hand! What a pleasure for those hesitant and poetic natures who will always prefer to a new thing an object having the patina of time! And to buy at third, fourth, or a hundredth hand! Here is luxury indeed, if one loves to speculate as to those who preceded him in the possession of the coveted object. An instruction and a renunciation more eloquent than Ecclesiastes! And will we not learn to enjoy things all the more in feeling that they are only temporarily ours and that we in turn must pass them along to others?

Chinese collectors do not appreciate a curio unless it has its pedigree; it must be accompanied by a hoary list of purchasers dating from the time of its birth.—How right they are; for on becoming the possessor of some antique, we buy whole centuries of history. And American collectors are with justice obeying a similar feeling when they pay a higher price for an object which can give some written proof of its nobility and show good evidence that it has passed through famous collections and sales in the course of its adventurous existence.

BUT we are not concerned here with expensive curios—praise heaven, no! I propose to guide my delicate, discerning, and diffident readers through those public markets which have been held for centuries in the large centres of Europe, and to which by the strangest and most devious routes are brought the products of misery and of theft,—and also of hazard, miraculous hazard, the father of Fortune.—Periodically these markets are submerged beneath waves coming from one knows not what depths; and shortly thereafter they are again emptied. Their commodities are supplied by the contingencies of taxation and of business failure, by changes in custom, by revolutions, suicides, and natural death.

I first do homage to the best of them all, the Caledonian Market in London, the least Britannic spot in the world. It is held on the site of an old stock yard. One sees few Englishmen selling here; but it is crowded with those peddlers of Central Europe who convert this north quarter of London into a little New York. And what bargains! There never were bargains in New York and there have ceased to be bargains in Paris; but in London the expert "curio-hunter" still finds his reward!—England is a maritime nation which has never been gravely troubled by invasions or revolutions. For four centuries, from the humble sailor of Sir Walter Raleigh who returned with strange negro or Oceanian gods, to the opulent lord who during the revolution in 1789 bought furniture from the royal palaces and cathedrals of France, her children have been travelling throughout the world, collecting and bringing home objects of every description. Thus there is no accumulation elsewhere like that of the British Isles, unless perhaps in Holland, another nation of shipowners and foreign merchants.

On Fridays at the stroke of noon you will see the Caledonian Market at its height. The place is divided off into squares, with a countless number of mediocre businesses all of which are more or less disreputable. Here is the silverware section, where certain articles lifted from the clubs the night before, and butter knives and dessert spoons purloined from the big hotels and carried off surreptitiously in the linings of coats, are offered at disconcertingly low prices. Here is the department for photographic apparatus, for old tires, for field glasses sold by demobilised officers, since modern things also grow old. Here, under a shed, is the women's ware: the hand-me-downs of coloratura sopranos ruined at gambling; old furs; the wardrobes of criminals; the fetiches, the stuffed dogs, the trophies of the tropical hunt. Gramophones in the open air are singing ardently of Italy to a constant procession of idlers, women dealers from the East End, fashionable adolescents from Chelsea with Oscar Wilde manners and bow ties of black satin, young women from Mayfair, each eager to furnish her "bijou residence" with Early Victorian, and respectable old ladies from Beecham Place and Bloomsbury who clutter up their rooms with glass paper weights, coloured globes, and hair pictures.

OF course "Paris is divine," dear Anita; but Paris is a nude divinity, and one too strongly lighted by the glare of the south which does not permit its adorers enough shadow and mystery. ... A subway line deposited me outside of Paris one evening, at the old-iron market, the foire a la ferraille, which is held on the edge of Clignancourt during Holy Week. The "ham" or "gammon" market is next. We sample the various preparations of pork, buy old pictures, ferret out some arm-chair which could not get as far as the market-house and has at least one antique leg. As to modern pictures, they are sold in the open at Montmartre at the foire aux croutes, the "daub market." It abounds in false Rousseaus and apochryphal Monticellis, in those romantic landscapes of Swiss origin with a real clock in a painted steeple which the saleswoman does not scruple to call "primitives." I must admit that these Parisian markets are no longer worth much. The Englishman, alternately extravagant and needy, parts with everything that he does not consider absolutely necessary. The Frenchman never relinquishes anything. He uses his belongings until they are threadbare, and puts by in the sepulchre of his great rustic closets all that he does not need. He absorbs everything and gives back nothing.

This explains why French markets are so disappointing. One could apply to them the African dialogue between the young hyena and its mother. The young hyena found a bone and went to show it to the mother hyena. The latter said: "Has your father seen it?"— "Yes."—Then the mother hyena replied, "If your father has seen it you may as well throw it away. There is nothing left after that."

Was it with you, Clarissa, that we visited the Orient-like bazaar of Naples on that steep street where, in front of all the houses, they make those flying angels, camels, negro kings, and shepherds for old cribs? How you loved to soil your gloves with the rust of the old iron displayed on the sidewalks! You almost wept with helpless rage before an enormous lamp stand which we could not possibly have removed (it would have encumbered the transept of a cathedral). An old hag had offered it to you for three hundred lire; and when, on your insistence, she finally came down to fifty, you refused—to an accompaniment of hisses which pursued us all the way to the boat. But your day was not in vain, for you had plundered from the peddlars all those puppets with names so complicated that I had to copy them down in my notebook, true figurines of the Commedia dell' Arte which my readers will be able to find at the rag market of the Porta Nolana, on Mondays and Fridays.

FROM Naples you took me to the Piazza Navona in Rome, where German hardware hangs among handsome fountains. How many times, to humour you, I bent under the burden of altar cloths, mixing bowls, wooden saints, bodices of phantom courtesans, and caramelled fruits! And what an excellent fair used to be held before the war in front of the Palazzo Farnese. Up until ten years ago, one could still find chasubles here and those velvet costumes of the eighteenth century which are so well made that we simply must buy them, whereupon we bury'them in drawers and never lay eyes on them again!—Around 1917 the fugitives from Caporetto who had hidden in the woods of the Roman countryside, sold their guns here quite rapidly.

I have a special weakness for the grand bazaar of Constantinople; all the excursions, voyages, or cruises which I have made in the Orient in the company of women have invariably ended there. Shut within a closed world, a veritable forbidden city for anyone who does not understand the technique and the thrills of buying, I have wandered up and down this market where, naturally, no Turks sell, but only Greeks, Jews and Armenians. Tokatlian's shop is nearby, in the odour of the wool of lamb on skewers, in the smoke of frying, in the fragrance of sour yogurt and of anise—all of which is greatly invigorating. We penetrate beneath the vaults of this city of cells, its walls corroded by dampness, which dates from the time of Byzantium and has served as a model for all the souks of the Orient, such as Fez, Tunis, and Brusa which in comparison seem like little country fairs. Here is the avenue of tapestries, where there is nothing left now but a poor grade of carpets, for all the best rugs have fled to London and to Paris, the Greek merchants having taken fright under the threat of Angora. In the department of clocks, we can still find examples of the charming art of the Turkish eighteenth century, with incrustations of gold and turquoises. There are Oriental saddleries with gold and silver braids, and Arabian harnesses such as I have never seen elsewhere except at the Velador or Thieves' Market of Mexico, brought from the Orient to America with the Spaniards as intermediary. But most important of all: here is the den of armours, the cave of the Forty Thieves. It is in the old stables of Justinian. A pale light falls from a round dormer window at the top of the cupola and illumines millions of terrible sabers, veritable out cries of steel, battered muskets, Sarazen casques of mail, . Moorish yataghans, and scimiters. There are even culverins and old wooden cannon encircled with iron. In long glass cases, guarded by a squatting Janizary, repose the shears, these damascened Turkish shears curved like an ibis' beak with very little holes for the fingers, and insidious dirks with handles of ivory or mother of pearl. I once got from here a poniard which has never left me and which carries this charmingly romantic device. "Poisoned Poniard: 1830"—The whole military epic of the Turks, from the high plateaux of Asia to the walls of Vienna, has ebbed and come to die here—and when I leave the bazaar and return to the Hotel Pera Palace, I am always armed to the teeth.

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Even more oriental than the bazaar of Stamboul, is the great Russian fair of Nijni Novgorod. It is, with Leipzig, the last of the great periodic commercial deposits such as existed during the middle ages in all of Europe from Troyes in Champagne as far north as the cities of the Hansa. In the spring, the fur fair invades the suburbs of Nijni Novgorod. It makes itself known at a distance, across the plains, by an odour of fat and grease. Siberian foxes are sold here, tied by the snouts in bundles of twelve. Mountains of grey, white and black astrakhan, roughly finished, and looking as though it had been combed with the silica of primitive man, encumber the state booths, huts of birch with the sign of the Sickle and Hammer on the door. The Soviet monopolies have estranged nearly all the big merchants of Europe and America, but Novgorod still retains curious specimens of those non-Slav traders who have procured from the Soviets the temporary authorization to conduct private businesses: notably Persians with their black magician's caps Buriats in caftans of red damask, Jews from Samarkand with eyes like precious stones, and even Mongols shod in yellow felt.

But there would be no end if I had to describe all the markets and fairs in the world to which a perverse love of bargains has attracted me. I ought not omit either the Street of Paintings in Pekin, or the shops of New Orleans with their wares after the fashion of Louis-Philippe, or the Rastro.—Yes, before closing—one last word as to this marvellous Rastro of old Madrid which is built along sloping streets with pointed paving blocks, while beyond one can see the beige and rose Castile. Las Americas is the name of this exotic quarter, America being the magic word, the symbol of fabulous riches for poor Europeans of both yesterday and today. And yet these are but sordid shanties and alleyways, a mere passage between two sidewalks, where the "stub merchants" sell over again—either by the piece or chopped into bits—all the butts of Havana cigars which have been chewed and thrown to the ground by the caballeros in the wealthy sections of the city. At the rear of the stalls, gleam those rose or blue trunks of zinc such as are used by emigrants, or glass imprinted with old palaces in ruins, or gilded altars with their madonnas draped in lace filched from the convents, or those Andalusian rugs called albujaras, which are still woven according to the Arab formulas.

But these random wanderings are not without their drawbacks. At the end of several years, all these objects which I brought home one by one have accumulated to the point where I should be left with no other expedient but to go and live at a hotel, had I not finally decided to have a sale. Hesitant, but with relief, I see this flotsam of the great shipwrecks of time and space departing for new horizons. I have kept some still with me, in the quiet harbour of my home. Now let them start out alone upon the troubled waters of adventure which they had left; let them return to those markets from which they came.