Going! Going! Gone!

PAUL MORAND

In which a persevering addict of the auction rooms makes a note of auctioneering methods

■ I entered the auction room that evening, just as the sale was over. The

shouts, the milling, the fevered intensity of the bidders were followed by dead silence. They were turning out the lights. The smell of bodies, of dust, of death, of suicide, was in the air. It was like the sack of a city, a funeral pyre, a deluge. Pieces of furniture were piled up, disembowelled sofas, broken bedsteads, wardrobes with shattered mirrors. Furniture is to be pitied. Men rest, men die, but pieces of furniture, beautiful or ugly though they be, are condemned to eternal servitude; they pass from one hand to another, see bankruptcies, failures, murders, love affairs; and they themselves, silent servants, faithful and devoted, retain in their wooden souls, their iron hearts, all these blows, and endure the memory of them in silence.

That is why there are, in these auction rooms, the sadness of a cemetery and the poetry of chance, which are the masters of our lives. The melancholy of a dispersed collection which belonged to a great actress, yesterday blazoned on all the billboards, today just a little, ruined old woman, or to a banker killed the week before in an automobile accident, is a thing eternally simple and profound under a ridiculous and sentimental aspect.

Whoever has not seen the furniture amid which he was brought up held for a moment over the heads of a crowd, to disappear a second later in the common abyss of oblivion, that furniture every bit of which is intimately known to him, every beauty, every broken piece, is ignorant of one of the most poignant of human emotions. A lamp held up in the auctioneer's hand, or a soup tureen, makes you want to cry out: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio!"

■ London is the European city in which auction sales are most amusing. Christie's is not the only place. The auction rooms are innumerable, for the profession is open to all; they specialize in the objects they sell and the class of society to which they cater. Christie's, to be sure, is like Solomon's temple, but how many fascinating places there are as well!

There are the Pall Mall rooms for sporting prints; Willis' for paintings, Puttick, in Leicester Square for books, textiles and miniatures; Knight, Fr'.nk and Rutley, in Hanover Square, and Sotheby's, in Bond street, for Greek and Egyptian antiques, books concerning art and autographs, the great European market for which is London; Glendenning's for objects from the Far East; Stevens' for scientific apparatus; Hurcombe's for silverware, and many others.

■ The Continent, ravaged by war, by bankruptcy, by revolutions, has seen its houses gutted many times of their contents, that England, conservative and unchanging, may swallow up again the objects its travellers and seamen have brought back from all over the world. A river filled with treasures and refuse passes each day through these auction rooms, but it is the muddy waters that are the joy of the real anglers. He who has time and the deep knowledge of a specialist may make a fortune in the auction rooms of London.

Holland was visited frequently in the Seventeenth century, Italy in the Sixteenth, by rich Englishmen who brought back marvelous things. It is well known that during the French Revolution English antique dealers travelled all over France to collect the loot pillaged from the chôteaux; many Englishmen, interned in France by Napoleon, and forced to live there for twelve or thirteen years, gathered remarkable collections. Who can guess all that English sailors, soldiers and missionaries collected in romantic Greece, in the East, even in the Pacific? Except for rugs and carpets, which are a monopoly of an Armenian group, it is safe to say that the English auctions are the most varied, the oddest, and the most profitable to buyers.

Parisian auctions are much more brilliant and fashionable than those in London. In London the great buyers are seldom present; they have agents; while in Paris they attend the sales themselves. Paris is the great furniture mart, especially when it comes to eighteenth century furniture, which has a changeable aspect—and a variable value, as well. A crowd of enthusiastic amateurs lets no chance slip away, and if the sales are more dramatic, they are, nevertheless, dominated by the dealers. Vanity has a free rein, and the prices, especially during the season, at the Galeries Georges Petit, reflect this fact.

As for ordinary sales, they take place every day in the Rue Drouot, the street of connoisseurs, in the Hotel des Ventes. Magnifying glass fixed in one eye, the diamond dealers try to discover flaws in a stone; to know how to read a monogram, a signature, is an art; lovers of faience make plates ring, lest they be cracked; specialists in silverware seek the hall mark. They are all like that Cousin Pons, of whom Balzac has left us an immortal portrait.

■ But, in fact, it is only the dealers who can see the truth, for, having given some one a tip, they come at hours when the general public is not admitted. It is a dreadful public! Painted old women who used to know famous actresses, commissionnaires, Poles, Armenian shop keepers, Levantine agents, all the dregs of foreign Paris are there.

■ The public for books is quite different from that which is interested in rugs; as for the sales of negroid art or modernistic paintings, which are of great importance in Paris, they bring a strange crowd from Montparnasse, made up not only of dealers, but of painters, who, anxious to become the rage, come to "bull their market", and try, by buying back their own works, to raise their prices, since the figures of the sales are not always representative of a fever of bidding or due to pride, but are sometimes due to speculation. These "victory" prices, which are absolutely artificial, seldom have any relation to reality.

The other chief European auction rooms are in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Austria has a tendency to sell its collections as a whole, preferably in Switzerland. Italy holds the old fashion of selling on the spot; when an Italian castle is not sold bodily to New York, it is sold as it stands, from cellar to attic. I have seen rhose strange sales, with dealers coming suddenly by every train, by the impossible roads of the Roman Campagna, at which one may buy a casserole, a Veronese or a standing forest!

To Berlin come the Imperial and princely furnishings which the Moscow Soviets scattered in their anger, and according to their need of money for propaganda purposes. Berlin specializes also in modern paintings, especially French, for Central Europe and the Scandinavian countries. In Amsterdam the house of Memsing has what practically amounts to a monopoly; Brussels is noted for its sales of paintings, of Flemish furniture, Gothic and Primitive art.

I am not as familiar with auctions in New York as with those in Europe, except for the publicity that attends them, the splendour of their catalogues, their soaring prices. Buyers seem to demand authenticity much more than a bargain, much more than the chance of making a good purchase at a low price. Hence the need of collecting a swarm of experts whose opinion creates a favourable atmosphere for the work to be sold.

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In almost every country in the world the calling of the auctioneer, the appraiser, is free to all; in many, as in England, sales are not taxed at all, at least so far as the seller's profit goes. In France the tax is heavy— 19½%. Moreover, the appraisers, in this country of public monopolies, are public officers, who buy their positions and often at a very high price. Christie's is a private concern; the Hotel of the Rue Drouot is conducted by the government. There are appraisers of all sorts; some are little sharks, who share profits with the dealers; others are men of the world, very worthy fellows, who do not concern themselves except when millions are involved, and whose offices are like banking rooms.

What an art it is to know when to let the fatal little ivory hammer fall! What shadings are possible, too, in the editing of the catalogues! You may think you are buying a genuine eighteenth century piece because, in the catalogue, it is listed as being of "the Louis XV style". Costly mistake! If you want to buy something, see to it that it is well and fully described in the catalogue; if possible, and preferably, that it is signed, and that its period is fixed.

But none of these guarantees is worth as much as a dealer's bill of sale, suits against auctioneers being very difficult to bring and very doubtful in outcome, and the experts being generally united in testifying against the luckless buyer.

How many other opportunities for sharp practices present themselves to the auctioneer! How many snares he sets for the buyers! Valuable objects are concealed in worthless lots; bidders are tricked; pieces are exchanged at the moment of the sale or immediately afterward, and the buyer gets something quite other than what he thought he was buying; lots are incomplete.

The commonest and best known ruse is "revision". The way that is worked is that the dealers buy at a low price, without competition among themselves, and then proceed, behind closed doors, to hold a new and final, and quite friendly sale among their number, the difference between the two sets of prices being divided, by way of profit, among the members of the "black gang". Although it is forbidden by the law, it is impossible to prevent this practice of revision.

In theory, the salesrooms are open to all; in practice the dealers keep them to themselves. To disgust the non-professional buyer they make him pay for his audacity, so that whatever he buys costs him more than if it were new, and always more than he would have to pay a dealer for the same thing. It is ingenious and irresistible trickery, thestrength of organization, the triumph of a group over the individual.

It seems to me that out of this material one could construot the most dramatic of moving pictures; a film whose heroine would be an early Victorian table or whose star might he a Fourteenth Century Madonna. The auction room is the modern slave market. One, two, three—going, going—gone!