Many people say that for a male person,
bric-a-brac hunting is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes, or decorating Japanese pots with decalcomanie butterflies would be, and these people fling mud at the elegant Englishman, Byng, who wrote a book called THE
BRIC-A-BRAC HUNTER, and make fun of him for chasing around after what they choose to call "his despicable trifles"; and for "gushing" over these trifles; and for exhibiting his "deep infantile delight" in what they call his "tuppenny collection of beggarly trivialities"; and for beginning his book with a picture of himself seated, in a "sappy, self-complacent attitude, in the midst of his poor little ridiculous
bric-a-brac junk shop."
She was carrying an enormous parcel that might have been a bird-cage wrapped in brown paper, and she took it into a
bric-a-brac shop and came out without it.
Among the
bric-a-brac of my heart I still cherish some of those little slips of paper with which we made international love--question and answer.
"For the king, whose name is Roquat of the Rocks, owns a splendid palace underneath the great mountain which is at the north end of this kingdom, and he has transformed the queen and her children into ornaments and
bric-a-brac with which to decorate his rooms."
There was no enviable
bric-a-brac, with its provoking legend of cheapness, in the room in which I had seen her.
"Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and
bric-a-brac, but likable."
I said I had been having a general jail-delivery at Camelot and among neighboring castles, and with her permission I would like to examine her collection, her
bric-a-brac -- that is to say, her prison- ers.
It is like a
bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
The wide rooms seemed too narrow for his rolling gait, and to himself he was in terror lest his broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or sweep the
bric-a-brac from the low mantel.
But its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero's gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky, contracted, and crowded with curious
bric-a-brac. Bellegarde, penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts.
* In those days it was still the custom to fill the living rooms with
bric-a-brac. They had not discovered simplicity of living.
Clothes, books and toys,
bric-a-brac plus raffle and cake stall.
