Cousin Pons by Honoré de Balzac

He was even more desperate as a collector and fancier of ez’ee/ofs than he was as a speculator; and while the one mania was nearly as responsible for his pecuniary troubles and his need to overwork himself as the other, it certainly gave him more constant and more comparatively harmless satisfactions. His connoisseurship has, of course, been questioned one connoisseur would be nothing if he did not question the competence of another, if not of all others. It seems certain that Balzac frequently bought things for what they were not and probable that his own acquisitions went, in his own eyes, through that succession of stages which Charles Lamb described inimitably.