THROWBACK SHOPS

If there is one saddening spectacle above all others, it is the one offered to us, renewed every day, by the auctioneers' salesroom.
It is there that all the wrecks of family or business disasters—with a few rare exceptions—come ashore, to fall under the auctioneer's hammer, into anonymous hands.
Some objects almost bring tears to your eyes, seeing them thus removed from the often centuries-old family privacy, to be displayed for the view of greedy or mocking visitors who speculate on the market value of the most sacred trinkets.
They represent almost nothing, but they are laden with memories. They are the age-old lares gods passed from hand to hand, surrounded by touching veneration.
And now, here they are in the general promiscuity of this sad bazaar that reeks of misery and exudes despair! How many tears are in these things! Old bridal crowns beneath outdated globes marking the date of loves forever extinguished; naive portraits of ancestors recalling the forebears whom the ashes of time have covered with the veil of oblivion; old tables where, in the evening, the family gathered! All these modest pieces of furniture that were the domestic companions of our early years and the fruit of savings laboriously amassed through daily work.
Oh! what sadness in all this display. Removed from their frames, sacred things no longer signifying anything, for what gave them value was the attachment we felt for them.
We saw, in the crowd of bidders, a weeping widow unable to remove, because of the price, the image of the one who had been her lifelong companion. Tears flowed silently from her eyes, bruised by pain and the years. An indifferent second-hand dealer removed it from a miscellaneous lot; We had estimated the price of the canvas, nothing more.
One wonders why some people buy piles of old photographs that can only be of value to people who knew the people portrayed. We see albums of these, even at flea markets! And they all sell!
Here is the armchair in which the hoary grandfather used to sit to spend the evening; how carefully this very modest armchair was cared for.
Now it will be part of the furniture of some hotel for the night. The shady, cosmopolitan itinerant underworld will take its place in this venerated piece of furniture that was called "grandfather's armchair."
All around the auction rooms, in every country, there is a perfectly organized gang of swindlers who enrich themselves on the misery of others. They have an elusive air that regulars know well. Aside from a few art sales of paintings or works of art by listed masters, which can sometimes fetch a profit at auction, the surplus is left to a veritable squandering. This is what has given rise to and led to the prosperity of "second-hand" dealers. The customers who go there pay a high price for what sellers, through their organization, have bought for a pittance.
These fellows are called: the black gang. They pass the business around with a touching camaraderie; "mine today, yours tomorrow!"

Certainly, there are some second-hand dealers who are very honest. They even provide a service to connoisseurs who don't have the leisure or the inclination to follow the auction house's bidding, but it's a matter of distinguishing them from the mass of others: that's the difficult part.
Nothing is more curious than these second-hand stores whose owners mainly buy their goods from the Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs. You can do good business there, without cheating anyone, of course. It's a matter of judgment and taste.
But what emerges from all this furniture and movable objects, as they say in legal language, is infinite sadness.
We have had and still hold in our hands old books whose flyleaves are covered with dedications, in Latin and French, depending on whether the precious work was passed down from generation to generation.
We see the handwriting of a young man, followed by the shaky letters of an old man. All lovers lost in unfathomable oblivion! We laboriously decipher the signatures of those who were, perhaps, powerful and adulated in their time.
As a great philosopher said: "We live on the ashes of our ancestors."
This is true for everything, especially for second-hand goods.
In short, we live on the dead. Our wisdom, our artistic and scientific knowledge come to us only from our predecessors. What makes man superior is that he benefits from the experience of generations who have lived before him.
Thrift stores present us with a kind of archive of things past. This is only possible in a highly civilized country like ours.

Praville.