“Grandma was always out rustling . . . looking for white elephants at the auction rooms . . . she brought back everything, oil paintings, amethysts, whole forests of candelabras, cascades of embroidered tulle, cabochons, pyxes, stuffed animals, armor, parasols, gilded monstrosities from Japan, alabaster bowls and worse, gimcracks without a name, and objects nobody ever heard of. . . .
    At the Passage she helped us as long as she could with what junk she still had left from her stock. We only lighted one window, that was as much as we could fill . . . It was a discouraging lot of bric-a-brac, decrepit with age, gray elephants, crap; if that was all we had to sell, we were sunk.”

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, Translated by Ralph Manheim, 1966.