Am I an idiot, or nuts, or is this a language issue?

"Pretty book smart"? I guess that's a good example of damning with faint praise. You have more than met my expectations. But I plead guilty to all the failings you list; I've already explained why I was distracted and therefore careless. I've never spent anything close to that amount before on an impulse purchase myself. In fact, it's only recently that I first spent more than about $1,000 on any individual coin (the Vespasian aureus).

However, even in my initial post -- and in my email to the dealer -- I certainly indicated that I thought the dealer's description, even in French without translation, was misleading. Intentionally or otherwise. And that opinion never changed fundamentally: it was only strengthened by the several native speakers of French who posted in the thread, and agreed that the language the dealer used was ambiguous at the very least. The fact that the re-listing of the coin now omits any mention of what I interpreted as provenance indicates to me that the dealer himself recognizes that his original listing was potentially misleading. So I think there was fault on both sides, even if I could have mitigated the effect of the dealer's potentially misleading description by checking what I had interpreted as the provenance before buying, and/or by asking the dealer to clarify. I suppose I got it into my head that if I delayed, someone else would buy the coin. Not a very rational concern, I admit.

 

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A bit late to this thread, and I do not at all claim to read French smoothly, but my first eyeball interpretation was that the phrasing was to a comparison example, not the item itself. Translation tools are still not perfect. Many times I have to re-read listings that cite to examples from secondary catalogs to be sure I am interpreting correctly. A perfectly honest US based solo dealer frequently phrases comparable sales in an idiosyncratic way that is clear but non-standard if English is your first language, but I am sure ESL readers have difficulty. Certainly this headache for you speaks to the better practice for dealers to use the traditional listing styles, as boring as that can be.

 

Clearly not the same coin. I think get a refund just because of that.

 

Fortunately, I have already received the refund, in the form of a credit to my American Express account. I hope to be able to post soon on what I have purchased in the place of this coin!

In the end, the amount of my credit in dollars was only $26.00 less than the amount of the original charge, taking currency exchange fees into account. Not much to pay for my own carelessness!

 

A cheap lesson then!
Looking forward to see the replacement.

 

Vous etes correct vraiment. You should indeed take umbrage. Very nice coin but not the same.

 

When I was new to Roman coins, I missed “Subaerat” (towards the end, just before the provenance info) in a German listing I thought I could “read” well enough without bothering to translate. The image itself was a dead giveaway, but I didn’t know better at the time. Ended up with a rather expensive fouree.

 

I do tend to agree with Pmah,

A lesson for us all, "to error on the side of caution."