have been in one or two apartments in nameless edifices since our return from Germany, and we are now in a small hotel in the Rue St. Dominique, where in some respects we are better lodged than ever, though compelled to occupy three floors.  Here the salon is near thirty feet in length, and seventeen high.  It is panelled in wood, and above all the doors, of which, real and false, there are six, are allegories painted on canvass, and enclosed in wrought gilded frames.  Four large mirrors are fixtures, and the windows are vast and descend to the floor.  The dining-room, which opens on a garden, is of the same size, but even loftier.  This hotel formerly had much interior gilding, but it has chiefly been painted over.  It was built by the physician of the Duc d’Orleans, who married Madame de Montesson, and from this fact you may form some idea of the style maintained by the nobles of the period; a physician, at that time, being but a very inferior personage in Europe.

[Footnote 16:  This ancient family still exists, though much shorn of its splendour, by the alienation of its estates, in consequence of the marriage of Charlotte de Montmorency, heiress of the eldest line, with a Prince of Conde, two centuries since.  By this union, the estates and chateaux of Chantilly, Ecouen, etc., ancient possessions of the house, passed into a junior branch of the royal family.  In this manner Enghien, a seigneurie of the Montmorencies, came to be the title of a prince of the blood, in the person of the unfortunate descendant of Charlotte of that name.  At the present time, besides the Duc de Montmorency, the Duc de Laval-Montmorency, the Duc de Luxembourg, the Prince de Bauffremont, the Prince de Tancarville, and one or two more, are members of this family, and most of them are, or were before the late revolution, peers of France.  The writer knew, at Paris, a Colonel de Montmorency, an Irishman by birth, who claimed to be the head of this celebrated family, as a descendant of a cadet who followed the Conqueror into England.  There are two Irish peers, who have also pretensions of the same sort, though the French branches of the family look coolly on the claim.  The title of “First Christian Baron,” is not derived from antiquity, ancient as the house unquestionably is, but from the circumstance that the barony of Montmorency, from its local position, in sight of Paris, aided by the great power of the family, rendered the barons the first in importance to their sovereign.  The family of Talleyrand-Perigord is so ancient, that, in the middle ages, when a King demanded of its head, “Who made you Count de Perigord?” he was asked, by way of reply, “Who made you King of France?”—­God!  I think I should have hesitated on the score of taste about establishing myself in a house of the Montmorencies, but Jonathan has usually no such scruples.  Our own residence was but temporary, the hotel being public.]