I thought I would go early to have some talk with Louise, but the circle was already completed when I arrived; everybody had come first.

The guests were assembled in a large, gloomy room, gloriously called a drawing-room, where the servant never enters without first taking off her shoes at the door, like a Turk in a mosque, and which is only opened on the most solemn occasions.  As it is doubtful whether you have ever set foot in a like establishment, I will give you, in imitation of the most profound of our novel-writers (which one? you will say; they are all profound now-a-days), a detailed description of Madame Taverneau’s salon.

Two windows, hung in red calico, held up by some black ornaments, a complication of sticks, pegs and all sorts of implements on stamped copper, gave light to this sanctuary, which commanded through them an animated look-out—­in the language of the commonalty—­upon the scorching, noisy highway, bordered by sickly elms sprinkled with dust, from the constant passage of vehicles which shake the house to its centre; wagons loaded with noisy iron, and droves of hogs, squeaking under the drover’s whip.

The floor was painted red and polished painfully bright, reminding one of a wine-merchant’s sign freshly varnished; the walls were concealed under frightful velvet paper which so religiously catches the fluff and dust.  The mahogany furniture stood round the room, a reproach against the discovery of America, covered with sanguinary cloth stamped in black with subjects taken from Fontaine’s fables.  When I say subjects I basely flatter the sumptuous taste of Madame Taverneau; it was the same subject indefinitely repeated—­the Fox and the Stork.  How luxurious it was to sit upon a stork’s beak!  In front of each chair was spread a piece of carpet, to protect the splendor of the floor, so that the guests when seated bore a vague resemblance to the bottles and decanters set round the plated centrepiece of a banquet given to a deputy by his grateful constituents.

An atrocious troubadour clock ornamented the mantel-piece representing the templar Bois-Guilbert bearing off a gilded Rebecca upon a silver horse.  On either side of this frightful time-piece were placed two plated lamps under globes.

This magnificence filled with secret envy more than one housekeeper of Pont de l’Arche, and even the maid trembled as she dusted.  We will not speak of the spun-glass poodles, little sugar St. Johns, chocolate Napoleons, a cabinet filled with common china, occupying a conspicuous place, engravings representing the Adieux to Fontainebleau, Souvenirs and Regrets, The Fisherman’s Family, The Little Poachers, and other hackneyed subjects.  Can you imagine anything like it?  For my part, I never could understand this love for the common-place and the hideous.  I know that every one does not dwell in Alhambras, Louvres, or Parthenons, but it is so easy to do without a clock to leave the walls bare, to exist without Manrin’s lithographs or Jazet’s aquatints!