The baron was a bachelor, and he lived in first-rate style; that is to say, he had magnificent apartments, in which it was his delight to collect occasionally the united wit and learning of the capital, and a handsome table for his friends at all times; for his hospitality was unbounded. And yet his own daily habits were as simple and primitive as might be. When at home, he passed his hours in the library, and slept in the small bedroom adjoining it. The latter, like all dormitories in France, was without a carpet, and altogether no better furnished than a private ward in an English hospital. There was a small iron bedstead just large enough for a middle-sized bachelor in one corner--a washing apparatus in another--and a table and two chairs at some distance from both. The naked and even uncomfortable aspect of this apartment had an absolutely chilling effect upon me, as I passed through it on my way to the great man himself; for, strange to say, the only road to the library was through this melancholy chamber. Great men as well as small have their "whims and oddities." The baron was reported to have taken pains to make, what appeared to me, a very incommodious arrangement. A door which had conducted to the library upon the other side of it had been removed, and the aperture in which it had stood blocked up, whilst the wall on this side had been cut away in order to effect an entrance. And what was the reason assigned for so much unnecessary labour? The baron had risen from nothing--had spent his early days in poverty and even misery; and he wished to perpetuate the remembrance of his early struggles, lest he should grow proud in prosperity, and forgetful of his duties. The frequent sight of the few articles of furniture which had been his whole stock twenty years before, was likely more than any thing else to keep the past vividly before his eyes, and he placed them therefore, to use his own words as attributed to him by my informant, "between the flattery of the dazzling world without, and the silence of his chamber of study and meditation." They no doubt answered their object, in rendering the possessor at times low-spirited, since they were certainly likely to have that effect even upon a stranger. On the day of my introduction, however, I had little time for observation. My name had been announced, and I passed rapidly on to the _sanctum sanctorum_.