A little pensive over lost glories, over periwig and falbala, over lovelock and Flanders point, there stood in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, in the once fashionable quarter of the Marais, the beautiful little Hôtel de la Séguinière, which a peer of France had built in the days of Louis XIII., a chancellor had inhabited under the Roi Soleil, and a favourite under Louis XV., and which, finally, a self-made banker had bought in 1780. All nymphs and garlands within, pilasters and garlands without, it was a house fit for a prince or a royal mistress, a house that smiled and sang, and into this house, in the year named above, the excellent Monsieur Gaumont, well known in the Rue Vivienne, had brought his equally excellent English wife. And the Hôtel de la Séguinière, so incongruous, had not affected either the simplicity of his manners or the goodness of his heart. He had not tried to live up to it; neither had he brought down its airy characteristics to his own bourgeois level. In these abstentions his sensible wife had aided him. Madame Gaumont, when she first entered this dwelling, though a bride, was already mature, and her husband was over fifty. If the good man sometimes found the decorations of his house a little trying, at least he never repented of his selection of a helpmate. During the ten years of his occupancy of the Hôtel, he sang the praises of the nation which had provided him with so good a wife, and at the end of that time he passed quietly out of the troubles of this world (exactly at the epoch when Mirabeau was proposing the creation of more assignats in order to meet the second financial crisis of 1790). M. Gaumont departed consoled with the knowledge that if any woman was able to take care of herself, under any circumstances, that woman was his wife. Nevertheless he had strongly urged her to return, as soon as might be, to her native land.