My Uncle Edmond’s room, for instance, gave me a directly contrary emotion, though here, too, all the furniture was old-fashioned. It gave me a sense of brisk, almost of stern, actuality; of present facts and occupations; of alert, busy manhood. As I followed Alexandre into it, in the morning, when he went to dust it and put it in order, I was filled with a kind of fearful admiration: the fear, the admiration, of the small for the big, of the weak for the strong, of the helpless for the commanding. The arrangement of the room, the lines of the room, the very colours of the room, seemed strong, and commanding, and severe. Yet, when you came to examine it, the only really severe-looking object was the bedstead; this being devoid of curtains, its four varnished pillars shone somewhat hard and bare. For the rest, there was just the natural furniture of a sleeping-room: a dressing-table, covered with a man’s toilet accessories—combs and brushes, razors, scissors, shoehorns, button-hooks, shirt-studs, and bottles enclosing I know not what necessary fluids; a bigger table, with writing-materials on it, with an old epaulette-box used now to hold tobacco, and endless pipes and little pink books of cigarette-papers; a bureau like my grandmother’s; a glazed bookcase; and the proper complement of chairs. The walls of the room were painted white, and ornamented by two pictures, facing each other: two steel-engravings, companion-pieces, after Rembrandt, I believe. “Le Philosophe en Contemplation” was the legend printed under one; and under the other, “Le Philosophe en Méditation.” I can only remember that the philosopher had a long grey beard, and that in both pictures he was seated in a huge easy-chair. My Uncle Edmond had been in the army when he was a young man, and in his closets (besides his ordinary clothes and his countless pairs of boots) there were old uniform coats, with silver buttons, old belts, clasps, spurs, and then, best of all, three or four swords, and a rosewood case or two of pistols. Needless to say whether my awe and my admiration mounted to their climax when I peeped in upon these historic trophies. And just as the smell of orange-flower water pervaded my grandmother’s room, so another, a very different smell, pervaded my Uncle Edmond’s, a dry, clean smell, slightly pungent, bitter, but not at all unpleasant. I could never discover what it came from, I can’t even now conjecture; but it seemed to me a manly smell, just the smell that a man’s room ought to have. In my too-fruitless efforts to imitate Uncle Edmond’s room in the organisation of my own, it was that smell, more than anything else, which baffled me. I could not achieve the remotest semblance of it. Of course, I was determined that when I grew up I should have a room exactly like my uncle’s in every particular, and I trusted, no doubt, that it would acquire the smell, with time.