There is still another salon, but it is not remarkable in any way. In the four corners, four bracket pedestals support four busts: those of the Duc de Berry, of Charles X., and other members of the royal family. The Vendramin-Calergi has gained an additional interest in recent years on account of the fact that Richard Wagner died in it on Feb. 13, 1883.--E. S. [Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF THE OLD SERAGLIO, TURKEY.] A VISIT TO THE OLD SERAGLIO, CONSTANTINOPLE PIERRE LOTI The rising sun gilds the mosque, gilds it under the fresh plane-trees; in the air there is a white mist which is like the original veil of day. The little Turkish _cafés_ begin to open, and two or three _minims_ are already being shaved in the open air under the trees. It is evidently very early, and I have time to stop here before returning to Pera. I sit down under the trellis ordering coffee with those warm little _bonbons_ that they sell here in the morning, and I think this better than the most delicate breakfast. About two hours afterwards, about eight o’clock, a carriage takes me back to Stamboul in the company of an aide-de-camp of His Majesty; and in a solemn and desert-like quarter, where the grass pushes up between the stones of the pavement, our coachman stops before a forbidding enclosure like that of a Mediæval fortress. These walls shut in a little corner of earth which is absolutely special and unique, and which is the extreme point of Oriental Europe,--a promontory that juts out towards neighbouring Asia, and which was, moreover, for many centuries, the residence of the Caliphs and a place of incomparable splendour. This, and the sacred suburb of Eyoub contain all that is most exquisite in Constantinople: this is the “Old Seraglio,”--a name that alone evokes a world of dreams. They open for us a door in this wall, and, then, as soon as the barrier is passed, the delicious melancholy of interior things is revealed to us, and the dead Past takes us to itself and envelops us with its winding-sheet. At first, there is silence and shadow. Empty, desolate courts, where the neglected grass pushes through the flag-stones and where still live ancient trees that were contemporaries of the magnificent sultans of former times: black cypresses as tall as towers, plane-trees which have acquired unwonted forms, all hollowed out by time, being supported only by immense shreds of bark and bent like old men. Then come the galleries with colonnades in the ancient Turkish style, painted with strange frescoes, under which the great Solomon forced the ambassadors of the European kings to enter. And this place, happily never open to profane visitors, has not yet become a common promenade for tourists; behind the high walls, it preserves a little mysterious peace, it is all imprinted with the sadness of dead splendour.