conversation, he proposed showing me his chateau, &c., and conducting me through several apartments on the ground-floor, we arrived at his own bed-room in the extremity of the building. Nothing can be conceived more desolate and cheerless. Superb as to dimensions and form, these apartments were completely unfurnished, and in a most melancholy state of dilapidation. The painting soiled and faded, the elaborately-moulded ceilings and cornices coming down piecemeal and covering the floors with their fragments; these floors themselves rotten, and sinking in many places into holes. The shutters of the high and numerous windows, some closed entirely, others only half; others, again, with one leaf, perhaps, on the floor, and one hanging by a single hinge. Such was the appearance of these once lordly rooms. I shuddered as I traversed this scene of former splendour--of present degradation. The mind, always busy on these occasions, called up the beruffed slashed-sleeve cavalier of other days; the courtly dame, the stomacher resplendent with costly jewels, ebon locks falling in ringlets over her bare, well-turned shoulders and swelling bosom. How changed the scene! The lordly _châtelain_ has given place to the little curved Turkish figure before me; the brilliant assemblage of knights and dames to desolation and solitude. The dormitory of mine host, where at least some comfort might have been expected, was only of a piece with the rest. Coarse, scanty, and not very clean-looking bedding, lying in a confused heap upon a low bedstead of common deal, without curtains--in short, such a bed as one sometimes sees in an ostler’s room over the stables--a rickety deal table, and a couple of old chairs. None of the appurtenances of the toilet, nor any apparent means of stowing his wardrobe; bare walls, and nought else. One might have imagined it the abode of some poor devil whom charity had admitted to occupy a nook in the deserted mansion. The Marquis showed all with perfect _sang-froid_, unconscious that there was anything strange in a man of his princely fortune living like a pauper, and continued leading me from room to room, until we arrived at one smaller than the rest, and a little less dilapidated, which he announced as his study--a title to which a huge table, occupying the greater part of it, and covered with a heap of papers, pictures, and writing material, all intermingled in most glorious confusion, seemed to give some colour; and here were also two or three common chairs. From amongst the litter on the table, after a little hunting, he rummaged out a small miniature of a female, which he thrust into my hand with an air of exultation, as much as to say, “There!--what think you of that?” and evidently supposing me as intimate with its features as himself, and as evidently mortified at my asking who the original might be, whilst, with rather a haughty air, he informed me that it was the portrait