Americans -- England -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Millionaires -- Fiction
The suite consists of six chambers--the ante-room, the saloon or
audience chamber, the dining-room, the yellow drawing-room (where
Royalty receives its friends), the library, and the State bedroom--to
the last of which we have already been introduced. The most important
and most impressive of these is, of course, the audience chamber, an
apartment fifty feet long by forty feet broad, with a superb outlook
over the Thames, the Shot Tower, and the higher signals of the South-
Western Railway. The decoration of this room is mainly in the German
taste, since four out of every six of its Royal occupants are of
Teutonic blood; but its chief glory is its French ceiling, a masterpiece
by Fragonard, taken bodily from a certain famous palace on the Loire.
The walls are of panelled oak, with an eight-foot dado of Arras cloth
imitated from unique Continental examples. The carpet, woven in one
piece, is an antique specimen of the finest Turkish work, and it was
obtained, a bargain, by Felix Babylon, from an impecunious Roumanian
Prince. The silver candelabra, now fitted with electric light, came from
the Rhine, and each had a separate history. The Royal chair--it is not
etiquette to call it a throne, though it amounts to a throne--was looted
by Napoleon from an Austrian city, and bought by Felix Babylon at the
sale of a French collector. At each corner of the room stands a gigantic
grotesque vase of German faïence of the sixteenth century. These were
presented to Felix Babylon by William the First of Germany, upon the
conclusion of his first incognito visit to London in connection with the
French trouble of 1875.
There is only one picture in the audience chamber. It is a portrait of
the luckless but noble Dom Pedro, Emperor of the Brazils. Given to Felix
Babylon by Dom Pedro himself, it hangs there solitary and sublime as a
reminder to Kings and Princes that Empires may pass away and greatness
fall. A certain Prince who was occupying the suite during the Jubilee of
1887--when the Grand Babylon had seven persons of Royal blood under its
roof--sent a curt message to Felix that the portrait must be removed.
Felix respectfully declined to remove it, and the Prince left for
another hotel, where he was robbed of two thousand pounds’ worth of
jewellery. The Royal audience chamber of the Grand Babylon, if people
only knew it, is one of the sights of London, but it is never shown, and
if you ask the hotel servants about its wonders they will tell you only
foolish facts concerning it, as that the Turkey carpet costs fifty
pounds to clean, and that one of the great vases is cracked across the
pedestal, owing to the rough treatment accorded to it during a riotous
game of Blind Man’s Buff, played one night by four young Princesses, a
Balkan King, and his aides-de-camp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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