Catholic churches seem always to have had a great attraction for him, as well as the people moving in them, and in this an echo of his _rococo_ enthusiasm is still perceptible. The quaint, _rococo_ churches in the ornate style favoured by the Jesuits, which are still preserved intact in Munich and the Tyrol, were those for which he had a peculiar preference. He lost himself voluptuously in the thousand details of sculpture, framework, organs, balustrades, and carved pulpits, dimly outlined in the subdued light from stained-glass windows. In the gloom it was all transformed into a forest of ornaments, expanding their traceries like trees in a wood. Sick and infirm people, women in prayer burying their faces in their hands, and lame men with crutches, kneel or move amid the luxuriant efflorescence of stone and wood and gold, of angels' heads and shrines, garlands of flowers, consoles, and fonts of holy water. Twisted marble pillars, church banners, lamps and lustres mount in a confusion of capricious outlines at once tasteful and piquant to the vaulted dome, where the painted skies, blackened by the ascending mist of incense, seem waywardly fantastic. After the churches the salons appealed to him. There came his pictures of modern society: ladies and cavaliers of the Court upon ballroom balconies, the conversation of Privy Councillors in the salon, the marvellous ball supper, where a mass of beautiful shoulders, splendid uniforms, and rustling silken trains move amid mirrors, lustres, colonnades, and gilded frames. "The Ball Supper" of 1870 is a vivid picture, bathed in glistening light. The music has stopped. And from a door of the brilliantly lighted ballroom the company is streaming into the neighbouring apartment, where the supper-table has been laid, and groups of ladies and men in animated conversation are beginning to occupy the chairs and sofas. In 1879 there followed the famous "Levee": the Emperor Wilhelm in the red Court uniform of the _Gardes du Corps_ is talking with a lady, surrounded by a sea of heads, uniforms, and naked bowing shoulders. Though it was always necessary in earlier representations of the kind to have a _genre_ episode to compensate the insufficient artistic interest of the work, in Menzel's pictures the pictorial situation is grasped as a whole. They have the value of a book; they neither falsify nor beautify anything, and they will hand down to the future an encyclopædia of types of the nineteenth century.