"His death troubled me the more since he had been unable to give me any more exact information about Mademoiselle Laurence. Where should I now find her again? I was not in love with her, nor did I feel my former inclination towards her; yet a mysterious desire spurred me to seek her everywhere. When I entered a drawing-room and examined the company, and could not find the well-known face, I soon lost all repose and was driven away. Reflecting over this feeling, I stood one day at a remote entrance to the Great Opera, waiting for a carriage, and waiting with considerable annoyance, for it was raining very fast. But no carriage came, or, rather, only carriages which belonged to other people, who placed themselves comfortably inside, and the place around me became gradually solitary. "Then you must come with me," said at last a lady, who, concealed in her black mantilla, had stood for a little time near me, and was now on the point of getting into a carriage. The voice sent a quiver through my heart, the well-known side-glance again exercised its charm, and I was again as in a dream on finding myself beside Mademoiselle Laurence in a cosy warm carriage. We did not speak, indeed we could not have understood each other, as the carriage rattled noisily through the streets of Paris for a long time, till it stopped at last before a great gateway. "Servants in gorgeous livery lighted us up the steps and through a succession of rooms. A lady's-maid met us with sleepy face, and stammering many excuses, said that there was only a fire in the red room. Motioning to the woman to go away, Laurence said, with a laugh, 'Chance is leading you a long way to-night; there is only a fire in my bed-room.' "In this bed-room, in which we soon found ourselves alone, blazed a large open fire, which was the pleasanter since the room was of immense size and height. This large sleeping-room, which rather deserved the name of a sleeping-hall, had a similarly desolate appearance. Furniture and decoration, all bore the impress of a time whose brilliance seems to us now so bedimmed, its sublimity so _jejune_, that its remains raise a certain dislike within us, if not indeed a smile. I speak of the time of the Empire, of the time of the golden eagle, of high-flying plumes, of Greek coiffures, of glory, of great drum-majors, of military masses, of official immortality (conferred by the _Moniteur_), of continental coffee prepared from chickory, of bad sugar manufactured from beet root, and of princes and dukes made from nothing at all. But it had its charm, though, that time of pathetic materialism. Talma declaimed, Gros painted, Bigottini danced, Grassini sang, Maury preached, Rovigo had the police, the Emperor read Ossian, Pauline Borghese let herself be moulded as Venus, and quite naked too,[13] for the room was well warmed, like the bed-room in which I found myself with Mademoiselle Laurence.