Renée shook hands with him as with a comrade. And rapidly, with an audacity full of a nervous raillery, she answered: "Ah! if I had not married your father, I really believe you would court me." This idea must have struck the young man as highly comical, for he had turned the corner of the Boulevard Malesherbes before he had done laughing. The carriage entered and drew up at the foot of the steps. These steps, which were broad and low, were sheltered by a vast glass verandah edged with a scallop imitating golden fringe and tassels. The two storeys of the mansion rose above the domestic offices, the square windows of which, glazed with ground glass, appeared almost on a level with the soil. At the top of the steps, the hall-door stood out flanked by slender columns fixed in the wall, forming thus a kind of fore-part pierced at each floor by a round bay, and ascending as high as the roof where it terminated in a point. On either side, each storey had five windows, placed at regular intervals along the façade, and surrounded by a simple stone border. The roof, with its attic windows, was square shaped, with broad sides almost perpendicular. But the façade on the garden side was far more sumptuous. A regal flight of steps led to a narrow terrace which extended the whole length of the ground floor; the balustrade of this terrace, in the style of the railings of the Parc Monceaux, was even more covered with gilt than the verandah and the lamps of the courtyard. Above this rose the mansion with a wing at either end, like two towers half inserted in the body of the building, and which contained rooms of circular shape. In the centre, another tower, even deeper inserted still, formed a slight curve. The windows, tall and narrow in the wings, wider apart and almost square on the flat portions of the façade, had stone balustrades on the ground floor, and gilded wrought-iron handrails at the upper storeys. It was a display, a profusion, a superabundance of riches. The mansion disappeared beneath the carvings. Around the windows, along the cornices, were scrolls of flowers and branches; there were balconies resembling masses of verdure supported by great nude women with strained hips and protruding breasts; then, here and there, were fantastical escutcheons, bunches of fruit, roses, every blossom it is possible to represent in stone or marble. As fast as one's glance ascended, the building seemed to bloom the more. Around the roof was a balustrade, bearing at equal distances urns on which burnt flames of stone. And there, between the oval windows of the attics, which opened amidst an incredible medley of fruits and foliage, expanded the crowning portions of this amazing ornamentation, the pediments of the two wings in the centre of which reappeared the great nude women, playing with apples and standing in every conceivable posture amongst sheaves of reeds. The roof, loaded with these ornaments, surmounted