besides with galleries of carved lead, with two lightning conductors and with four enormous symmetrical chimney stacks sculptured like all the rest, seemed to be the final flare up of this architectural firework. To the right was a vast conservatory, fixed to the side of the mansion, and communicating with the ground floor by means of a French window opening out of a little drawing-room. The garden, separated from the Parc Monceaux by a low iron railing hidden by a hedge, sloped rather sharply. Too small for the house, and so narrow that a lawn and a few clumps of evergreens occupied the entire space, it simply formed a kind of knoll, a verdant pedestal, on which the mansion was proudly planted decked out in its gayest attire. Seen from the park, towering above the bright grass and the shining foliage of the shrubs, this great building, looking still new and quite sickly, had the sallow complexion, the stupid and moneyed importance of some female upstart, with its heavy head-dress of slates, its gilded balustrades, and its flood of sculpture. It was a reproduction of the new Louvre on a smaller scale, one of the most characteristic specimens of the style of the Second Empire, that opulent bastard of every style. On summer evenings, when the last rays of the sun lit up the gilt of the balustrades against the white façade, the strollers in the park would stop to look at the red silk curtains hanging at the ground floor windows; and, through panes so large and clear that they seemed, like those of the great modern emporiums, placed there to display the interior wealth to the outer world, these families of modest citizens would catch glimpses of articles of furniture, of portions of hangings, and of corners of ceilings of dazzling splendour, the sight of which would root them to the spot with admiration and envy right in the centre of the pathways.