d-twenty feet
high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of
them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier
tables mingling with modern _bric-a-brac_. And things become abominable
when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there
you no longer find an article of furniture, no longer a hanging, nothing
but disaster, a series of magnificent deserted halls given over to rats
and spiders. The embassy occupies but one of them, where it heaps up its
dusty archives. Near by is a huge hall occupying the height of two
floors, and thus sixty feet in elevation. Reserved by the owner of the
palace, the ex-King of Naples, it has become a mere lumber-room where
_maquettes_, unfinished statues, and a very fine sarcophagus are stowed
away amidst all kinds of remnants. And this is but a part of the palace.
The ground floor is altogether uninhabited; the French "Ecole de Rome"
occupies a corner of the second floor; while the embassy huddles in
chilly fashion in the most habitable corner of the first floor, compelled
to abandon everything else and lock the doors to spare itself the useless
trouble of sweeping. No doubt it is grand to live in the Palazzo Farnese,
built by Pope Paul III and for more than a century inhabited by
cardinals; but how cruel the discomfort and how frightful the melancholy
of this huge ruin, three-fourths of whose rooms are dead, useless,
impossible, cut off from life. And the evenings, oh! the evenings, when
porch, court, stairs, and corridors are invaded by dense gloom, against
which a few smoky gas lamps struggle in vain, when a long, long journey
lies before one through the lugubrious desert of stone, before one
reaches the ambassador's warm and cheerful drawing-room!

* The French have two embassies at Rome: one at the Palazzo
Farnese, to the Italian Court, and the other at the Palazzo
Rospigliosi, to the Vatican.--Trans.

Pierre came away quite aghast. And, as he walked along, the many other
grand palaces which he had seen during his strolls rose before him, one
and all of them stripped of their splendour, shorn of their princely
establishments, let out in uncomfortable flats! What could be done with
those grandiose galleries and halls now that no fortune could defray the
cost of the pompous life for which they had been built, or even feed the
retinue needed to keep them up? Few indeed were the nobles who, like
Prince Aldobrandini