border, those execrable
engravings, and the calico curtains with red fringes, in a dining-room,
where the friends of Petitot once feasted! Do you notice the effect
produced in the salon by those portraits of Monsieur and Madame and
Mademoiselle Thuillier by Pierre Grassou, the artist par excellence
of the modern bourgeoisie. Have you remarked the card-tables and the
consoles of the Empire, the tea-table supported by a lyre, and that
species of sofa, of gnarled mahogany, covered in painted velvet of a
chocolate tone? On the chimney-piece, with the clock (representing the
Bellona of the Empire), are candelabra with fluted columns. Curtains of
woollen damask, with under-curtains of embroidered muslin held back by
stamped brass holders, drape the windows. On the floor a cheap carpet.
The handsome vestibule has wooden benches, covered with velvet, and the
panelled walls with their fine carvings are mostly hidden by wardrobes,
brought there from time to time from the bedrooms occupied by the
Thuilliers. Fear, that hideous divinity, has caused the family to add
sheet-iron doors on the garden side and on the courtyard side, which are
folded back against the walls in the daytime, and are closed at night.

It is easy to explain the deplorable profanation practised on this
monument of the private life of the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth
century, by the private life of the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth. At
the beginning of the Consulate, let us say, some master-mason having
bought the ancient building, took the idea of turning to account the
ground which lay between it and the street. He probably pulled down
the fine porte-cochere or entrance gate, flanked by little lodges which
guarded the charming "sejour" (to use a word of the olden time), and
proceeded, with the industry of a Parisian proprietor, to impress his
withering mark on the elegance of the old building. What a curious study
might be made of the successive title-deeds of property in Paris! A
private lunatic asylum performs its functions in the rue des Batailles
in the former dwelling of the Chevalier Pierre Bayard du Terrail, once
without fear and without reproach; a street has now been built by the
present bourgeois administration through the site of the hotel Necker.
Old Paris is departing, following its kings who abandoned it. For one
masterpiece of architecture saved from destruction by a Polish princess
(the hotel Lambert, Ile Saint-Louis, bought and occupied by t