the centre of that
avenue is a fountain, surmounted by a Triton so grey and moss-eaten,
that though he holds his conch to his swelling lips, curling his tail
in the arid basin, his instrument has had a sinecure for at least fifty
years; and did not think fit even to play when the Bourbons, in whose
time he was erected, came back from their exile. At the end of the
lime-tree avenue is a broken-nosed damp Faun, with a marble panpipe,
who pipes to the spirit ditties which I believe never had any tune.
The perron of the hotel is at the other end of the avenue; a couple of
Caesars on either side of the door-window, from which the inhabitants
of the hotel issue into the garden--Caracalla frowning over his mouldy
shoulder at Nerva, on to whose clipped hair the roofs of the grey
chateau have been dribbling for ever so many long years. There are more
statues gracing this noble place. There is Cupid, who has been at the
point of kissing Psyche this half-century at least, though the delicious
event has never come off, through all those blazing summers and dreary
winters: there is Venus and her Boy under the damp little dome of a
cracked old temple. Through the alley of this old garden, in which their
ancestors have disported in hoops and powder, Monsieur de Florac's chair
is wheeled by St. Jean, his attendant; Madame de Preville's children
trot about, and skip, and play at cache-cache. The R. P. de Florac (when
at home) paces up and down and meditates his sermons; Madame de Florac
sadly walks sometimes to look at her roses; and Clive and Ethel Newcome
are marching up and down; the children, and their bonne of course being
there, jumping to and fro; and Madame de Florac, having just been called
away to Monsieur le Comte, whose physician has come to see him.

Ethel says, "How charming and odd this solitude is: and how pleasant
to hear the voices of the children playing in the neighbouring Convent
garden," of which they can see the new chapel rising over the trees.

Clive remarks that "the neighbouring hotel has curiously changed its
destination. One of the members of the Directory had it; and, no doubt,
in the groves of its garden, Madame Tallien, and Madame Recamier, and
Madame Beauharnais have danced under the lamps. Then a Marshal of the
Empire inhabited it. Then it was restored to its legitimate owner,
Monsieur le Marquis de Bricquabracque, whose descendants, having a
lawsuit about the Bricquabracque succession, sold the hotel