great sensations of the antique art; but it is perfectly
felicitous, and, in spite of having been put to all sorts
of incongruous uses, marvellously preserved. Its slender
columns, its delicate proportions, its charming com-
pactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the century
that built it than the great superpositions of arenas
and bridges, and give it the interest that vibrates from
one age to another when the note of taste is struck.
If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple
a happy production, the service would be rendered by
the second-rate boulevard that conducts to it, adorned
with inferior cafes and tobacco-shops. Here, in a
respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations,
and with the theatre, of a classic pretension, opposite,
stands the small "square house," so called because it
is much longer than it is broad. I saw it first in the
evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look
as if it were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly,
that it has the shape of a playing-card, and he ex-
presses his admiration for it by the singular wish
that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris.
He even goes so far as to say that in the year 1880
this tribute will have been rendered to its charms;
nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than to
"have" in that city "le Pantheon de Rome, quelques
temples de Grece." Stendhal found it amusing to
write in the character of a _commis-voyageur_, and some-
times it occurs to his reader that he really was one.