art which make the ordinary boast of private collectors.

These pictures occupied two rooms of moderate size, built for their
reception, and lighted from above. The great salon to which they led
contained treasures scarcely less precious; the walls were covered with
the richest silks which the looms of Lyons could produce. Every piece of
furniture here was a work of art in its way: console-tables of Florentine
mosaic, inlaid with pearl and lapis-lazuli; cabinets in which the
exquisite designs of the Renaissance were carved in ebony; colossal vases
of Russian malachite, but wrought by French artists. The very knick-
knacks scattered carelessly about the room might have been admired in the
cabinets of the Palazzo Pitti. Beyond this room lay the _salle de
danse_, its ceiling painted by ------, supported by white marble columns,
the glazed balcony and the angles of the room filled with tiers of
exotics. In the dining-room, on the same floor, on the other side of the
landing-place, were stored in glazed buffets not only vessels and salvers
of plate, silver and gold, but, more costly still, matchless specimens of
Sevres and Limoges, and mediaeval varieties of Venetian glass. On the
ground-floor, which opened on the lawn of a large garden, Louvier had his
suite of private apartments, furnished, as he said, "simply, according to
English notions of comfort;"--Englishmen would have said, "according to
French notions of luxury." Enough of these details, which a writer
cannot give without feeling himself somewhat vulgarized in doing so, but
without a loose general idea of which a reader would not have an accurate
conception of something not vulgar,--of something grave, historical,
possibly tragical,--the existence of a Parisian millionaire at the date
of this narrative.

The evidence of wealth was everywhere manifest at M. Louvier's, but it
was everywhere refined by an equal evidence of taste. The apartments