devoted to hospitality ministered to the delighted study of artists, to
whom free access was given, and of whom two or three might be seen daily
in the "show-rooms," copying pictures or taking sketches of rare articles
of furniture or effects for palatian interiors.

Among the things which rich English visitors of Paris most coveted to see
was M. Louvier's hotel, and few among the richest left it without a sigh
of envy and despair. Only in such London houses as belong to a
Sutherland or a Holford could our metropolis exhibit a splendour as
opulent and a taste as refined.

M. Louvier had his set evenings for popular assemblies. At these were
entertained the Liberals of every shade, from tricolor to rouge, with the
artists and writers most in vogue, pele-mele with decorated diplomatists,
ex-ministers, Orleanists, and Republicans, distinguished foreigners,
plutocrats of the Bourse, and lions male and female from the arid nurse
of that race, the Chaussee d'Antin. Of his more select reunions
something will be said later.

"And how does this poor Paris metamorphosed please Monsieur Vane?" asked
a Frenchman with a handsome, intelligent countenance, very carefully
dressed though in a somewhat bygone fashion, and carrying off his tenth
lustrum with an air too sprightly to evince any sense of the weight.
This gentleman, the Vicomte de Breze, was of good birth, and had a
legitimate right to his title of Vicomte,--which is more than can be said
of many vicomtes one meets at Paris. He had no other property, however,
than a principal share in an influential journal, to which he was a
lively and sparkling contributor. In his youth, under the reign of Louis
Philippe, he had been a chief among literary exquisites; and Balzac was
said to have taken him more than once as his model for those brilliant