new bedrooms, a salon, a billiard-room, a dining-room, and the kitchen
garden out of which he would make an English pleasure-ground, with
lawns, grottos, fountains, and statuary. The bedrooms at present
occupied by the brother and sister, on the second floor of a house
with three windows front and six storeys high in the rue Saint-Denis,
were furnished with the merest necessaries, yet no one in Paris had
finer furniture than they--in fancy. When Jerome walked the streets he
stopped short, struck with admiration at the handsome things in the
upholsterers' windows, and at the draperies he coveted for his house.
When he came home he would say to his sister: "I found in such a shop,
such and such a piece of furniture that will just do for the salon."
The next day he would buy another piece, and another, and so on. He
rejected, the following month, the articles of the months before. The
Budget itself, could not have paid for his architectural schemes. He
wanted everything he saw, but abandoned each thing for the last thing.
When he saw the balconies of new houses, when he studied external
ornamentation, he thought all such things, mouldings, carvings, etc.,
out of place in Paris. "Ah!" he would say, "those fine things would
look much better at Provins." When he stood on his doorstep leaning
against the lintel, digesting his morning meal, with a vacant eye, the
mercer was gazing at the house of his fancy gilded by the sun of his
dream; he walked in his garden; he heard the jet from his fountain
falling in pearly drops upon a slab of limestone; he played on his own
billiard-table; he gathered his own flowers.

Sylvie, on the other hand, was thinking so deeply, pen in hand, that
she forgot to scold the clerks; she was receiving the bourgeoisie of
Provins, she was looking at herself in the mirrors of her salon, and
admiring the beauties of a marvellous cap. The brother and sister
began to think the atmosphere of the rue Saint-Denis unhealthy, and