THE WORKS

OF

EDWARD BULWER LYTTON

(LORD LYTTON)


NIGHT AND MORNING

Book III




CHAPTER I.

"The knight of arts and industry,
And his achievements fair."
THOMSON'S _Castle of Indolence: Explanatory Verse to Canto II._

In a popular and respectable, but not very fashionable quartier in Paris,
and in the tolerably broad and effective locale of the Rue ----, there
might be seen, at the time I now treat of, a curious-looking building,
that jutted out semicircularly from the neighbouring shops, with plaster
pilasters and compo ornaments. The _virtuosi_ of the _quartier_ had
discovered that the building was constructed in imitation of an ancient
temple in Rome; this erection, then fresh and new, reached only to the
_entresol_. The pilasters were painted light green and gilded in the