ions 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
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 young vauriens who figure in the great novelist's comedy of
Human Life