s the pencil of Gerard in his picture of Daphnis and Chloe.

The bedroom of Madame Jules was a sacred plot. Herself, her husband,
and her maid alone entered it. Opulence has glorious privileges, and the
most enviable are those which enable the development of sentiments to
their fullest extent,--fertilizing them by the accomplishment of even
their caprices, and surrounding them with a brilliancy that enlarges
them, with refinements that purify them, with a thousand delicacies that
make them still more alluring. If you hate dinners on the grass, and
meals ill-served, if you feel a pleasure in seeing a damask cloth that
is dazzlingly white, a silver-gilt dinner service, and porcelain of
exquisite purity, lighted by transparent candles, where miracles of
cookery are served under silver covers bearing coats of arms, you must,
to be consistent, leave the garrets at the tops of the houses, and the
grisettes in the streets, abandon garrets, grisettes, umbrellas, and
overshoes to men who pay for their dinners with tickets; and you must
also comprehend Love to be a principle which develops in all its grace
only on Savonnerie carpets, beneath the opal gleams of an alabaster
lamp, between guarded walls silk-hung, before gilded hearths in chambers
deadened to all outward sounds by shutters and billowy curtains. Mirrors
must be there to show the play of form and repeat the woman we would
multiply as love itself multiplies and magnifies her; next low
divans, and a bed which, like a secret, is divined, not shown. In this
coquettish chamber are fur-lined slippers for pretty feet, wax-candles
under glass with muslin draperies, by which to read at all hours of the
night, and flowers, not those oppressive to the head, and linen, the
fineness of which might have satisfied Anne of Austria.

Madame Jules had realized this charming programme, but that was nothing.
All women of taste can do as much, though there is always in the
arrangement of these details a stamp of personality which gives to this
decoration or that detail a character that cannot be imitated. To-day,
more than ever, reigns the fanaticism of individuality. The more our
laws tend to an impossible equality, the more we shall get away from it
in our manners and customs. Thus, rich people are beginning, in France,
to become more exclusive in their tastes and their belongings, than they
have been for the last thirty years. Madame Jules knew very well how
to carry out this programme