e Fourth's Pavilion at Brighton. The inventive and industrious
Parisian workmen had moulded the doors and window-frames; the ceilings
were imitated from the middle-ages or those of a Venetian palace; marble
veneering abounded on the outer walls. Steinbock and Francois Souchet
had designed the mantel-pieces and the panels above the doors; Schinner
had painted the ceilings in his masterly manner. The beauties of the
staircase, white as a woman's arm, defied those of the hotel Rothschild.
On account of the riots and the unsettled times, the cost of this folly
was only about eleven hundred thousand francs,--to an Englishman a mere
nothing. All this luxury, called princely by persons who do not know
what real princes are, was built in the garden of the house of a
purveyor made a Croesus by the Revolution, who had escaped to Brussels
and died there after going into bankruptcy. The Englishman died in
Paris, of Paris; for to many persons Paris is a disease,--sometimes
several diseases. His widow, a Methodist, had a horror of the little
nabob establishment, and ordered it to be sold. Comte Adam bought it at
a bargain; and how he came to do so shall presently be made known, for
bargains were not at all in his line as a grand seigneur.

Behind the house lay the verdant velvet of an English lawn shaded at
the lower end by a clump of exotic trees, in the midst of which stood a
Chinese pagoda with soundless belfries and motionless golden eggs. The
greenhouse concealed the garden wall on the northern side, the opposite
wall was covered with climbing plants trained upon poles painted green
and connected with crossway trellises. This lawn, this world of flowers,
the gravelled paths, the simulated forest, the verdant palisades, were
contained within the space of five and twenty square rods, which are
worth to-day four hundred thousand francs,--the value of an actual
forest. Here, in this solitude in the middle of Paris, the birds
sang, thrushes, nightingales, warblers, bulfinches, and sparrows. The
greenhouse was like an immense jardiniere, filling the air with perfume
in winter as in summer. The means by which its atmosphere was made
to order, torrid as in China or temperate as in Italy, were cleverly
concealed. Pipes in which hot water circulated, or steam, were either
hidden under ground or festooned with plants overhead. The boudoir was a
large room. The miracle of the modern Parisian fairy named Architecture
is to get all these many