ifice, quitting it by a door on the great staircase again,
opposite to the one by which you entered. In those cases in which there
are courts, the principal rooms are ranged in this manner, _en suite_,
on the exterior range, usually looking out on the gardens, while those
within them, which look into the court, contain the bed-rooms, boudoir,
eating-rooms, and perhaps the library. So tenacious are those, who lay
any claim to gentility here, of the use of the ante-chambers, that I
scarcely recollect a lodging of any sort, beyond the solitary chamber of
some student, without, at least, one. They seem indispensable, and I
think rightly, to all ideas of style, or even of comfort. I remember to
have seen an amusing instance of the strength of this feeling in the
case of the wife of a former French minister, at Washington. The
building she inhabited was one of the ordinary American double houses,
as they are called, with a passage through the centre, the stairs in the
passage, and a short corridor, to communicate with the bed-rooms above.
Off the end of this upper corridor, if, indeed, so short a transverse
passage deserves the name, was partitioned a room of some eight feet by
ten, as a bed-room. A room adjoining this, was converted into a boudoir
and bed-room, for Madame de ----, by means of a silk screen. The usual
door of the latter opened, of course, on the passage. In a morning call
one day, I was received in the boudoir. Surprised to be carried up
stairs on such an occasion, I was still more so to find myself taken
through a small room, before I was admitted to the larger. The amount of
it all was; that Madame de ----, accustomed to have many rooms, and to
think it vulgar to receive in her great drawing-room of a morning,
believing _au premier_, or up one pair of stairs, more genteel than the
_rez de chaussee_, or the ground floor, and feeling the necessity of an
ante-chamber as there was an abruptness in being at once admitted into
the presence of a lady from a staircase, a sort of local _brusquerie_,
that would suit her cook better than the wife of an envoy extraordinary,
had contrived to introduce her guests through the little bed-room, at
the end of the upstairs entry!

From all this you will be prepared to understand some of the essential
differences between a reception in Paris and one at New York, or even at
Washington. The footman, or footmen, if there are two, ascend to the
inner ante-chamber, with their master