little Louvre overloaded with ornament. He will manage to get in a
courtyard, stables, and if you care for it, a garden. Inside the house
he will accommodate a quantity of little rooms and passages. He is so
clever in deceiving the eye that you think you will have plenty of
space; but it is only a nest of small rooms, after all, in which a
ducal family has to turn itself about in the space that its own
bakehouse formerly occupied.

The hotel of the Comtesse Laginska, rue de la Pepiniere, is one of
these creations, and stands between court and garden. On the right, in
the court, are the kitchens and offices; to the left the coachhouse
and stables. The porter's lodge is between two charming
portes-cocheres. The chief luxury of the house is a delightful
greenhouse contrived at the end of a boudoir on the ground-floor which
opens upon an admirable suite of reception rooms. An English
philanthropist had built this architectural bijou, designed the garden,
added the greenhouse, polished the doors, bricked the courtyard, painted
the window-frames green, and realized, in short, a dream which resembled
(proportions excepted) George the 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