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Updated: May 8, 2025
The curtains of the window were of purple silk, embroidered, I imagined, by the fair Frenchwoman herself, and the great four-poster bed was of fine walnut with deep mouldings, and adorned with the fleur-de-lys of France. The whole room seemed to be redolent of the grace of a charming grande dame of old France.
All the improvements of Paris might have been completed with the money spent on stucco castings, gilt mouldings, and sham sculpture during the last fifteen years by individuals of the Crevel stamp. Beyond this drawing-room was a splendid boudoir furnished with tables and cabinets in imitation of Boulle. The bedroom, smart with chintz, also opened out of the drawing-room.
An ancient stone-pine tree springs straight upwards, spreading out lovely branches. There are bushes again and a magnolia, and a Japanese medlar, and there is moss. The stone mouldings of the fountains are rich with the green tints of time.
In the parlor is a large mirror with gilded mouldings, and the dining-room walls are hung with painted paper representing in vivid colors, and with much gilding and silvering, scenes from French history, in which musqueteers, courtiers and the cardinal de Richelieu figure. A large and notable company is present, among them many high civil functionaries, but the chargé d'affaires is not there.
This magnificent window occupied the entire end of the room, save where the corners were rendered convex by two immense mirrors, which formed a beautiful finish to the rich mouldings of the casement, and curved gracefully back to the wall, making that end of the apartment almost semicircular.
Many of the main arches remain, and the details of the ornamentation and mouldings will repay careful study. At the west end is a very perfect piece of arcading. The large arch, seen above a low wall to the east, was the arch leading to the chapel; in exactly the same position as the chancel arch in a church. At each side of this arch is a lancet never pierced.
We will now pass on for the moment to the other apartments. The bed-room of Henry IV must arrest our attention, and the eye naturally falls on the alcove where his bed was placed, the oak carving, and gilded mouldings have been preserved exactly in the same state that they were when he died.
It was a vast, high room, with elaborate and ponderous mouldings, painted a whitish gray, along the upper portion of the walls and the ceiling; with a great deal of faded and carefully repaired tapestry in the doorways and chair-backs; a Turkey carpet in light colors, still soft and deep, in spite of great antiquity, on the floor, and portraits of each of Madame de Bellegarde's children, at the age of ten, suspended against an old screen of red silk.
He examined the mouldings, stroked them as one who knew their beginning, said they were difficult or easy in the working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm, or convenient to the tool. What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been inflicted on the aged erections.
You see the edges of it, instead of being bossed, or knopped, or crocketed, are mouldings of severest line. No vaulting, no clustered shafts, no traceries, no fantasies, no perpendicular flights of aspiration. Steady pillars, each of one polished block; useful capitals, one trefoiled arch between them; your panel above it; thereon your story of the founder of Christianity.
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