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Updated: June 21, 2025
I lay in a large and handsomely-furnished apartment, in which the hand of taste was as evident in all the decorations as the unsparing employment of wealth; the silk draperies of my bed, the inlaid tables, the ormolu ornaments which glittered upon the chimney, were one by one so many puzzles to my erring senses, and I opened and shut my eyes again and again, and essayed by every means in my power to ascertain if they were not the visionary creations of a fevered mind.
In the accompanying view you will observe a large album on a stand; this was given to the Queen-Regent by the ladies of Holland. It is of leather, with ormolu mounts, on the covers being painted panels and flowers worked in silk, these flowers being surrounded with rubies and pearls; and at either corner is a large sapphire.
There was a set of Solingen razors, marked in Arabic with the days of the week; a cloak of blue-and-white-striped cloth, fit for any prince of Bedouins; and an ormolu clock with a gong inside it that would have graced the chimneypiece of a Brooklyn boarding-house.
The slain, however, turned out to be the very things of which we were in search; old-fashioned furniture in all kinds of incongruous styles, and of all epochs Louis Quatorze cabinets in cracked tortoise-shell and blackened buhl antique carved chairs emblazoned elaborately with coats of arms, as old as the time of Albert Duerer slender-legged tables in battered marqueterie time-pieces in lack-lustre ormolu, still pointing to the hour at which they had stopped, who could tell how many years ago? bundles of moth-eaten tapestries and faded silken hangings exquisite oval mirrors framed in chipped wreaths of delicate Dresden china mouldering old portraits of dead-and-gone court beauties in powder and patches, warriors in wigs, and prelates in point-lace whole suites of furniture in old stamped leather and worm-eaten Utrecht velvet; broken toilette services in pink and blue Sevres; screens, wardrobes, cornices in short, all kinds of luxurious lumber going fast to dust, like those who once upon a time enjoyed and owned it.
The late Mr. Walter Pater was once invited to admire a hideous wedding-present, compact of ormolu and malachite. Closing his eyes, the founder of modern aesthetics leaned back in his chair, and waving away the offending object, murmured in his softest tone, "Oh, very rich, very handsome, very expensive, I am sure. But they mustn't make any more of them."
The boy hung his head, and played a little uneasily with an ormolu terrier-pot, upsetting half the tobacco in it; he was trained to his brother's nonchalant, impenetrable school, and used to his brother's set; a cool, listless, reckless, thoroughbred, and impassive set, whose first canon was that you must lose your last thousand in the world without giving a sign that you winced, and must win half a million without showing that you were gratified; but he had something of girlish weakness in his nature, and a reserve in his temperament that was with difficulty conquered.
And going to an escritoire covered with ormolu one of those pieces of French furniture which cost hundreds of pounds he took out a bundle of Evelyn's notices. "The most interesting," he said, "were the first notices before the critics had made up their mind about her." He stopped in his untying of the parcel to tell Ulick about his journey to Brussels to hear her sing.
An hour by an inlaid ormolu clock she sat there, her feet in soft, elastic-sided shoes, just lifted from the floor. Incongruous enough, on a plain deal table beside her, a sheaf of blue-prints lay unrolled.
An Aubusson carpet of palest green, with a festoon pattern of pink roses, covered two-thirds of the blocked, polished floor. The empanelled walls were white, with here a gilt mirror, flanked on either side by a girandole in ormolu.
It may be remarked in passing, that lacquer work was also made previous to this time in England. Several cabinets of "Old" English lac are included in the Strawberry Hill sale catalogue; and they were richly mounted with ormolu, in the French style; this sale took place in 1842.
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