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the family, which out-topped the low buildings in front. But in the humbler street to which we were bound there were few houses entre cour et jardin; and I could not help wondering how people bore to live in the perpetual noise, and heavy closeness of atmosphere.
The friend we were going to see, Madame A--, had lived in this street for many years. Her rooms were lofty and tolerably large. The gloomy outlook of the long narrow windows was concealed by the closed muslin curtains, which were of an irreproachable whiteness. I knew the rooms of old. We had to pass through the satle-à-manger to the salon; and from thence we, being intimate friends, went on into her bedroom. The satle-à-manger had an inlaid floor, very slippery, and without a carpet; the requisite chairs and tables were the only furniture. The pile of clean dinner-plates was placed on the top of a china stove; a fire would be lighted in it, half-an-hour before dinner, which would warm the plates as well as the room. The salon was graced with the handsome furniture of thirty or forty years ago; but it was a room to be looked at rather than used. Indeed, the family only sit in it on Sunday evenings, when they receive. The floor was parqueté in this room, but here and there it was covered with small brilliantly-coloured Persian carpets: before the sofa, underneath the central table, and before the fire. There were the regular pieces of furniture which were de rigueur in a French household of respectability when Madame A-- was married: the gilt vases of artificial flowers, each under a glass shade; the clock, with a figure of a naked hero, supposed to represent Achilles, leaning on his shield (the face of the clock); and the "guéridon" (round, marble-topped table), which was so long the one indispensable article in a French drawing-room.
But, altogether, Madame A--'s salon does not look very habitable; and we pass on into the bed-room, which has little e