Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/170

THE AMERICAN Valentin lived in the basement of an old house in the Rue d'Anjou Saint Honoré, and his small apartments lay between the court of the house and a garden of equal antiquity, which spread itself behind—one of those large, sunless, humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Paris from back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations they find their space. When Newman presently called on him it was to hint that such quarters were, though in a different way, at least as funny as his own. Their oddities had another sense than those of our hero's gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky, contracted, and was crowded with curious bric-à-brac. Their proprietor, penniless patrician though he might be, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts. Here and there was one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in which the French upholsterer's art is prolific; a curtained recess with a sheet of looking-glass as dark as a haunted pool; a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows, you could no more sit down than on a dowager's lap; a fireplace draped, flounced, frilled, by the same analogy, to the complete exclusion of fire. The young man's possessions were in picturesque disorder, and his apartment pervaded by the odour of cigars, mingled, for inhalation, with other dim ghosts of past presences. Newman thought it, as a home, damp, gloomy and perverse, and was puzzled by the romantic incoherence of the furniture. 140