Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 01.djvu/98

82 "In this bedroom, where we were soon alone, blazed a beautiful fire, which was the more agreeable because the apartment was immensely large and high. This great chamber, which might better be called a great hall, had in it something strangely desolate or empty. Its furnitare and decoration and architecture bore the impress of an age whose splendour is now so dusty, and whose dignity seems so sober and sad, that its relics awaken a feeling of discomfort, if not a subdued smile. I speak of the time of the Empire, of the days of golden eagles, high-flying plumes, Greek coiffures, the glory of grand drum-majors, military masses, official immortality decreed by the Moniteur, Continental coffee made from chicory, bad sugar from beetroot, and princes and dukes manufactured out of nothing at all. Yet it had its charm, this age of pathetic materialism. Talma declaimed, Gros painted, Bigottini danced, Grassini sang, Maury preached, Rovigo had the police, the Emperor read Ossian, and Pauline Borghese had herself modelled as Venus, and stark naked at that, for the room was quite warm, like that in which I found myself with Mademoiselle Laurence.

"We sat by the fire conversing confidentially, and she told me sighing how she was married to a Buonaparte hero, who every evening before