Mr. Granger made his Parisian arrangements on the large scale which became
him as a landed gentleman of unlimited wealth. A first floor of some ten
spacious rooms was selected in one of the bran-new stone mansions in a
bran-new street in the fashionable Faubourg; a house that seemed to have
been built for the habitation of giants; a house made splendid by external
decoration in carved stonework, garlands of stone-fruit and flowers,
projecting lion-heads, caryatides, and so on: no gloomy _porte-cochere_,
but a street-door, through which a loaded drag might have been driven
without damage to the hats of the outside passengers. A house glorified
within by egg-and-dart mouldings, white enamelled woodwork and much
gilding; but a house in which the winter wind howled as in a primeval
forest, and which required to be supplied with supplementary padded
crimson-velvet doors before the spacious chambers could be made
comfortable. Here Mr. Granger took up his abode, with ten of his Arden
Court servants quartered on a floor above. The baby had a nursery loosing
into the broad bare street, where some newly-planted sticks of the sycamore
species shivered in the north-east wind; and the baby took his matutinal
airings in the Tuileries Gardens, and his afternoon drives in the Bois,
while every movement of his infant existence was watched or directed by the
tenderest of mothers. The chief nurse, who had lived with more fashionable
mistresses, for whom the duties of the nursery were subordinate to the
business of society, pronounced Mrs.
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