Chapter 6

Book Sixth

I

It was quite by half-past five--after the two men had been together
in Madame de Vionnet's drawing-room not more than a dozen minutes--
that Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their
hostess, said genially, gaily: "I've an engagement, and I know you
won't complain if I leave him with you. He'll interest you
immensely; and as for her," he declared to Strether, "I assure you,
if you're at all nervous, she's perfectly safe."

He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as
they could best manage, and embarrassment was a thing that Strether
wasn't at first sure Madame de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it
himself, to his surprise; but he had grown used by this time to
thinking of himself as brazen. She occupied, his hostess, in the
Rue de Bellechasse, the first floor of an old house to which our
visitors had had access from an old clean court. The court was
large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit
of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and
approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the high
homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was
always looking for--sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more
acutely missed--was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed
staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings,
mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish-white salon into which
he had been shown. He seemed at the very outset to see her in the
midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary
cherished charming. While his eyes turned after a little from those
of his hostess and Chad freely talked--not in the least about HIM,
but about other people, people he didn't know, and quite as if he
did know them--he found himself making out, as a background of the
occupant, some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some
Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements
clinging still to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses
and sphinxes' heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with
alternate silk.

The place itself went further back--that he guessed, and how old
Paris continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary
period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand,
of Madame de Stael, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of
harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects,
ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had
present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private order--
little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in leather
bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged,
together