I was particularly
interested in the apartment devoted to the casts from the statuary in
the Louvre and in other palaces. These casts are taken with
mathematical exactness, and subjected to the inspection of a
committee, who order any that are defective to be broken. Proof casts
of all the best works, ancient and modern, are thus furnished at a
small price, and so brought within the reach of the most moderate
means.
This morning M. and Madame Belloc took me with them to call on
Beranger, the poet. He is a charming old man, very animated, with a
face full of feeling and benevolence, and with that agreeable
simplicity and vivacity of manner which is peculiarly French. It was
eleven o'clock, but he had not yet breakfasted; we entreated him to
waive ceremony, and so his maid brought in his chop and coffee, and we
all plunged into an animated conversation. Beranger went on conversing
with shrewdness mingled with childlike simplicity, a blending of the
comic, the earnest, and the complimentary. Conversation in a French
circle seems to me like the gambols of a thistle down, or the rainbow
changes in soap bubbles.
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