“Your own?” I inquired —­ “one of your own invention?”

“I am proud,” he replied, “to acknowledge that it is —­ at least in some measure.”

In this manner I conversed with Monsieur Maillard for an hour or two, during which he showed me the gardens and conservatories of the place.

“I cannot let you see my patients,” he said, “just at present.  To a sensitive mind there is always more or less of the shocking in such exhibitions; and I do not wish to spoil your appetite for dinner.  We will dine.  I can give you some veal a la Menehoult, with cauliflowers in veloute sauce —­ after that a glass of Clos de Vougeot —­ then your nerves will be sufficiently steadied.”

At six, dinner was announced; and my host conducted me into a large salle a manger, where a very numerous company were assembled —­ twenty-five or thirty in all.  They were, apparently, people of rank-certainly of high breeding —­ although their habiliments, I thought, were extravagantly rich, partaking somewhat too much of the ostentatious finery of the vielle cour.  I noticed that at least two-thirds of these guests were ladies; and some of the latter were by no means accoutred in what a Parisian would consider good taste at the present day.  Many females, for example, whose age could not have been less than seventy were bedecked with a profusion of jewelry, such as rings, bracelets, and earrings, and wore their bosoms and arms shamefully bare.  I observed, too, that very few of the dresses were well made —­ or, at least, that very few of them fitted the wearers.  In looking about, I discovered the interesting girl to whom Monsieur Maillard had presented me in the little parlor; but my surprise was great to see her wearing a hoop and farthingale, with high-heeled shoes, and a dirty cap of Brussels lace, so much too large for her that it gave her face a ridiculously diminutive expression.  When I had first seen her, she was attired, most becomingly, in deep mourning.  There was an air of oddity, in short, about the dress of the whole party, which, at first, caused me to recur to my original idea of the “soothing system,” and to fancy that Monsieur Maillard had been willing to deceive me until after dinner, that I might experience no uncomfortable feelings during the repast, at finding myself dining with lunatics; but I remembered having been informed, in Paris, that the southern provincialists were a peculiarly eccentric people, with a vast number of antiquated notions; and then, too, upon conversing with several members of the company, my apprehensions were immediately and fully dispelled.

The dining-room itself, although perhaps sufficiently comfortable and of good dimensions, had nothing too much of elegance about it.  For example, the floor was uncarpeted; in France, however, a carpet is frequently dispensed with.  The windows, too, were without curtains; the shutters, being shut, were securely fastened with iron bars, applied diagonally, after the fashion of our ordinary shop-shutters.  The apartment, I observed, formed, in itself, a wing of the chateau, and thus the windows were on three sides of the parallelogram, the door being at the other.  There were no less than ten windows in all.