The room we are now in -- a smoking room-cum-library -- is fairly representative of his work.
It was originally a rectangular space, twenty feet by twelve.
He began by making it into an oval room with eight dark, carved wooden panels on the walls: he went to Spain to get them; apparently they come from the Prado.
In between the panels he placed tall brass-inlaid Brazilian rosewood bookcases, bearing on their shelves a great number of books all bound in the same tan-brown leather, mostly artbooks, in alphabetical order.
Huge, chestnut-brown button-leathered sofas are placed beneath the shelves and fit the curves precisely.
Between the sofas stand dainty kingwood low talbes, whilst in the middle of the room there looms a heavy, four-leafed, centre-pillar table heaped with newspapers and reviews.
The woodblock floor is almost entirely masked by a dark red woollen carpet with triangular motifs in an even darker red.
In front of one of the bookcases there is a set of library steps, in oak with brass fittings, which allows access to the upper shelves, and one of the risers of which is studded all over with gold coins.
In several places, the bookshelves have been made into glass-fronted display cases.
That is how some old calendars, almanacs, and Second Empire diaries are shown off in the first case, on the left, together with some small posters, including Cassandre's Normandy and Paul Colin's Grand Prix of the Arc de Triomphe;
in the second display case -- the only reminder of the activities of the mistress of the house -- there are a few old tools: three planes, two adzes, a twibill, six cold chisels, two files, three hammers, three gimlets, two augers, all bearing the monogram of the Suez Canal Company and all used during the cutting of the canal, as well as a magnificent Sheffield Multum in parvo looking like an ordinary pocket knife (wider, of course) but containing not just blades of various sizes but a screwdriver, a corkscrew, pincers, pen nibs, nailfiles, and punches; in the third case, various objects which had belonged to Flourens, the physiologist, and in particular the skeleton, red through and through, of the young pig whose mother the scientist had fed for the last 84 days of her pregnancy on food mixed with madder to prove experimentally the direct relationship of mother and foetus; and in the fourth case, a doll's house, parallelepipedal, three feet high, two feet nine inches wide, and two feet deep, dating from the late nineteenth century and representing a typical English cottage down to the smallest detail: 1 drawing room with bay windows (2 lancets), thermometer affixed, 1 sitting room, 4 bedrooms, 2 servants' rooms, tiled kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen wallpresses, fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopedia Britannica and the New Century Dictionary, transverse obsolete medieval and oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, hand tufted Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with pillar-and-claw legs, hearth with massive firebrassses and ormolu mantel chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments, upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk center, three-banner Japanese screen and pyramidically prismatic central chanderlier lustre, a bentwood perch with its tame parrot, and hundreds of everyday objects, baubles, crockery, clothes, all reproduced almost microscopically with manic acuracy: stools, lithos, cheap champagne bottles, capes on coat hangers, socks and stockings drying in the scullery, and even two minute copper pot-holders, tinier than thimbles, with grennery sprouting from them; and lastly, in the fifth set of bookcases, on raked stands, there are several open musical scores, amongst them the title page of Haydn's Symphony No. 70 in D as printed in London by William Forster in 1782.
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