The Gobelin tapestry.--How and where it is made.--Père la-Chaise.--Poor Rachel!--The baby establishment.--"Now I lay me."--The little mother.--The old woman who lived in a shoe.--The American chapel.--Beautiful women and children.--The last conference-meeting.--"I'm a proof-reader, I am."
BY no means least among the places of interest in Paris is the manufactory of the Gobelin tapestry which serves to adorn the walls of the palace _salons_. O, these long, tiresome _salons_, which must be visited, though your head is ready to burst with seeing, your feet to drop off with sliding and slipping over the polished floors. The wicked _stand_ upon slippery places, and nothing so convinced us of the demoralizing effect of foreign travel as our growing ability to do the same. When you have seen one or two, you have seen all. There may be degrees in gorgeous splendor, but we were filled with all the appropriate and now-forgotten emotions at sight of the first, and one cannot be more than full. Many of the old palace apartments are dull and dingy beyond belief, by no means the marble halls of our dreams; but of the others let me say something once for all. Under your feet is the treacherous, bare floor of dark wood, laid in diamonds, squares, &c.; over your head, exquisite frescoes of gods and goddesses, and all manner of unearthly and impossible beings enveloped in clouds by the bale,--usually an apotheosis of some king or queen, or both, and, as a rule, of the most wicked known at that time. The Medici were especially glorified and raised above the flesh,--and they had need to be. On every side pictures in Gobelin tapestry, framed into the walls, often so large as to cover the entire space from corner to corner, from cornice to within a few feet of the floor, and in this latter space doors, formed of a panel sometimes, for the entrance and egress of servants. Imagine, with all this, the gilt, and stucco, and wood-carving; the flowers, and arabesques, and entwined initials; the massive chandeliers, with glittering pendants; the mantels of rare marbles, of porphyry, and malachite; the cabinets, and tables, and escritoires of marqueterie and mosaic; the gilded chairs, stiff and stark, richly covered; the bronzes, vases, and curious clocks: and over all the air of having never been used from all time, and of continuing to be a bare show to all eternity,--and you have a faint conception of the _salons_ of half the palaces.