text:  I had left it a stately but rather melancholy-looking household; I found the mansion glittering in all the novelty of French furniture gilding and _or-molu_--crowded with fashion and all its menial tribe from the groom in the stables to the gentleman's gentleman who slipped along the chambers in soft silence and seemed an embodying of Etiquette all in new equipments of all kinds--the avenue trimmed until it resembled a theatrical wood; and the grounds once sober and silent enough for a Jacques to escape from the sight of human kind and hold dialogues with the deer; now levelled opened shorn and shaved with the precision of a retired citizen's elysium