Mignon wished to be announced, and Zoe left him for a moment after
remarking that Madame had passed a miserable day. He had only been at
the house once before, and he did not know it at all. The dining room
with its Gobelin tapestry, its sideboard and its plate filled him with
astonishment. He opened the doors familiarly and visited the drawing
room and the winter garden, returning thence into the hall. This
overwhelming luxury, this gilded furniture, these silks and velvets,
gradually filled him with such a feeling of admiration that it set his
heart beating. When Zoe came down to fetch him she offered to show him
the other rooms, the dressing room, that is to say, and the bedroom. In
the latter Mignon's feelings overcame him; he was carried away by them;
they filled him with tender enthusiasm.
That damned Nana was simply stupefying him, and yet he thought he knew
a thing or two. Amid the downfall of the house and the servants' wild,
wasteful race to destruction, massed-up riches still filled every gaping
hole and overtopped every ruined wall. And Mignon, as he viewed this
lordly monument of wealth, began recalling to mind the various great
works he had seen. Near Marseilles they had shown him an aqueduct, the
stone arches of which bestrode an abyss, a Cyclopean work which cost
millions of money and ten years of intense labor.
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