Читать книгу The Reign of Gilt онлайн

27 страница из 41

The palace was to have cost our family a million, including the site. Up to the present time it has cost them two and a half millions, and that does not include the one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar set of tapestries for the dining-room which is on its way from Europe. The site cost half a million; the house three-quarters of a million; the rest went for furniture, and the house still looks bare to the family. “A wretched barn,” madame calls it. There are one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in paintings and statuary in the entrance-hall, fifty thousand dollars in paintings, statuary, and such matters in the rest of the house. Two hundred thousand dollars could easily be spent without overcrowding. The furniture, thinly scattered in the long and lofty salon, cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—it is amazing how fast the money disappears once one goes in for old furniture.

As you look round these show rooms—the vast entrance-hall, the enormous dining-room, the great library, the salon which is used as ballroom, the comparatively small and exquisitely furnished reception-rooms—you are struck by the absence of individual taste. You are in a true palace—the dwelling-place, but in no sense the home, of people of great wealth, but of no marked æsthetic development. They have the money, and to a certain extent the faculty of appreciation. But others have supplied the active, the creative brains.