Explore "My Novel, Book X" by Edward Bulwer-lytton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Early the next day Randal Leslie was in the luxurious business-room of Baron Levy. How unlike the cold Doric simplicity of the statesman's library! Axminster carpets, three inches thick; /portieres a la Francaise/ before the doors; Parisian bronzes on the chimney-piece; and all the receptacles that lined the room, and contained title-deeds and postobits and bills and promises to pay and lawyer-like japan boxes, with many a noble name written thereon in large white capitals -- "making ruin pompous," all these sepulchres of departed patrimonies veneered in rosewood that gleamed with French polish, and blazed with ormulu. There was a coquetry, an air of /petit maitre/, so diffused over the whole room, that you could not, for the life of you, recollect you were with a usurer!
Plutus wore the, aspect of his enemy Cupid; and how realize your idea of Harpagon in that baron, with his easy French "/Mon cher/," and his white, warm hands that pressed yours so genially, and his dress so exquisite, even at the earliest morn? No man ever yet saw that baron in a dressing-gown and slippers! As one fancies some feudal baron of old (not half so terrible) everlastingly clad in mail, so all one's notions of this grand marauder of civilization were inseparably associated with varnished boots and a camellia in the button-hole.