Monsieur Bergeret in Paris by Anatole France

In Monsieur Felix Panneton's little house there was a large room which had formerly been used as a studio by the fashionable painter, and which the new inmate had furnished with the magnificence of a great collector of curios and the discretion of an accomplished lover of women. Artistically and in methodical order Monsieur Panneton had strewn the room with couches, sofas and divans of all shapes and kinds.

Looking from right to left as you went in, you would first of all notice a little blue silk settee the arms of which, shaped like a swan's neck, reminded one of the time when Bonaparte in Paris, like Tiberius of old in Rome, was bent on improving the manners and customs of society. Then came another rather bigger couch upholstered in Beauvais cloth with tapestry-covered ends; then a settee in three divisions, covered in silk; then a little wooden settee _à la capucine_ with a covering of Turkish tapestry; then a large sofa of gilded wood upholstered in crimson figured velvet with cushions of the same, which had belonged to Mademoiselle Damours; then a broad, low, luxuriously stuffed divan of flame-coloured silk; and finally a tottering mass of soft cushions on a very low Oriental divan which, bathed in a dim rose-coloured light, stood on the left near the Baudouin room.