It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather⁠— M. Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber, the finest in the house. “That will make me young again,” he said. “It’s an old plan of mine. I have always entertained the idea of having a wedding in my chamber.”

He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles. He had the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff, which he had by him in the piece, and which he believed to have emanated from Utrecht with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered with velvet auricula blossoms.⁠—“It was with that stuff,” said he, “that the bed of the Duchesse d’Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped.”⁠—On the chimneypiece, he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain, carrying a muff against her nude stomach.

M. Gillenormand’s library became the lawyer’s study, which Marius needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council of the order.