Princess Napraxine, Volume 3 (of 3)

Excerpt...

When Yseulte had recovered enough to travel, he took her to the Italian lakes for awhile, to restore her to her usual health and strength, and distract her thoughts from what had befallen her at Amyôt. With the beginning of winter they returned, and made their home for awhile in the great hotel of the Boulevard St. Germain, which he hated, and where he intended to remain for the briefest time that could suffice for the fulfilment of those social duties of which Friederich Othmar never ceased to remind him. There his mother’s apartments had been prepared for his wife, and every grace and attraction that the art and the taste of the day could add to them had been added, as though the most solicitous affection had presided over the preparation of them. All the preferences she had shown in the country had been remembered and gratified; whatever she had liked best in colour, in treatment, in art, in flowers, in marble, had been consulted or reproduced in Paris; and even a large dog to which she had taken a fancy at Amyôt had been brought thence from the kennels, and was lying before the fire when she entered.