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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: antique types, which indeed gave his pictures the character of colored
sculpture. But none of these devices of Imperial luxury found civic
rights under Madame de Granville's roof. The spacious, square drawing-
room remained as it had been left from the time of Louis XV., in white
and tarnished gold, lavishly adorned by the architect with checkered
lattice-work and the hideous garlands due to the uninventive designers
of the time. Still, if harmony at least had prevailed, if the
furniture of modern mahogany had but assumed the twisted forms of
which Boucher's corrupt taste first set the fashion, Angelique's room
would only have suggested the fantastic contrast of a young couple in
the nineteenth century living as though they were in the eighteenth;
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