In accordance with Madame de Buffon’s wishes, I was granted a set of apartments across a landing, near to hers. They were as gilt-touched as you might imagine. The walls were decorated with pilasters of gold, the ceilings painted with floating gods; Mercury and Venus ascended like balloons into a cloud-strewn cerulean heaven. Every wall winked with mirrors so that the daylight blazed from the windows into each corner. I cannot well describe the impression these rooms left upon me, for, in spite of their luxury – the perfumed bed of fringed crimson damask, the dressing table whose looking glass was held aloft by golden putti, the altar-like marble mantels which rose nearly to the glittering squares of the architraves – they seemed the most desolate place on earth. I could not ignore the ghostly rectangular outlines that appeared upon the walls in nearly every room. Week upon week, Orléans’s creditors claimed another of his treasures. The splendid Arcadian scenes by Claude and Poussin or the portraits of double-chinned Bourbons seemed to vanish without remark. Indian ivory cabinets disappeared, as did towering blue Chinese vases. It was as if the objects of the palace were gradually abandoning the Duke in the manner of the courtiers who had once lived in it.

For the better part of a year, the Palais-Royal had been inhabited only by a modest band of servants and those assorted members of Orléans’s household whom I had met at La Volière. Where once the clack of hundreds of heels of nobles and ladies, of maids and valets, would have been regularly heard upon the parquetry floors, there now came scarcely a sound: not the trill of laughter from an adjoining set of rooms, not the plucked song of a harp through the walls. There came nothing but the forlorn moan of a persistent draught. Lucy and I rattled in my apartments like two small beads forgotten at the bottom of a coffer.

To live among these deserted spaces was to move in silence along enfilades of rooms. Echoes followed footsteps, while the reverberation of a shutting of a door might be felt in the shake of a cabinet or a piece of glass. At night, a glance at the adjoining wing offered nothing but a view of row upon row of blackened windows. Neither the illumination of chandeliers nor any number of candles dispelled this sense of emptiness. There was but one remedy for it: company.