On walking through the dining-room, you enter, by a door on the left, a little salon, which seems relatively small after the preceding rooms, and perhaps overwhelmed by the sumptuous furniture that adorns it. It contains thirty splendid pictures; this is a kind of Uffizi or Salon carré, where scarcely one of the greatest names in painting is missing. Among these great masterpieces shines a Virgin by Andrea del Sarto, so beautiful that it would make cold chills run through the most elementary connoisseur and the most hide-bound and prosaic Philistine.
This Salon illumined by a soft and well distributed light, seems to me the select spot, the very heart of the building, and I left it with deep regret to go and visit the famous salon which contains those two porphyry columns whose value is so great that they are worth more than the entire palace. They are placed in front of a door, and thus produce as little effect as the lapis lazuli in the “Salon Serra” in Genoa, which you might well believe were painted and varnished, and which strongly resemble a metallic blue watered silk.
There is still another salon, but it is not remarkable in any way. In the four corners, four bracket pedestals support four busts: those of the Duc de Berry, of Charles X., and other members of the royal family.
The Vendramin-Calergi has gained an additional interest in recent years on account of the fact that Richard Wagner died in it on Feb. 13, 1883.—E. S.
FOUNTAIN OF THE OLD SERAGLIO, TURKEY.
A VISIT TO THE OLD SERAGLIO, CONSTANTINOPLE
PIERRE LOTI
The rising sun gilds the mosque, gilds it under the fresh plane-trees; in the air there is a white mist which is like the original veil of day. The little Turkish cafés begin to open, and two or three minims are already being shaved in the open air under the trees.
It is evidently very early, and I have time to stop here before returning to Pera. I sit down under the trellis ordering coffee with those warm little bonbons that they sell here in the morning, and I think this better than the most delicate breakfast.
About two hours afterwards, about eight o’clock, a carriage takes me back to Stamboul in the company of an aide-de-camp of His Majesty; and in a solemn and desert-like quarter, where the grass pushes up between the stones of the pavement, our coachman stops before a forbidding enclosure like that of a Mediæval fortress.