Its slender columns, its delicate
proportions, its charming compactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the
century that built it than the great superpositions of arenas and bridges,
and give it the interest that vibrates from one age to another when the
note of taste is struck.
If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy production,
the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard that conducts
to it, adorned with inferior cafes and tobacco-shops. Here, in a
respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations, and with the
theater, of a classic pretension, opposite, stands the small "square
house," so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it
first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if it
were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of a
playing-card, and he expresses his admiration for it by the singular wish
that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris. He even goes as far
as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been rendered to
its charms; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than to "have" in
that city "le Pantheon de Rome, quelques temples de Grece.
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