As I had to adjust my formal dinners to the old style, I was not only delighted to have Tanno with us for himself and for his jollity, but also because he just made up the nine diners demanded by ancient convention.
Agathemer had asked me, as a special favor, to leave the decoration of the _triclinium_ entirely to him, and I had agreed, when he fairly begged me, not to enter the _triclinium_ or even pass its door, after my noonday siesta.

When I did enter it with my guests I was dazzled.

The sun had just set and the northwestern sky was all a blaze of golden brightness, streaked with long pink and rosy streamers of cloud, from which the evening light, neither glaring nor dim, flooded through the big northwestern windows.

The spacious room was a bower of bloom.

Great armfuls of flowers hid the capitals of the pilasters, others their bases; garlands--heavy, even corpulent garlands--were looped from pilaster to pilaster; every vase was filled with flowers, the little vases on the brackets, the big ones alternating with the statues in the niches, the huge floor-vases in the corners: the table, the sofas, the floor, all were strewn with smaller blossoms, tiny flowers or fresh petals of roses.