The favorite of the Great Dauphin, Mademoiselle Choin (to whom Les Aigues was given), added a number of farms to it.

Bouret furnished the house with all the elegancies of Parisian homes for an Opera celebrity; and to him Les Aigues owes the restoration of its ground floor in the style Louis XV.
I have often stood rapt in admiration at the beauty of the dining-room.
The eye is first attracted to the ceiling, painted in fresco in the Italian manner, where lightsome arabesques are frolicking.

Female forms, in stucco ending in foliage, support at regular distances corbeils of fruit, from which spring the garlands of the ceiling.

Charming paintings, the work of unknown artists, fill the panels between the female figures, representing the luxuries of the table,--boar's-heads, salmon, rare shell-fish, and all edible things,--which fantastically suggest men and women and children, and rival the whimsical imagination of the Chinese,--the people who best understand, to my thinking at least, the art of decoration.

The mistress of the house finds a bell-wire beneath her feet to summon servants, who enter only when required, disturbing no interviews and overhearing no secrets.