But the dining-room, the bed-chambers, and other apartments occupied by the _personnel_ look out on to the mournful gloom of a side street.

All these vast rooms, twenty and four-and-twenty feet high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier tables mingling with modern _bric-a-brac_.

And things become abominable when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there you no longer find an article of furniture, no longer a hanging, nothing but disaster, a series of magnificent deserted halls given over to rats and spiders.

The embassy occupies but one of them, where it heaps up its dusty archives.

Near by is a huge hall occupying the height of two floors, and thus sixty feet in elevation.