In the huge dining-room the table was set for forty persons, the usual number, until the war came, when it was reduced to twenty, and Bigot gave a dinner there nearly every evening, unless he was absent from Quebec.
Robert felt as soon as he entered the palace that he had come into a strange, new, exotic atmosphere, likely to prove intoxicating to the young, and he remembered the hunter's words of warning.

Yet his spirit responded at once to the splendor and the call of a gayer and more gorgeous society than any he had ever known.

Wealth and great houses existed even then in New York and upon occasion their owners made full use of both, but there was a restraint about the Americans, the English and the Dutch.

Their display was often heavy and always decorous, and in Quebec he felt for the first time the heedless gayety of the French, when the Bourbon monarchy had passed its full bloom, and already was in its brilliant decay.

Truly, they could have carved over the doorway, "Leave all fear and sorrow behind, ye who enter here." There were lights everywhere, flaming from tall silver candlesticks, and uniforms, mostly in white and silver, or white with black or violet facings, were thick in the rooms.