Within all was elegance and luxury. There were immense salons, with marble floors, and walls covered with Smyrna hangings of the most beautiful description that of themselves must have cost a fortune. These salons were furnished with rich divans, tables of malachite, cabinets of ebony, and oriental rugs of the most artistic and complicated workmanship. There were dazzling reception rooms filled with exquisite statues and superb paintings, the works of the greatest sculptors and artists of the east and west, of the past and the present. Figures by Thorwaldsen, Powers and other modern celebrities of the block and chisel stood beside antique masterpieces framed by the genius of Phidias and his brother sculptors of old Greece and Rome, masterpieces that had been torn from the ruins of antiquity by the hand of the untiring and enterprising excavator. Among the paintings were fine specimens of the skill of Albert Dürer, Murillo, Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Sir Joshua Reynolds and other votaries of the brush whose names are immortal. These paintings did not hang on the walls, for they were covered with rich tapestry from the looms of Benares and the Gobelins, but rested on delicately fashioned easels, themselves entitled to a high, rank as works of art. In the salons were statues by Michael Angelo, Pierre Puget and Pompeo Marchesi, and paintings by Claude Lorraine, Titian, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Correggio and Salvator Rosa.
The vast library was encircled by lofty bookcases of walnut and ebony, filled with rare and costly volumes from the curiously illuminated missals of monkish days to the latest scientific works, together with a liberal sprinkling of poetry and fiction; upon tables, stands and mantels were superb ornaments in brass repoussé work and grand old faïence, including some wonderful specimens of ancient Chinese crackle ware, the peculiar secret of the manufacture of which had been lost in the flight of ages.
At an exquisite desk of walnut, carved with grotesque images, sat the Count of Monte-Cristo; he was busily engaged in writing, and beside him lay a huge pile of manuscript that was ever and anon augmented by an additional sheet, hastily scrawled in strange, bewildering Semitic characters.
The Count showed but small trace of the passage of years; he did not look much older than when he left the Isle of Monte-Cristo with Haydée on that voyage which was destined to result so disastrously for the Alcyon and her ill-fated crew. To be sure, his hair was slightly flecked with gray, but his visage still retained its full outline, and not a wrinkle marred its masculine beauty. He was clad in an exceedingly picturesque costume, half Greek and half Turkish, while upon his head was a red fez from the centre of which hung down a gilt tassel.