antechamber

• “Of her influence we need no better evidence than the fact that her salon was called the antechamber to the Academie Francaise.”

  The Women of the French Salons

• “The moment we stepped over the threshold, on the right hand of the passage we found ourselves ushered into what in other countries would be called the antechamber; the ground floor, however, was muddy and filthy, a large fire was burning,”

  John James Audubon

• “The only article of furniture in the antechamber was a wooden bench on which Pierre perceived two female patients awaiting their turn in the charge of a young hospitaller.”

  The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete Lourdes, Rome and Paris

• “In preparing to write or speak upon a subject of which the details have been mastered, I gather, after some inquiry, that the usual method among persons who have the gift of fluency is to think cursorily on topics connected with it, until what I have called the antechamber is well filled with cognate ideas.”

  Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development

• “On either side of the interior door of the antechamber was a turnstile or tourelle, which enabled the inmates within to receive anything from the outside world without being themselves seen.”

  The Golden Dog

• “First, an ante-chamber, at the farther end of which was a winding wooden staircase, behind which came the kitchen; on either side of the antechamber was a dining-room and a parlor panelled in oak now nearly black, with armorial bearings in the divisions of the ceilings.”

  Sons of the Soil

• “Lovely because it suggests that there was a time before history began, when people hung around in a kind of antechamber waiting to be called forth to kick off the human story.”

  The Guardian: The Making of the British Landscape by Francis Pryor

• “Echoing Myhrvold, we might charitably say that de Grey's proposals exist in a kind of antechamber of science, where they wait possibly in vain for independent verification.”

  The Speculist: July 2006 Archives

• “Though the facts are unclear as to whether or not the tomb's "antechamber" was explored when its sealed doorway was first breached, it is apparent that the "burial chamber" was toured well before its official opening.”

  TutWatch: The Man Who Found Tut

• “: The Royal Pavilion had been set up with a kind of antechamber to keep out the coldest air; he parted a second set of door flaps just inside the first.”

  Exile's Valor

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