ades, yielding gradually to the
influence of the twilight, which seemed colder there than elsewhere;
but, before they turned away, Hemerlingue, following out his thought,
pointed to the monument, with the draperies and outstretched hands of
the carved figures like wings at the four corners:

"There was a man who understood all about keeping up appearances."

Jansoulet took his arm to assist him in the descent.

"Oh! yes, he was strong. But you are stronger than anybody else," he
said in his fervid Gascon accent.

Hemerlingue did not protest.

"I owe it all to my wife. So I urge you to make your peace with her,
because if you don't--"

"Oh! never fear--we will come Saturday; but you will go with me to Le
Merquier."

And as the two silhouettes, one tall and square-shouldered, the other
short and stout, disappeared in the windings of the great labyrinth, as
Jansoulet's voice, guiding his friend, with a "This way, old
fellow--lean on me," gradually died away, a stray beam of the setting
sun fell upon the plateau behind them, and lighted the colossal bust of
Balzac looking after them with its expressive face, its noble brow from
which the long hair was brushed back, its powerful and sarcastic lip.

XX.

BARONESS HEMERLINGUE.

At the farther end of the long archway beneath which were the offices of
Hemerlingue and Son, a dark tunnel which Pere Joyeuse had for ten years
bedecked and illumined with his dreams, a monumental staircase with
wrought-iron rail, a staircase of old Paris, ascended to the left,
leading to the baroness's salons, whose windows looked on the courtyard
just above the counting-room, so that, during the warm season, when
everything was open, the chink of the gold pieces, the noise made by
piles of crowns toppling over on the counters, slightly deadened by the
rich hangings at the long windows, formed a sort of commercial
accompaniment to the subdued conversations carried on by worldly
Catholicism.

That detail was responsible for the peculiar physiognomy of that salon,
no less peculiar than the woman who presided over it, mingling a vague
odor of the sacristy with the excitement of the Bourse and the most
consummate worldliness, heterogeneous elements which constantly met and
came in contact there, but remained separate, just as the Seine
separates the noble Catholic faubourg under whose auspices the notorious
conversion of the Moslem woman took place, from the financial quarters
in wh