e stone buildings of an Italian port embracing an
iridescent sea where the sunshine was already Eastern, where everything
sang, to the very swelling of the sails on the blue water. Paris, as it
happened, was muddy that day, uniformly gray, flooded by one of those
continuous rains of which it seems to have the special property, rains
that seem to have risen in clouds from its river, from its smoke, from
its monster's breath, and to fall in torrents from its roofs, from
its spouts, from the innumerable windows of its garrets. Felicia
was impatient to get away from this gloomy Paris, and her feverish
impatience found fault with the cabmen who made slow progress with the
horses, two sorry creatures of the veritable cab-horse type, with an
inexplicable block of carriages and omnibuses crowded together in the
vicinity of the Pont de la Concorde.

"But go on, driver, go on, then."

"I cannot, madame. It is the funeral procession."

She put her head out of the window and drew it back again immediately,
terrified. A line of soldiers marching with reversed arms, a confusion
of caps and hats raised from the forehead at the passage of an endless
cortege. It was Mora's funeral procession defiling past.

"Don't stop here. Go round," she cried to the cabman.

The vehicle turned about with difficulty, dragging itself regretfully
from the superb spectacle which Paris had been awaiting for four days;
it remounted the avenues, took the Rue Montaigne, and, with its slow
and surly little trot, came out at the Madeleine by the Boulevard
Malesherbes. Here the crowd was greater, more compact.

In the misty rain, the illuminated stained-glass windows of the church,
the dull echo of the funeral chants beneath the lavishly distributed
black hangings under which the very outline of the Greek temple was
lost, filled the whole square with a sense of the office in course of
celebration, while the greater part of the immense procession was still
squeezed up in the Rue Royale, and as far even as the bridges a long
black line connecting the dead man with that gate of the Legislative
Assembly through which he had so often passed. Beyond the Madeleine
the highway of the boulevard stretched away empty, and looking bigger
between two lines of soldiers with arms reversed, confining the curious
to the pavements black with people, all the shops closed, and the
balconies, in spite of the rain, overflowing with human beings all
leaning forward in the direc