under which were the offices of
Hemerlingue and Sons, the black tunnel which Joyeuse had for ten years
adorned and illuminated with his dreams, a monumental staircase with a
wrought-iron balustrade, a staircase of mediaeval time, led towards the
left to the reception rooms of the baroness, which looked out on the
court-yard just above the cashier's office, so that in summer, when the
windows were open, the ring of the gold, the crash of the piles of
money scattered on the counters, softened a little by the rich and lofty
hangings at the windows, made a mercantile accompaniment to the buzzing
conversation of fashionable Catholicism.

The entrance struck at once the note of this house, as of her who did
the honours of it. A mixture of a vague scent of the sacristy, with
the excitement of the Bourse, and the most refined fashion, these
heterogeneous elements, met and crossed each other's path there, but
remained as much apart as the noble faubourg, under whose patronage
the striking conversion of the Moslem had taken place, was from the
financial quarters where Hemerlingue had his life and his friends.
The Levantine colony--pretty numerous in Paris--was composed in great
measure of German Jews, bankers or brokers who had made colossal
fortunes in the East, and still did business here, not to lose the
habit. The colony showed itself regularly on the baroness's visiting
day. Tunisians on a visit to Paris never failed to call on the wife of
the great banker; and old Colonel Brahim, _charge d'affaires_ of
the Bey, with his flabby mouth and bloodshot eyes, had his nap every
Saturday in the corner of the same divan.

"One seems to smell scorching in your drawing-room, my child," said the
old Princess de Dions smilingly to the newly named Marie, whom M. Le
Merquier and she had led to the font. But the presence of all these
heretics--Jews, Moslems, and even renegades--of these great over-dressed
blotched women, loaded with gold and ornaments, veritable bundles
of clothes, did not hinder the Faubourg Saint-Germain from visiting,
surrounding, and looking after the young convert, the plaything of these
noble ladies, a very obedient puppet, whom they showed, whom they took
out, and whose evangelical simplicities, so piquant by contrast with
her past, they quoted everywhere. Perhaps deep down in the heart of her
amiable patronesses a hope lay of meeting in this circle of returned
Orientals some new subject for conversion, an occasion