, their doors each with its
knocker, seem lifted out of some provincial and religious town--Tours
or Orleans, for example--in the district of the cathedral or the palace,
where the great over-hanging trees in the gardens rock themselves to the
sound of the bells and the choir.

It was there, in the neighbourhood of the Catholic Club--of which he
had just been made honorary president--that M. Le Merquier lived. He was
_avocat_, deputy for Lyons, business man of all the great communities of
France; and Hemerlingue, moved by a deep-seated instinct, had intrusted
him with the affairs of his firm.

He arrived before nine o'clock at an old mansion of which the ground
floor was occupied by a religious bookshop, asleep in the odour of the
sacristy, and of the thick gray paper on which the stories of miracles
are printed for hawkers, and mounted the great whitewashed convent
stairway. Jansoulet was touched by this provincial and Catholic
atmosphere, in which revived the souvenirs of his past in the south,
impressions of infancy still intact, thanks to his long absence from
home; and since his arrival at Paris he had had neither the time nor the
occasion to call them in question. Fashionable hypocrisy had presented
itself to him in all its forms save that of religious integrity, and
he refused now to believe in the venality of a man who lived in such
surroundings. Introduced into the _avocat's_ waiting-room--a vast
parlour with fine white muslin curtains, having for its sole ornament
a large and beautiful copy of Tintoretto's Dead Christ--his doubt and
trouble changed into indignant conviction. It was not possible! He had
been deceived as to Le Merquier. There was surely some bold slander in
it, such as so easily spreads in Paris--or perhaps it was one of those
ferocious snares among which he had stumbled for six months. No, this
stern conscience, so well known in Parliament and the courts, this cold
and austere personage, could not be treated like those great swollen
pashas with loosened waist-belts and floating sleeves open to conceal
the bags of gold. He would only expose himself to a scandalous refusal,
to the legitimate revolt of outraged honour, if he attempted such means
of corruption.

The Nabob told himself all this, as he sat on the oak bench which ran
round the room, a bench polished with serge dresses and the rough cloth
of cassocks. In spite of the early hour several persons were waiting
there with him. A Dominica