Not a shop, never a passer-by—­nothing but melancholy frontages, with shutters always closed.  At the back, however, their windows, overlooking some courtyards, were turned to the full sunlight.  The dining-room opened even on to a spacious balcony, a kind of wooden gallery, whose arcades were hung with a giant wistaria which almost smothered them with foliage.  And the girl had grown up there, at first near her invalid father, then cloistered, as it were, with her mother, whom the least exertion exhausted.  She had remained so complete a stranger to the town and its neighbourhood, that Claude and herself burst into laughter when she met his inquiries with the constant answer, ’I don’t know.’  The mountains?  Yes, there were mountains on one side, they could be seen at the end of the streets; while on the other side of the town, after passing along other streets, there were flat fields stretching far away; but she never went there, the distance was too great.  The only height she remembered was the Puy de Dome, rounded off at the summit like a hump.  In the town itself she could have found her way to the cathedral blindfold; one had to turn round by the Place de Jaude and take the Rue des Gras; but more than that she could not tell him; the rest of the town was an entanglement, a maze of sloping lanes and boulevards; a town of black lava ever dipping downward, where the rain of the thunderstorms swept by torrentially amidst formidable flashes of lightning.  Oh! those storms; she still shuddered to think of them.  Just opposite her room, above the roofs, the lightning conductor of the museum was always on fire.  In the sitting-room she had her own window—­a deep recess as big as a room itself—­where her work-table and personal nick-nacks stood.  It was there that her mother had taught her to read; it was there that, later on, she had fallen asleep while listening to her masters, so greatly did the fatigue of learning daze her.  And now she made fun of her own ignorance; she was a well-educated young lady, and no mistake, unable even to repeat the names of the Kings of France, with the dates of their accessions; a famous musician too, who had never got further than that elementary pianoforte exercise, ‘The little boats’; a prodigy in water-colour painting, who scamped her trees because foliage was too difficult to imitate.  Then she skipped, without any transition, to the fifteen months she had spent at the Convent of the Visitation after her mother’s death—­a large convent, outside the town, with magnificent gardens.  There was no end to her stories about the good sisters, their jealousies, their foolish doings, their simplicity, that made one start.  She was to have taken the veil, but she felt stifled the moment she entered a church.  It had seemed to be all over with her, when the Superior, by whom she was treated with great affection, diverted her from the cloister by procuring her that situation at Madame Vanzade’s.  She had not yet got over the surprise.  How had Mother des Saints Anges been able to read her mind so clearly?  For, in fact, since she had been living in Paris she had dropped into complete indifference about religion.