MY DEAR OLD COM_—­I cannot accom_ you to Le Mer. Too bus just now.  Besid_ y_ will be bet alone to tal.  Go th bold.  You are exp.  A Cassette, ev morn 8 to 10.

Yours faith

HEM.

Below as a postscript, a very small hand had written very legibly: 

“A religious picture, as good as possible.”

What was he to think of this letter?  Was there real good-will in it, or polite evasion?  In any case hesitation was no longer possible.  Time pressed.  Jansoulet made a bold effort, then—­for he was very frightened of Le Merquier—­and called on him one morning.

Our strange Paris, alike in its population and its aspects, seems a specimen map of the whole world.  In the Marais there are narrow streets, with old sculptured worm-eaten doors, with overhanging gables and balconies, which remind you of old Heidelberg.  The Faubourg Saint-Honore, lying round the Russian church with its white minarets and golden domes, seems a part of Moscow.  On Montmartre I know a picturesque and crowded corner which is simply Algiers.  Little, low, clean houses, each with its brass plate and little front garden, are English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Elysees while all behind the apse of Saint-Sulpice, the Rue Feron, the Rue Cassette, lying peaceably in the shadow of its great towers, roughly paved, 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