“I’ll give it to him myself,” she said; “he will come.”

The next morning, at the open window, and humming on his balcony, Leon himself varnished his pumps with several coatings.  He put on white trousers, fine socks, a green coat, emptied all the scent he had into his handkerchief, then having had his hair curled, he uncurled it again, in order to give it a more natural elegance.

“It is still too early,” he thought, looking at the hairdresser’s cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of nine.  He read an old fashion journal, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three streets, thought it was time, and went slowly towards the porch of Notre Dame.

It was a beautiful summer morning.  Silver plate sparkled in the jeweller’s windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds; the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting paper round bunches of violets.

The young man took one.  It was the first time that he had bought flowers for a woman, and his breast, as he smelt them, swelled with pride, as if this homage that he meant for another had recoiled upon himself.

But he was afraid of being seen; he resolutely entered the church.  The beadle, who was just then standing on the threshold in the middle of the left doorway, under the “Dancing Marianne,” with feather cap, and rapier dangling against his calves, came in, more majestic than a cardinal, and as shining as a saint on a holy pyx.

He came towards Leon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity assumed by ecclesiastics when they question children—­

“The gentleman, no doubt, does not belong to these parts?  The gentleman would like to see the curiosities of the church?”

“No!” said the other.

And he first went round the lower aisles.  Then he went out to look at the Place.  Emma was not coming yet.  He went up again to the choir.

The nave was reflected in the full fonts with the beginning of the arches and some portions of the glass windows.  But the reflections of the paintings, broken by the marble rim, were continued farther on upon the flag-stones, like a many-coloured carpet.  The broad daylight from without streamed into the church in three enormous rays from the three opened portals.  From time to time at the upper end a sacristan passed, making the oblique genuflexion of devout persons in a hurry.  The crystal lustres hung motionless.  In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating, its echo reverberating under the lofty vault.