It is hence quite well understood why the Abbe Gelon’s chapel is crowded.  If a little whispering goes on, it is because they have been waiting three long hours, and because everybody knows one another.

All the ladies, you may be sure, are there.

“Make a little room for me, dear,” whispers a newcomer, edging her way through trains, kneeling-stools, and chairs.

“Ah! is that you, dear?  Come here.  Clementine and Madame de B. are there in the corner at the cannon’s mouth.  You will have to wait two good hours.”

“If Madame de B. is there, it does not surprise me.  She is inexhaustible, and there is no other woman who is so long in telling a thing.  Have all these people not had their turn yet?  Ah! there is Ernestine.” (She waves her hand to her quietly.) “That child is an angel.  She acknowledged to me the other day that her conscience troubled her because, on reading the ‘Passion,’ she could not make up her mind to kiss the mat.”

“Ah! charming; but, tell me, do you kiss the mat yourself?”

“I! no, never in my life; it is so nasty, dear.”

“You confess to the omission, at least?”

“Oh!  I confess all those little trifles in a lump.  I say, ’Father, I have erred out of human self-respect.’  I give the total at once.”

“That is just what I do, and that dear Abbe Gelon discharges the bill.”

“Seriously, time would fail him if he acted otherwise.  But it seems to me that we are whispering a little too much, dear; let me think over my little bill.”

Madame leans upon her praying-stool.  Gracefully she removes, without taking her eyes off the altar, the glove from her right hand, and with her thumb turns the ring of Ste-Genevieve that serves her as a rosary, moving her lips the while.  Then, with downcast eyes and set lips, she loosens the fleur-de-lys-engraved clasp of her Book of Hours, and seeks out the prayers appropriate to her condition.

She reads with fervency:  “’My God, crushed beneath the burden of my sins I cast myself at thy feet’—­how annoying that it should be so cold to the feet.  With my sore throat, I am sure to have influenza,—­’that I cast myself at thy feet’—­tell me, dear, do you know if the chapel-keeper has a footwarmer?  Nothing is worse than cold feet, and that Madame de P. sticks there for hours.  I am sure she confesses her friends’ sins along with her own.  It is intolerable; I no longer have any feeling in my right foot; I would pay that woman for her foot-warmer—­’I bow my head in the dust under the weight of repentance, and of........’”

“Ah!  Madame de P. has finished; she is as red as the comb of a turkey-cock.”

Four ladies rush forward with pious ardor to take her place.

“Ah!  Madame, do not push so, I beg of you.”

“But I was here before you, Madame.”

“I beg a thousand pardons, Madame.”

“You surely have a very strange idea of the respect which is due to this hallowed spot.”