whom, one feels that their polished boots are cleverly designed to cover their animal hoofs, and that skilful clothiers have arranged their garments so that their tails are not perceived.  But that hoofs and tails are existent would seem to be a certainty.  Here sometimes will sing a celebrated tenor, bulky and brazen,—­pouring out from his bull-throat such liquid devotional notes as might lift the mind of the listener to Heaven ifone were not so positive that a moral fiend sang them;—­ here sometimes may be seen the stout chanteuse who is the glory of open-air cafes in the Champs Elysees, kneeling with difficulty on a velvet hassock and actually saying prayers.  And one must own that it is an exhilarating and moving sight to behold such a woman pretending to confess her sins, with the full delight of them written on her face, and the avowed intention of committing them all over again manifesting itself in every turn of her head, every grin of her rouged lips, and every flash of her painted eyes!  For these sections out of the French “Inferno,” Notre Dame de Lorette is a good place to play penitence and feign prayer;—­the Madeleine is too classic and serene and sombre in its interior to suggest anything but a museum, from which the proper custodian is absent,—­Notre Dame de Paris reeks too much with the blood of slain Archbishops to be altogether comfortable,—­St. Roch in its “fashionable” congregation, numbers too many little girls who innocently go to hear the music, and who have not yet begun to paint their faces, to suit those whose lives are all paint and masquerade,—­and the “Lorette” is just the happy medium of a church where, Sham being written on its walls, one is scarcely surprised to see Sham in the general aspect of its worshippers.  Among the ugly columns, and against the heavy ceiling divided into huge raised lumps of paint and gilding, Abbe Vergniaud’s voice had often resounded,—­and his sermons were looked forward to as a kind of witty entertainment.  In the middle or the afterwards of a noisy Mass,—­Mass which had been “performed” with perhaps the bulky tenor giving the “Agnus Dei,” with as sensually dramatic an utterance as though it were a love-song in an opera, and the “basso,” shouting through the “Credo,” with the deep musical fury of the tenor’s jealous rival,—­with a violin “interlude,” and a ’cello “solo,”—­and a blare of trumpets at the “Elevation,” as if it were a cheap spectacle at a circus fair,—­after all this melodramatic and hysterical excitement it was a relief to see the Abbe mount the pulpit stairs, portly but lightfooted, his black clerical surtout buttoned closely up to his chin, his round cleanshaven face wearing a pious but suggestive smile, his eyes twinkling with latent satire, and his whole aspect expressing, “Welcome excellent humbugs!  I, a humbug myself, will proceed to expound Humbug!” His sermons were generally satires on religion,—­ satires delicately veiled, and full of the double-entendres so dear to the hearts of Parisians,—­and