n her gown studded with stones and
embroidered with scenes from the Old Testament; her beautiful, cruel
face preserved hard and black with aromatic plants, and her ebony
hands immovable on her knees. For thirteen centuries she retained this
funereal majesty, until one day a child passed a candle through the
opening of the grave and burned the body."

Madame Martin-Belleme asked what that dead woman, so obstinate in her
conceit, had done during her life.

"Twice a slave," said Dechartre, "she became twice an empress."

"She must have been beautiful," said Madame Martin. "You have made
me see her too vividly in her tomb. She frightens me. Shall you go to
Venice, Monsieur Dechartre? Or are you tired of gondolas, of canals
bordered by palaces, and of the pigeons of Saint Mark? I confess that I
still like Venice, after being there three times."

He said she was right. He, too, liked Venice.

Whenever he went there, from a sculptor he became a painter, and made
studies. He would like to paint its atmosphere.

"Elsewhere," he said, "even in Florence, the sky is too high. At Venice
it is everywhere; it caresses the earth and the water. It envelops
lovingly the leaden domes and the marble facades, and throws into the
iridescent atmosphere its pearls and its crystals. The beauty of Venice
is in its sky and its women. What pretty creatures the Venetian women
are! Their forms are so slender and supple under their black shawls. If
nothing remained of these women except a bone, one would find in that
bone the charm of their exquisite structure. Sundays, at church, they
form laughing groups, agitated, with hips a little pointed, elegant
necks, flowery smiles, and inflaming glances. And all bend, with the
suppleness of young animals, at the passage of a priest whose head
resembles that of Vitellius, and who carries the chalice, preceded by
two choir-boys."

He walked with unequal step, following the rhythm of his ideas,
sometimes quick, sometimes slow. She walked more regularly, and almost
outstripped him. He looked at her sidewise, and liked her firm and
supple carriage. He observed the little shake which at moments her
obstinate head gave to the holly on her toque.

Without expecting it, he felt a charm in that meeting, almost intimate,
with a young woman almost unknown.

They had reached the place where the large avenue unfolds its four rows
of trees. They were following the stone parapet surmounted by a hedge of
boxwood,