em,
such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my
aunt's service.

Alas! we had definitely to alter our opinion of M. Legrandin. On one-of
the Sundays following our meeting with him on the Pont-Vieux, after
which my father had been forced to confess himself mistaken, as mass
drew to an end, and, with the sunshine and the noise of the outer world,
something else invaded the church, an atmosphere so far from sacred that
Mme. Goupil, Mme. Percepied (all those, in fact, who a moment ago, when
I arrived a little late, had been sitting motionless, their eyes fixed
on their prayer-books; who, I might even have thought, had not seen
me come in, had not their feet moved slightly to push away the little
kneeling-desk which was preventing me from getting to my chair) began in
loud voices to discuss with us all manner of utterly mundane topics, as
though we were already outside in the Square, we saw, standing on the
sun-baked steps of the porch, dominating the many-coloured tumult of the
market, Legrandin himself, whom the husband of the lady we had seen with
him, on the previous occasion, was just going to introduce to the wife
of another large landed proprietor of the district. Legrandin's face
shewed an extraordinary zeal and animation; he made a profound bow, with
a subsidiary backward movement which brought his spine sharply up into a
position behind its starting-point, a gesture in which he must have
been trained by the husband of his sister, Mme. de Cambremer. This rapid
recovery caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin's
hips, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but
this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency, with not the
least hint in it of spiritual significance, this wave lashed to a fury
by the wind of an assiduity, an obsequiousness of the basest sort, awoke
my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different
from the one whom we knew. The lady gave him some message for her
coachman, and while he was stepping down to her carriage the impression
of joy, timid and devout, which the introduction had stamped there,
still lingered on his face. Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled,
then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than
usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left,
in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he
abandoned himself to it