nine o’clock
Little , low , clean houses , each with its brass plate and little front garden , are English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Elysees while all behind the apse of Saint-Sulpice , the Rue Feron , the Rue Cassette , lying peaceably in the shadow of its great towers , roughly paved , their doors each with its knocker , seem lifted out of some provincial and religious town -- Tours or Orleans , for example -- in the district of the cathedral or the palace , where the great over-hanging trees in the gardens rock themselves to the sound of the bells and the choir . It was there , in the neighbourhood of the Catholic Club -- of which he had just been made honorary president -- that M. Le Merquier lived . He was _ avocat _ , deputy for Lyons , business man of all the great communities of France ; and Hemerlingue , moved by a deep-seated instinct , had intrusted him with the affairs of his firm . He arrived before nine o'clock at an old mansion of which the ground floor was occupied by a religious bookshop , asleep in the odour of the sacristy , and of the thick gray paper on which the stories of miracles are printed for hawkers , and mounted the great whitewashed convent stairway . Jansoulet was touched by this provincial and Catholic atmosphere , in which revived the souvenirs of his past in the south , impressions of infancy still intact , thanks to his long absence from home ; and since his arrival at Paris he had had neither the time nor the occasion to call them in question . Fashionable hypocrisy had presented itself to him in all its forms save that of religious integrity , and he refused now to believe in the venality of a man who lived in such surroundings . Introduced into the _ avocat 's _ waiting-room -- a vast parlour with fine white muslin curtains , having for its sole ornament a large and beautiful copy of Tintoretto 's Dead Christ -- his doubt and trouble changed into indignant conviction .