noon
`` Your sister , Moina , '' said Mme. d'Aiglemont , bursting into tears when she reached her room , `` your sister meant no doubt to tell you that a girl will never find happiness in a romantic life , in living as nobody else does , and , above all things , far away from her mother . '' It was one of the earliest June days of the year 1844 . A lady of fifty or thereabouts , for she looked older than her actual age , was pacing up and down one of the sunny paths in the garden of a great mansion in the Rue Plument in Paris . It was noon . The lady took two or three turns along the gently winding garden walk , careful never to lose sight of a certain row of windows , to which she seemed to give her whole attention ; then she sat down on a bench , a piece of elegant semi-rusticity made of branches with the bark left on the wood . From the place where she sat she could look through the garden railings along the inner boulevards to the wonderful dome of the Invalides rising above the crests of a forest of elm-trees , and see the less striking view of her own grounds terminating in the gray stone front of one of the finest hotels in the Faubourg Saint-Germain . Silence lay over the neighboring gardens , and the boulevards stretching away to the Invalides .