about nine o'clock
On Montmartre there is a picturesque , crowded spot that is pure Algiers . Low , clean little houses , with their copper-plates on the doors , and their private gardens , stand in line along typical English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Élysées ; while the whole circuit of the apse of Saint-Sulpice , Rue Férou , Rue Cassette , lying placidly in the shadow of the great towers , roughly paved , with knockers on the front doors , seems to have been transplanted from some pious provincial city , -- Tours or Orléans for instance , in the neighborhood of the cathedral and the bishop 's palace , where tall trees tower above the walls and sway to the music of the bells and the responses . There , in the vicinity of the Catholic club , of which he had been chosen honorary president , lived Maître Le Merquier , advocate , Deputy for Lyon , man of business of all the great religious communities of France , and the man whom Hemerlingue , in pursuance of an idea of great profundity for that bulky individual , had intrusted with the legal affairs of his firm . Arriving about nine o'clock at an ancient mansion , whose ground-floor was occupied by a religious publishing house sleeping peacefully in its odor of the sacristy and of coarse paper for printing miracles , and ascending the broad staircase , the walls of which were whitewashed like those of a convent , Jansoulet felt permeated with that provincial and Catholic atmosphere wherein the memories of his Southern past revived , childish impressions still fresh and intact , thanks to his long exile , impressions which the son of Françoise had had neither time nor occasion to disown since his arrival in Paris . Worldly hypocrisy had assumed all its different shapes before him , tried all its masks , except that of religious integrity . So that he refused in his own mind to believe in the venality of a man who lived in such surroundings . Ushered into the advocate 's waiting-room , a large parlor with curtains of starched muslin as fine as that of which surplices are made , its only ornament a large and beautiful copy of Tintoret 's _ Dead Christ _ over the door , his uncertainty and anxiety changed to indignant conviction .