Her voice trembled, and it was easy to see that, after all the humiliations to which she had been subjected by this man, she yet loved him. For many Sundays after, Jack came alone to Etiolles, and relinquished what to him was the greatest happiness of the day, the twilight walk, and the quiet talk with Cécile, that he might return to Paris in time to dine with his mother. He took the afternoon train, and passed from the tranquillity of the country to the animation of a Sunday in the Faubourg. The sidewalks were covered by little tables, where families sat drinking their coffee, and crowds were standing, with their noses in the air, watching an enormous yellow balloon that had just been released from its moorings. In remoter streets, people sat on the steps of the doors, and in the courtyard of the large, silent house the concierge was chatting with his neighbors, who had taken chairs out to breathe air a little fresher than they could obtain in their confined quarters within. Sometimes, in Jack’s absence, Ida, tired of her loneliness, went to a little reading-room kept by a certain Madame Lévèque. The shop was filled with mouldy books, was literally obstructed by magazines and illustrated papers, which she let for a sou a day. Here lived a dirty, pretentious old woman, who spent her time in making a certain kind of antiquated trimming of narrow, colored ribbons. It seems that Madame Lévèque had known better days, and that under the first empire her father was a man of considerable importance. “I am the godchild of the Duc de Dantzic,” she said to Ida, with emphasis. She was one of the relics of past days, such as one finds occasionally in the secluded corners of old Paris. Like the dusty contents of her shop, her gilt-edged books torn and incomplete, her conversation glittered with stories of past splendors. That enchanting reign, of which she had seen but the conclusion, had dazzled her eyes, and the mere tone in which she pronounced the titles of that time evoked the memory of epaulettes and gold lace. And her anecdotes of Josephine, and of the ladies of the court! One especial tale Madame Lévèque was never tired of telling: it was of the fire at the Austrian embassy, the night of the famous ball given by the Princess of Schwartzenberg. All her subsequent years had been lighted by those flames, and by that light she saw a procession of gorgeous marshals, tall ladies in very low dresses, with heads dressed _à la Titus or à la Grecque_, and the emperor, in his green coat and white trousers, carrying in his arms across the garden the fainting Madame de Schwartzenberg.