"Your salon smells of burning flesh, my goddaughter," the old Princesse de Dions said laughingly to the newly-christened Marie, whom she and Maitre Le Merquier had held at the baptismal font; but the presence of that crowd of heretics, Jews, Mussulmans and even renegades, those fat women with pimply faces, gaudily dressed, loaded down with gold and earrings, "veritable bales" of finery, did not prevent Faubourg Saint-Germain from calling upon, surrounding and watching over the young neophyte, the plaything of those noble dames, a very pliant, very docile doll, whom they took about and exhibited, quoting her _naive_ evangelical remarks, especially interesting by way of contrast to her past. Perhaps there found its way into the hearts of those amiable patronesses the hope of encountering in that company fresh from the Orient an opportunity to make a new conversion, to fill the aristocratic mission chapel once more with the touching spectacle of one of those baptisms of adults, which carry you back to the early days of the faith, to the banks of the Jordan, and are soon followed by the first communion, the rebaptizing, the confirmation, all affording pretexts for the godmother to accompany her goddaughter, to guide that young soul, to look on at the ingenuous transports of a new-born faith, and at the same time to display costumes deftly varied and shaded to suit the brilliancy or the solemnity of the ceremony. But it does not often happen that a baron prominent in financial circles brings to Paris an Armenian slave whom he has made his lawful wife.