So I went, taking with me a magnificent bouquet, and an embroidered satin bag full of _marrons glaces_.
My divinity lived, as she had told me, _sous les toits_--and _sous les toits_, up seven flights of very steep and dirty stairs, I found her.

It was a large attic with a sloping roof, overlooking a bristling expanse of chimney-pots, and commanding the twin towers of Notre Dame.

There were some colored prints of battles and shipwrecks wafered to the walls; a couple of flower-pots in the narrow space between the window-ledge and the coping outside; a dingy canary in a wire cage; a rival mechanical cuckoo in a Dutch clock in the corner; a little bed with striped hangings; a rush-bottomed _prie-dieu_ chair in front of a plain black crucifix, over which drooped a faded branch of consecrated palm; and some few articles of household furniture of the humblest description.

In all this there was nothing vulgar.

Under other circumstances I might, perhaps, have even elicited somewhat of grace and poetry from these simple materials.