Delage, with his twenty-five years, looked upon her as prodigiously old.

Yet, as he whispered into her ear, he felt excited, infatuated, he became sincere, he really desired her, out of perverse curiosity, because he wanted to do something extraordinary, and was certain that he would be able to do it, perhaps because of his professional instinct as a handsome youth, and, lastly, because, in the first place having asked for what he did not want, he began to want what he had asked for.

Madame Ravaud, indignant but flattered, made good her escape.
The coffin was carried along a narrow path bordered with dwarf cypresses, amid a murmuring of prayers: _"In paradisum deducant te Angeli, in tuo adventu susciptant te Martyres et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem, Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat et cum Lazaro, quondam paupere, aeternam habeas requiem."_ Soon there was no longer any visible path.

It was necessary, in following the quickly vanishing coffin, the priests and the choristers, to scatter, striding over the recumbent tombstones, and slipping between the broken columns and upright slabs.

They lost the coffin and found it again.