The clergy appeared in the yard.  Mother Simon climbed on a chair to reach the bull’s-eye, and in this manner could see the altar.  It was covered with a lace cloth and draped with green wreaths.  In the middle stood a little frame containing relics; at the corners were two little orange-trees, and all along the edge were silver candlesticks, porcelain vases containing sun-flowers, lilies, peonies, and tufts of hydrangeas.  This mount of bright colours descended diagonally from the first floor to the carpet that covered the sidewalk.  Rare objects arrested one’s eye.  A golden sugar-bowl was crowned with violets, earrings set with Alencon stones were displayed on green moss, and two Chinese screens with their bright landscapes were near by.  Loulou, hidden beneath roses, showed nothing but his blue head which looked like a piece of lapis-lazuli.

The singers, the canopy-bearers and the children lined up against the sides of the yard.  Slowly the priest ascended the steps and placed his shining sun on the lace cloth.  Everybody knelt.  There was deep silence; and the censers slipping on their chains were swung high in the air.  A blue vapour rose in Felicite’s room.  She opened her nostrils and inhaled with a mystic sensuousness; then she closed her lids.  Her lips smiled.  The beats of her heart grew fainter and fainter, and vaguer, like a fountain giving out, like an echo dying away;—­and when she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw in the half-opened heavens a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.