“I shall go there next week,” he said.  “I long to see again Ravenna asleep among the black pines of its sterile shore.  Have you seen Ravenna, Madame?  It is an enchanted tomb where sparkling phantoms appear.  The magic of death lies there.  The mosaic works of Saint Vitale, with their barbarous angels and their aureolated empresses, make one feel the monstrous delights of the Orient.  Despoiled to-day of its silver lamels, the grave of Galla Placidia is frightful under its crypt, luminous yet gloomy.  When one looks through an opening in the sarcophagus, it seems as if one saw the daughter of Theodosius, seated on her golden chair, erect in her gown studded with stones and embroidered with scenes from the Old Testament; her beautiful, cruel face preserved hard and black with aromatic plants, and her ebony hands immovable on her knees.  For thirteen centuries she retained this funereal majesty, until one day a child passed a candle through the opening of the grave and burned the body.”

Madame Martin-Belleme asked what that dead woman, so obstinate in her conceit, had done during her life.

“Twice a slave,” said Dechartre, “she became twice an empress.”

“She must have been beautiful,” said Madame Martin.  “You have made me see her too vividly in her tomb.  She frightens me.  Shall you go to Venice, Monsieur Dechartre?  Or are you tired of gondolas, of canals bordered by palaces, and of the pigeons of Saint Mark?  I confess that I still like Venice, after being there three times.”

He said she was right.  He, too, liked Venice.

Whenever he went there, from a sculptor he became a painter, and made studies.  He would like to paint its atmosphere.

“Elsewhere,” he said, “even in Florence, the sky is too high.  At Venice it is everywhere; it caresses the earth and the water.  It envelops lovingly the leaden domes and the marble facades, and throws into the iridescent atmosphere its pearls and its crystals.  The beauty of Venice is in its sky and its women.  What pretty creatures the Venetian women are!  Their forms are so slender and supple under their black shawls.  If nothing remained of these women except a bone, one would find in that bone the charm of their exquisite structure.  Sundays, at church, they form laughing groups, agitated, with hips a little pointed, elegant necks, flowery smiles, and inflaming glances.  And all bend, with the suppleness of young animals, at the passage of a priest whose head resembles that of Vitellius, and who carries the chalice, preceded by two choir-boys.”

He walked with unequal step, following the rhythm of his ideas, sometimes quick, sometimes slow.  She walked more regularly, and almost outstripped him.  He looked at her sidewise, and liked her firm and supple carriage.  He observed the little shake which at moments her obstinate head gave to the holly on her toque.

Without expecting it, he felt a charm in that meeting, almost intimate, with a young woman almost unknown.