And thus he would spend one more day in that old crumbling palace, near the corpse of that unhappy young woman to whom he had been so much attached and for whom he would try to find some prayers in the depths of his empty and lacerated heart.
When he reached the threshold of the Cardinal's reception-rooms, he suddenly remembered his first visit to them.

They still presented the same aspect of ancient princely pomp falling into decay and dust.

The doors of the three large ante-rooms were wide open, and the rooms themselves were at that early hour still empty.

In the first one, the servants' anteroom, there was nobody but Giacomo who stood motionless in his black livery in front of the old red hat hanging under the _baldacchino_ where spiders spun their webs between the crumbling tassels.

In the second room, which the secretary formerly had occupied, Abbe Paparelli, the train-bearer, was softly walking up and down whilst waiting for visitors; and with his conquering humility, his all-powerful obsequiousness, he had never before so closely resembled an old maid, whitened and wrinkled by excess of devout observances.