Overhead was a siding, with its signals round and square, red and yellow, and posts with cast-iron ladders; and there always in the same place an engine was being fired, or, with shrill whistling, was moving out backwards.
Madame Bavoil stopped at a door under a round arch in an immense wall, which not far off ran against the embankment, forming an impassable angle; it was built of millstone grit of the colour of burnt almonds, like that used for the Paris reservoirs; here dwelt the nuns of Saint Theresa.
Madame Bavoil, as being used to convent ways, pushed open the door which stood ajar, and Durtal saw before him a paved walk between strips of river pebbles, dividing a garden stocked with fruit-trees and geraniums.
Two yews, clipped into spheres, with a cross on the top of each, gave this priestly close a graveyard flavour.
The path led upwards, cut into steps.

When they reached the top Durtal saw a building of brick and plaster pierced with windows guarded by iron bars, and a grey door with a wicket bearing these words painted in white, "O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who put our trust in Thee." He looked about him, surprised at seeing nobody, hearing nothing; but Madame Bavoil beckoned to him, made her way round the house, and led the way into a sort of vestibule along which clambered a vine wrapped in swathing, and she turned into a little chapel, where she knelt down on the flagstones.
Durtal, amazed, seemed to breathe the melancholy that weighed on this naked sanctuary.
He was in a building of the end of the eighteenth century; in the middle, raised on eight steps, stood an altar of wax-polished wood in the shape of a tomb; above it was a shrine covered with a curtain of white brocade and surmounted by a picture of the Annunciation, a washy painting mounted in a gilt frame.

To the right and left were two medallions in relief, on one side Saint Joseph and on the other Saint Theresa, and above the picture, close to the ceiling, were the arms of the Carmelites, also in relief: a shield with a cross and stars beneath a marquis's coronet, from which an arm emerges wielding a sword.

This was held up by fat little angels, the swollen infants of the sculptors of that period, and floating in the air was a scroll bearing the motto of the order: "_Zelo, zelatus sum, pro Domino Deo Exercituum_." Finally, to the right of the altar, the iron grating of the nunnery was seen in an arch in the wall; and on the steps of the altar, inside the railing for the communicants, an annoying statue was emerging from under a gilt canopy--the Infant Christ holding a globe in one hand, and raising the other as if to command attention; a statue of painted plaster as of some precocious mountebank, with homage offered in this deserted chapel, of two pots of hydrangea and a floating wick in a crimson glass.
"How cold and dismal is such _rococo_!" thought Durtal.

He knelt down on a chair, and by degrees his impressions underwent a change.