the Salon Carre he pointed to the window and said:

"That is the balcony where Charles IX fired on the people!"

With a magnificent gesture he ordered his party to stand still in the
center of the Salon Carre.

"There are only chefs-d'oeuvres here," he whispered as solemnly as if
he had been in a church.

They walked around the salon. Gervaise asked the meaning of one of
the pictures, the _Noces de Cana_; Coupeau stopped before _La
Joconde_, declaring that it was like one of his aunts.

Boche and Bibi-la-Grillade snickered and pushed each other at the
sight of the nude female figures, and the Gaudrons, husband and wife,
stood open-mouthed and deeply touched before Murillo's Virgin.

When they had been once around the room Madinier, who was quite
attentive to Mme Lorilleux on account of her silk gown, proposed
they should do it over again; it was well worth it, he said.

He never hesitated in replying to any question which she addressed
to him in her thirst for information, and when she stopped before
Titian's Mistress, whose yellow hair struck her as like her own, he
told her it was a mistress of Henri IV, who was the heroine of a play
then running at the Ambigu.

The wedding party finally entered the long gallery devoted to the
Italian and Flemish schools of art. The pictures were all meaningless