"Mon cher, it is dangerous to be too curious, je suis un prêtre."
Some days after—it was on a winter's morning, when a little snow had fallen—I chanced to glance over into the court on which the mysterious window looked, and saw the beautiful foot-mark of a lady's slipper. It was scarce longer than my hand—too narrow and delicately formed for a child's foot, least of all the foot of such children as belonged to the Rue de Seine. I could not but associate the foot-track—so small, so beautiful, and so unlocked for in such scene—with the veil I had seen at the window.
Through all of my morning's lesson—I was then reading La Grammaire des Grammaires—I could think of nothing but the pretty foot-track in the snow. No such foot, I was quite sure, could be seen in the dirty Rue de Seine—not even the shop-girls of the Rue de la Paix, or the tidiest Llorettes could boast of one so pretty.
I asked the abbé to walk with me; and as we passed the corridor, I threw my eye carelessly into the court, as if it were only my first observation, and said as quietly as possible, "Mon cher abbé, the snow tells tales this morning."
The abbé looked curiously down upon the foot-marks, ran his eye rapidly over the windows, turned to me, shook his head expressively, and said, as he glanced down again, "O'etait un fort joli petit soulier." (It was a very pretty little shoe.)
"Whose was it?" said I.
"Mon cher, I do not know."
I still kept up, day after day, my watch upon the window. It shortly supplied me with an important link in the chain of observations. I saw lying within the glass, against which the veil yet hung, nothing more nor less than the same little shoe, I thoroughly believed, which had made the delicate foot-marks on the snow in the court. Not a prettier shoe could be seen on the Boulevards, and scarce one so small. It would have been very strange to see such delicate articles of dress at any hotels of the neighborhood, and stranger still to find them in the humblest window of so dismal a court.
There was a mystery about the matter that perplexed me. Every one knows, who knows any thing about Paris, that that part of the city along the Rue de Seine, between the Rues Jacob and Bussy, and though very reputable in its way, is yet no place for delicate ladies, not even as a promenade, and much less as a residence. It is assigned over, as well by common consent as custom, to medical students, shop-men, attorneys, physicians, priests, lodging-house keepers, market-men, sub-officials, shop-women, second-class milliners, and grisettes.
Indeed a delicate lady—and such only, I was sure, could have left the foot-print in the court, and be the owner of the shoe I had seen—could hardly pass through the Rue de Seine without drawing the eyes of all the lodgers on the street. Dried up hag faces would have met the apparition with a leer; the porters would have turned to stare, and she would have had very suspicious followers.