The Elm-Tree on the Mall by Anatole France

It is true that Abbé Guitrel, professor of sacred rhetoric at the high seminary of…, was intimately connected with M. _le préfet_ Worms-Clavelin and with Madame Worms-Clavelin, _née_ Coblentz. But Abbé Lantaigne was wrong in believing that M. Guitrel frequented the drawing-rooms of the prefecture, where his presence would have been equally disquieting to the Archbishop and to the masonic lodges, since the _préfet_ was master of the lodge "The Rising Sun." It was in the confectioner's shop kept by Dame Magloire in the Place Saint-Exupère, where he went every Saturday at five o'clock to buy two little three-sou cakes, one for his servant and the other for himself, that the priest had met the _préfet's_ wife, while she was eating _babas_ there in the company of Madame Lacarelle, wife of M. _le préfet's_ private secretary.

By his demeanour, at once obsequious and discreet, which inspired entire confidence and removed all apprehensions, the professor of sacred rhetoric had instantly gained the good graces of Madame Worms-Clavelin, to whom he suggested the mind, the face, and almost the sex of those old-clothes women, the guardian angels of her youth in the difficult days of Batignolles and the Place Clichy, when Noémi Coblentz had finished growing up and was beginning to fade in the business office kept by her father Isaac in the midst of distress-sales and police-raids. One of these dealers in second-hand clothes, a Madame Vacherie, who esteemed her, had acted as go-between for her and an active and promising young barrister, M. Théodore Worms-Clavelin, who, finding her seriously-minded and practically useful, had married her after the birth of their daughter Jeanne, and she in return had cleverly pushed him in the administration. Abbé Guitrel was very much like Madame Vacherie.