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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, En Route, by J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans,
+Translated by W. Fleming
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: En Route
+
+
+Author: J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 31, 2007  [eBook #24096]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EN ROUTE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Camille François, Suzanne Shell, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+EN ROUTE
+
+by
+
+J. K. HUYSMANS
+
+Translated by W. Fleming
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+EN ROUTE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+During the first week in November, the week within the Octave of All
+Souls, Durtal entered St. Sulpice, at eight o'clock in the evening. He
+often chose to turn into that church, because there was a trained choir,
+and because he could there examine himself at peace, apart from the
+crowd. The ugliness of the nave, with its heavy vaulting, vanished at
+night, the aisles were often empty, it was ill-lighted by a few
+lamps--it was possible for a man to chide his soul in secret, as if at
+home.
+
+Durtal sat down behind the high altar, on the left, in the aisle along
+the Rue de St. Sulpice; the lamps of the choir organ were lighted. Far
+off, in the almost empty nave, an ecclesiastic was preaching. He
+recognized, by the unctuousness of his delivery, and his oily accent, a
+well-fed priest who poured on his audience, according to his wont, his
+best known commonplaces.
+
+"Why are they so devoid of eloquence?" thought Durtal. "I have had the
+curiosity to listen to many of them, and they are much the same. They
+only vary in the tones of their voice. According to their temperament,
+some are bruised down in vinegar, others steeped in oil. There is no
+such thing as a clever combination." And he called to mind orators
+petted like tenors, Monsabré, Didon, those Coquelins of the Church, and
+lower yet than those products of the Catholic training school, that
+bellicose booby the Abbé d'Hulst.
+
+"Afterwards," he continued, "come the mediocrities, each puffed by the
+handful of devotees who listen to them. If those cooks of the soul had
+any skill, if they served their clients with delicate meats, theological
+essences, gravies of prayer, concentrated sauces of ideas, they would
+vegetate misunderstood by their flocks. So, on the whole, it is all for
+the best. The low-water mark of the clergy must conform to the level of
+the faithful, and indeed Providence has provided carefully for this."
+
+A stamping of shoes, then the movement of chairs grinding on the flags
+interrupted him. The sermon was over.
+
+Then a great stillness was broken by a prelude from the organ, which
+dropped to a low tone, a mere accompaniment to the voices.
+
+A slow and mournful chant arose, the "De Profundis." The blended voices
+sounded under the arches, intermingling with the somewhat raw sounds of
+the harmonicas, like the sharp tones of breaking glass.
+
+Resting on the low accompaniment of the organ, aided by basses so hollow
+that they seemed to have descended into themselves, as it were
+underground, they sprang out, chanting the verse "De profundis ad te
+clamavi, Do--" and then stopped in fatigue, letting the last syllables
+"mine" fall like a heavy tear; then these voices of children, near
+breaking, took up the second verse of the psalm, "Domine exaudi vocem
+meam," and the second half of the last word again remained in suspense,
+but instead of separating, and falling to the ground, there to be
+crushed out like a drop, it seemed to gather itself together with a
+supreme effort, and fling to heaven the anguished cry of the
+disincarnate soul, cast naked, and in tears before God.
+
+And after a pause, the organ, aided by two double-basses, bellowed out,
+carrying all the voices in its torrent--baritones, tenors, basses, not
+now serving only as sheaths to the sharp blades of the urchin voices,
+but openly with full throated sound--yet the dash of the little soprani
+pierced them through all at once like a crystal arrow.
+
+Then a fresh pause, and in the silence of the church, the verses mourned
+out anew, thrown up by the organ, as by a spring board. As he listened
+with attention endeavouring to resolve the sounds, closing his eyes,
+Durtal saw them at first almost horizontal, then rising little by
+little, then raising themselves upright, then quivering in tears, before
+their final breaking.
+
+Suddenly at the end of the psalm, when the response of the antiphon
+came--"Et lux perpetua luceat eis"--the children's voices broke into a
+sad, silken cry, a sharp sob, trembling on the word "eis," which
+remained suspended in the void.
+
+These children's voices stretched to breaking, these clear sharp voices
+threw into the darkness of the chant some whiteness of the dawn, joining
+their pure, soft sounds to the resonant tones of the basses, piercing as
+with a jet of living silver the sombre cataract of the deeper singers;
+they sharpened the wailing, strengthened and embittered the burning salt
+of tears, but they insinuated also a sort of protecting caress, balsamic
+freshness, lustral help; they lighted in the darkness those brief gleams
+which tinkle in the Angelus at dawn of day; they called up, anticipating
+the prophecies of the text, the compassionate image of the Virgin,
+passing, in the pale light of their tones, into the darkness of that
+sequence.
+
+The "De Profundis" so chanted was incomparably beautiful. That sublime
+prayer ending in sobs, at the moment when the soul of the voices was
+about to overpass human limits, gave a wrench to Durtal's nerves, and
+made his heart beat. Then he wished to abstract himself, and cling
+especially to the meaning of that sorrowful plaint, in which the fallen
+being calls upon its God with groans and lamentations. Those cries of
+the third verse came back to him, wherein calling on his Saviour in
+despair from the bottom of the abyss, man, now that he knows he is
+heard, hesitates ashamed, knowing not what to say. The excuses he has
+prepared appear to him vain, the arguments he has arranged seem to him
+of no effect, and he stammers forth; "If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe
+iniquities, Lord, who shall endure it?"
+
+"It is a pity," said Durtal to himself, "that this psalm, which in its
+first verses chants so magnificently the despair of humanity, becomes in
+those which follow more personal to King David. I know well," he went
+on, "that we must accept the symbolic sense of this pleading, admit that
+the despot confounds his own cause with that of God, that his
+adversaries are the unbelievers and the wicked, that he himself,
+according to the doctors of the Church, prefigures the person of Christ;
+but yet the memory of his fleshly desires, and the presumptuous praise
+he gives to his incorrigible people, contracts the scope of the poem.
+Happily the melody has a life apart from the text, a life of its own,
+not arising out of mere tribal dissensions, but extending to all the
+earth, chanting the anguish of the time to be born, as well as of the
+present day, and of the ages which are no more."
+
+The "De Profundis" had ceased; after a silence, the choir intoned a
+motet of the eighteenth century, but Durtal was only moderately
+interested in human music in churches. What seemed to him superior to
+the most vaunted works of theatrical or worldly music, was the old plain
+chant, that even and naked melody, at once ethereal and of the tomb, the
+solemn cry of sadness and lofty shout of joy, those grandiose hymns of
+human faith, which seem to well up in the cathedrals, like irresistible
+geysers, at the very foot of the Romanesque columns. What music, however
+ample, sorrowful or tender, is worth the "De Profundis" chanted in
+unison, the solemnity of the "Magnificat," the splendid warmth of the
+"Lauda Sion," the enthusiasm of the "Salve Regina," the sorrow of the
+"Miserere," and the "Stabat Mater," the majestic omnipotence of the "Te
+Deum"? Artists of genius have set themselves to translate the sacred
+texts: Vittoria, Josquin de Près, Palestrina, Orlando Lasso, Handel,
+Bach, Haydn, have written wonderful pages; often indeed they have been
+uplifted by the mystic effluence, the very emanation of the Middle Ages,
+for ever lost; and yet their works have retained a certain pomp, and in
+spite of all are pretentious, as opposed to the humble magnificence, the
+sober splendour of the Gregorian chant--with them the whole thing came
+to an end, for composers no longer believed.
+
+Yet in modern times some religious pieces may be cited of Lesueur,
+Wagner, Berlioz, and Cĉsar Franck, and in these again we are conscious
+of the artist underlying his work, the artist determined to show his
+skill, thinking to exalt his own glory, and therefore leaving God out.
+We feel ourselves in the presence of superior men, but men with their
+weaknesses, their inseparable vanity, and even the vice of their senses.
+In the liturgical chant, created almost always anonymously in the depth
+of the cloisters, was an extraterrestrial well, without taint of sin or
+trace of art. It was an uprising of souls already freed from the slavery
+of the flesh, an explosion of elevated tenderness and pure joy, it was
+also the idiom of the Church, a musical gospel appealing like the Gospel
+itself at once to the most refined and the most humble.
+
+Ah! the true proof of Catholicism was that art which it had founded, an
+art which has never been surpassed; in painting and sculpture the Early
+Masters, mystics in poetry and in prose, in music plain chant, in
+architecture the Romanesque and Gothic styles. And all this held
+together and blazed in one sheaf, on one and the same altar; all was
+reconciled in one unique cluster of thoughts: to revere, adore and serve
+the Dispenser, showing to Him reflected in the soul of His creature, as
+in a faithful mirror, the still immaculate treasure of His gifts.
+
+Then in those marvellous Middle Ages, wherein Art, foster-child of the
+Church, encroached on death and advanced to the threshold of Eternity,
+and to God, the divine concept and the heavenly form were guessed and
+half-perceived, for the first and perhaps for the last time by man. They
+answered and echoed each other--art calling to art.
+
+The Virgins had faces almond-shaped, elongated like those ogives which
+the Gothic style contrived in order to distribute an ascetic light, a
+virginal dawn in the mysterious shrine of its naves. In the pictures of
+the Early Masters the complexion of holy women becomes transparent as
+Paschal wax, and their hair is pale as golden grains of frankincense,
+their childlike bosoms scarcely swell, their brows are rounded like the
+glass of the pyx, their fingers taper, their bodies shoot upwards like
+delicate columns. Their beauty becomes, as it were, liturgical. They
+seem to live in the fire of stained glass, borrowing from the flaming
+whirlwind of the rose-windows the circles of their aureoles. The ardent
+blue of their eyes, the dying embers of their lips, keeping for their
+garments the colours they disdain for their flesh, stripping them of
+their light, changing them, when they transfer them to stuffs, into
+opaque tones which aid still more by their contrast to declare the
+seraphic clearness of their look, the grievous paleness of the mouth, to
+which, according to the Proper of the season, the scent of the lily of
+the Canticles or the penitential fragrance of myrrh in the Psalms lend
+their perfume.
+
+Then among artists was a coalition of brains, a welding together of
+souls. Painters associated themselves in the same ideal of beauty with
+architects, they united in an indestructible relation cathedrals and
+saints, only reversing the usual process--they framed the jewel
+according to the shrine, and modelled the relics for the reliquary.
+
+On their side the sequences chanted by the Church had subtle affinities
+with the canvases of the Early Painters.
+
+Vittoria's responses for Tenebrĉ are of a like inspiration and an equal
+loftiness with those of Quentin Matsys' great work, the Entombment of
+Christ. The "Regina Coeli" of the Flemish musician Lasso has the same
+good faith, the same simple and strange attraction, as certain statues
+of a reredos, or religious pictures of the elder Breughel. Lastly, the
+Miserere of Josquin de Près, choirmaster of Louis XII., has, like the
+panels of the Early Masters of Burgundy and Flanders, a patient
+intention, a stiff, threadlike simplicity, but also it exhales like them
+a truly mystical savour, and its awkwardness of outline is very
+touching.
+
+The ideal of all these works is the same and attained by different
+means.
+
+As for plain chant, the agreement of its melody with architecture is
+also certain; it also bends from time to time like the sombre Romanesque
+arcades, and rises, shadowy and pensive, like complete vaulting. The "De
+Profundis," for instance, curves in on itself like those great groins
+which form the smoky skeleton of the bays; it is like them slow and
+dark, extends itself only in obscurity and moves only in the shadow of
+the crypts.
+
+Sometimes, on the other hand, the Gregorian chant seems to borrow from
+Gothic its flowery tendrils, its scattered pinnacles, its gauzy rolls,
+its tremulous lace, its trimmings light and thin as the voices of
+children. Then it passes from one extreme to another, from the amplitude
+of sorrow to an infinite joy; at other times again, the plain music, and
+the Christian music to which it gave birth, lend themselves, like
+sculpture, to the gaiety of the people, associate themselves with simple
+gladness, and the sculptured merriment of the ancient porches; they take
+the popular rhythm of the crowd, as in the Christmas carol "Adeste
+Fideles" and in the Paschal hymn "O Filii et Filiĉ;" they become trivial
+and familiar like the Gospels, submitting themselves to the humble
+wishes of the poor, lending them a holiday tune easy to catch, a
+running melody which carries them into pure regions where these simple
+souls can cast themselves at the indulgent feet of Christ.
+
+Born of the Church, and bred up by her in the choir-schools of the
+Middle Ages, plain chant is the aerial and mobile paraphrase of the
+immovable structure of the cathedrals; it is the immaterial and fluid
+interpretation of the canvases of the Early Painters; it is a winged
+translation, but also the strict and unbending stole of those Latin
+sequences, which the monks built up or hewed out in the cloisters in the
+far-off olden time.
+
+Now it is changed and disconnected, foolishly overwhelmed by the crash
+of organs, and is chanted, God knows how!
+
+Most choirs when they intone it, like to imitate the rumbling and
+gurgling of water-pipes, others the grating of rattles, the creaking of
+pullies, the grinding of a crane, but, in spite of all, its beauty
+remains, unextinguished, dulled though it be, by the wild bellowing of
+the singers.
+
+The sudden silence in the church roused Durtal. He rose and looked about
+him; in his corner was no one save two poor women, asleep, their feet on
+the bars of chairs, their heads on their knees. Leaning forward a
+little, he saw, hanging above him in a dark chapel, the light of a lamp,
+like a ruby in its red glass; no sound save the military tread of the
+Suisse, making his round in the distance.
+
+Durtal sat down again; the sweetness of his solitude was enhanced by the
+aromatic perfume of wax, and the memories, now faint, of incense, but it
+was suddenly broken. As the first chords crashed on the organ Durtal
+recognized the "Dies irĉ," that despairing hymn of the Middle Ages;
+instinctively he bowed his head and listened.
+
+This was no more as in the "De Profundis" an humble supplication, a
+suffering which believes it has been heard, and discerns a path of light
+to guide it in the darkness, no longer the prayer which has hope enough
+not to tremble; it was the cry of absolute desolation and of terror.
+
+And, indeed, the wrath divine breathed tempestuously through these
+stanzas. They seemed addressed less to the God of mercy, to the Son who
+listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him whom the Old
+Testament shows us, overcome with anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke
+of the pyres, the inconceivable attractions of burnt-offerings. In this
+chant it asserted itself still more savagely, for it threatened to
+strike the waters, and break in pieces the mountains, and to rend
+asunder the depths of heaven by thunder-bolts. And the earth, alarmed,
+cried out in fear.
+
+A crystalline voice, a clear child's voice, proclaimed in the nave the
+tidings of these cataclysms, and after this the choir chanted new
+strophes wherein the implacable judge came with shattering blare of
+trumpet, to purify by fire the rottenness of the world.
+
+Then, in its turn, a bass, deep as a vault, as though issuing from the
+crypt, accentuated the horror of these prophecies, made these threats
+more overwhelming, and after a short strain by the choir, an alto
+repeated them in yet more detail. Then, so soon as the awful poem had
+exhausted the enumeration of chastisement and suffering, in shrill
+tones--the falsetto of a little boy--the name of Jesus went by, and a
+light broke in on the thunder-cloud, the panting universe cried for
+pardon, recalling, by all the voices of the choir, the infinite mercies
+of the Saviour, and His pardon, pleading with Him for absolution, as
+formerly He had spared the penitent thief and the Magdalen.
+
+But in the same despairing and headstrong melody the tempest raged
+again, drowned with its waves the half-seen shores of heaven, and the
+solos continued, discouraged, interrupted by the recurrent weeping of
+the choir, giving, with the diversity of voices, a body to the special
+conditions of shame, the particular states of fear, the different ages
+of tears.
+
+At last, when still mixed and blended, these voices had borne away on
+the great waters of the organ all the wreckage of human sorrows, all the
+buoys of prayers and tears, they fell exhausted, paralyzed by terror,
+wailing and sighing like a child who hides its face, stammering "Dona
+eis requiem," they ended, worn out, in an Amen so plaintive, that it
+died away in a breath above the sobbing of the organ.
+
+What man could have imagined such despair, dreamed of such disasters?
+And Durtal made answer to himself: "No man."
+
+In fact the attempt has been vain to discover the author both of the
+music and of the sequence. They have been attributed to Frangipani,
+Thomas of Celano, St. Bernard and a crowd of others, and they have
+remained anonymous, simply formed by the sad alluvial deposits of the
+age. The "Dies irĉ" seemed to have, at first, fallen, like a seed of
+desolation, among the distracted souls of the eleventh century; it
+germinated there and grew slowly, nurtured by the sap of anguish,
+watered by the rain of tears. It was at last pruned when it seemed ripe,
+and had, perhaps, thrown out too many branches, for in one of the
+earliest known texts, a stanza, which has since disappeared, called up
+the magnificent and barbarous image of an earth revolving as it belched
+forth flames, while the constellations burst into shards, and heaven
+shrivelled like a parched scroll.
+
+"All this," concluded Durtal, "does not prevent these triple stanzas
+woven of shadow and cold, full of reverberating rhymes, and hard echoes,
+this music of rude stuff which wraps the phrases like a shroud, and
+masks the rigid outlines of the work, from being admirable! Yet that
+chant which constrains, and renders with such energy the breadth of the
+sequence, that melodic period, which without variation, remaining always
+the same, succeeds in expressing by turns prayer and terror, moves me
+less than the 'De Profundis,' which yet has not its grandiose
+spaciousness nor that artistic cry of despair.
+
+"But chanted to the organ the psalm is earthy and suffocating. It comes
+from out the very depths of the sepulchre, while the 'Dies irĉ' has its
+source only on the sill of the tomb. The first is the very voice of the
+dead, the second that of the living who inter him, and the dead man
+weeps, but takes courage a little, when those that bury him despair.
+
+"To sum up," Durtal concluded, "I prefer the text of the 'Dies irĉ' to
+that of the 'De Profundis,' and the melody of the 'De Profundis' to that
+of the 'Dies irĉ.' It is true also that this last sequence is
+modernized, and chanted theatrically here, without the imposing and
+needful march of unison.
+
+"This time, for instance, it is devoid of interest," he continued,
+ceasing his thoughts for a moment, to listen to the piece of modern
+music which the choir was just then rendering. "Ah, who will take on
+himself to proscribe that pert mysticism, those fonts of toilet-water
+which Gounod invented!... There ought indeed to be astonishing
+penalties for choir masters who allow such musical effeminacy in church.
+This is, as it was this morning at the Madeleine, when I happened to be
+present at the interminable funeral of an old banker; they played a
+military march with violin and violoncello accompaniments, with trumpets
+and timbrels, a heroic and worldly march to celebrate the departure and
+the decomposition of a financier!... It is too absurd." And listening no
+more to the music in St. Sulpice, Durtal transferred himself in thought
+to the Madeleine, and went off at full speed in his dreams.
+
+"Indeed," he said to himself, "the clergy make Jesus like a tourist,
+when they invite Him daily to come down into that church whose exterior
+is surmounted by no cross, and whose interior is like the grand
+reception-room at an hotel. But how can you make those priests
+understand that ugliness is sacrilege, and that nothing is equal to the
+frightful sin of this confusion of Romanesque and Greek, these pictures
+of aged men, that flat ceiling studded with skylights, from which filter
+in all weathers the spoiled gleams of a rainy day, to that futile altar
+surmounted by a circle of angels who, in discreet abandonment, dance in
+honour of our Lady, a motionless marble rigadoon?"
+
+Yet in the Madeleine, at a funeral, when the door opens, and the corpse
+advances in a gap of daylight, all is changed. Like a superterrestrial
+antiseptic, an extrahuman disinfectant, the liturgy purifies and
+cleanses the impious ugliness of the place.
+
+And thinking over his memories of the morning, Durtal saw again, as he
+closed his eyes, at the end of the semicircular apse, the procession of
+red and black robes, white surplices, joining in front of the altar,
+descending the steps together, making their way together to the
+catafalque, dividing again on each aide, joining to mix afresh in the
+great gangway between the chairs.
+
+This slow and silent procession, led by incomparable Suisses, in
+mourning, their swords horizontal, and a general's epaulets in jet,
+advanced, preceded by a cross, in front of the corpse laid on tressels,
+and far-off in all that confusion of lights falling from the roof, and
+lighted flambeaux round the catafalque and on the altar, the white of
+the tapers disappeared, and the priests who bore them seemed to march
+with empty hands uplifted as though to point out the stars which
+accompanied them, twinkling above their heads.
+
+Then when the bier was surrounded by the clergy, the "De Profundis"
+burst forth from the depths of the sanctuary, intoned by invisible
+singers.
+
+"That was good," said Durtal to himself. At the Madeleine the voices of
+the children are sharp and feeble, and the basses are badly trained and
+failing; we are evidently far from the choir of St. Sulpice, but all the
+same it was superb; then what a moment was that of the priests'
+communion, when suddenly arising from the murmuring of the choir, the
+voice of the tenor threw above the corpse the magnificent plain chant
+antiphon--
+
+    "Requiem ĉternam dona eis Domine
+    Et lux perpetua luceat eis."
+
+It seems that after all the lamentations of the "De Profundis" and the
+"Dies irĉ," the presence of God, who comes then upon the altar, brings
+consolation, and sanctions the confident and solemn pride of that
+melodious phrase, which then invokes Christ, without dread and without
+tears.
+
+The mass ended, the celebrant disappeared, and, as at the moment when
+the corpse entered, the clergy, preceded by the Suisses, advanced
+towards the body, and in the blazing circle of the tapers, a priest, in
+his cope, said the mighty prayers of the general absolution.
+
+Then the liturgy took a higher tone, and became still more admirable.
+Mediative between the sinner and the judge, the Church, by the mouth of
+her priest, implores the Lord to pardon the poor soul: "Non intres in
+judicium cum servo tuo Domine"--then after the amen given by the organ
+and all the choir, a voice arose in the silence, and spoke in the name
+of the dead:--
+
+"Libera me!"
+
+and the choir continued the old chant of the tenth century. Just as in
+the "Dies irĉ," which appropriates to itself fragments of these plaints,
+the Last Judgment flamed out, and pitiless responses declare to the dead
+the reality of his alarms, declare to him that at the end of Time the
+Judge will come with the crash of thunder to chastise the world.
+
+The priest marched round the catafalque, sprinkling it with beads of
+holy water, incensed it, gave shelter to the poor weeping soul, consoled
+it, took it to himself, covered it, as it were, with his cope, and
+again, intervened to pray that, after so much weariness and sorrow, the
+Lord will permit the unhappy one to sleep the sleep that knows no
+waking, far from earth's noises.
+
+Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more august
+mission been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above
+humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while
+earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and
+intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who
+has no doubt forgotten her since that day, and may even have persecuted
+her up to the hour of his death.
+
+Nor does the Church shrink from the task. Before that fleshly dust
+heaped in a chest, she thinks of that sewage of the soul, and cries:
+"From the gates of hell deliver him, O Lord!" but at the end of the
+general absolution, at the moment when the procession, turning its back,
+is on the way to the sacristy, she too seems disquieted. Perhaps
+recalling in an instant, the ill deeds done by that body while it was
+alive, she seemed to doubt if her supplications were heard, and the
+doubt her words would not frame, passed into the intonation of the last
+amen, murmured at the Madeleine, by children's voices.
+
+Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this amen said: "We have done
+what we could, but ... but ..." And in the funereal silence which
+followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble
+reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a
+carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be
+made into soap at the factories.
+
+"If," continued Durtal, "in opposition to these sad prayers, these
+eloquent absolutions, we call up before us a marriage mass, all is
+changed. There the Church is disarmed and her musical liturgy is as
+nought. Then she may well play Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and borrow
+from profane authors the gaiety of their songs to celebrate the brief
+and empty joy of the body. Imagine, and indeed it happens, the canticle
+of the Virgin used to magnify the glad impatience of a bride. Fancy the
+Te Deum, to hymn the blessedness of a bridegroom!"
+
+Far away from this infamous barter of the flesh, plain chant remains
+shut up in the antiphonaries, like a monk in the cloister, and when it
+goes forth, it is to cast up before Christ his garnered pains and
+sorrows. It gathers and sums them up in admirable supplications, and if,
+fatigued with pleading it adores, its impulse is to glorify eternal
+events, Palm Sunday and Easter, Pentecost and the Ascension, Epiphany
+and Christmas, then its joy bursts forth so magnificently, that it
+springs beyond the world to show its ecstatic joy at the feet of God.
+
+As to the very ceremonies of the funeral, they are now only the regular
+way of getting money, an official routine, a prayer-wheel which is
+turned mechanically without thought of it.
+
+The organist while he plays thinks of his family, and considers how
+wearied he is; the bellows-blower thinks, as he fills the pipes, of the
+half-pint which will dry his sweat; the tenors and basses are careful of
+their effects, and admire themselves in the more or less rippled water
+of their voices; the choir boys dream of their scampers after mass; and,
+moreover, not one of them at all understands a word of the Latin they
+sing and abridge, as for instance the "Dies irĉ," of which they suppress
+a part of the stanzas.
+
+In its turn beadledom calculates the sum the dead man brings in, and
+even the priest, wearied with the prayers of which he has read so many,
+and needing his breakfast, prays mechanically from the lips outward,
+while the assistants are in a hurry that the mass to which they have not
+listened should come to an end, that they may shake hands with the
+relations, and leave the dead.
+
+There is absolute inattention, profound weariness. Yet how terrible is
+that thing on the tressels that is waiting there in the church, that
+empty dwelling-place, that body which is already breaking up. Liquid
+manure that stinks, gases which evaporate, flesh that rots is all that
+remains!
+
+And the soul, now that life is over, and all begins? No one thinks of
+it, not even the family worn out by the length of the service, absorbed
+in their own sorrow; who in fact regret only the visible presence of the
+being they have lost; no one except myself, thought Durtal, and a few
+curious people, who associate themselves in their alarm with the "Dies
+irĉ" and the "Libera," of which they understand both the language and
+the meaning.
+
+Then by the external sound of the words, without the aid of
+contemplation, without even the help of thought, the Church acts.
+
+There it is, the miracle of her liturgy, the power of her word, the
+constantly renewed prodigy of phrases created by revolving time, of
+prayers arranged by ages which are dead. All has passed, nothing exists
+that was raised up in those bygone times. Yet those sequences remain
+intact, cried aloud by indifferent voices and cast out from empty
+hearts, plead, groan, and implore even with efficacy, by their virtual
+power, their talismanic might, their inalienable beauty by the almighty
+confidence of their faith. The Middle Ages have left us these to help us
+to save, if it may be, the soul of the modern and dead fine gentleman.
+
+At the present time, concluded Durtal, there is nothing left peculiar to
+Paris, but the ceremonies, very like each other, of taking the veil and
+of funerals. It is unfortunate that when we have to do with a sumptuous
+corpse, undertakers have their way.
+
+They then bring out their terrible upholstery, plated statues of our
+Lady in atrocious taste, zinc basins in which blaze bowls of green
+punch, tin candelabra at the end of a branch, like a cannon on end with
+its mouth upwards, supporting spiders on their backs, with burning
+candles set about their legs, all the funeral ironmongery of the First
+Empire, with curtain rods in relief, acanthus leaves, winged
+hour-glasses, lozenges and Greek frets. It is unfortunate, too, that to
+touch up the miserable furniture of these ceremonies they play Massenet
+and Dubois, Benjamin Godard and Widor, or, worse still, the sacristy
+orchestra, mystical bellowing, such as the women sing, who are
+affiliated to the confraternities of the month of May.
+
+And alas, we hear no longer the tempests of the great organs and the
+majestic dolours of plain chant, save at the funerals of the monied
+classes; for the poor, nothing--no choir, no organ, just a handful of
+prayers, then a few dips of the brush in the holy water stoup, and there
+is a dead man the more on whom the rain falls, who is carried away. But
+the Church knows that the carrion of the rich rots as much as that of
+the poor, while his soul stinks more, but she jobs indulgences and
+haggles about masses; she, even she, is consumed by the lust of gold.
+
+"Yet I must not think too ill of these wealthy fools," said Durtal,
+after silent thought, "for after all it is thanks to them that I can
+hear the admirable liturgy of the burial service, these people who
+perhaps have done no good action in their life, do at least this
+kindness to a few, without knowing it, after their death."
+
+A noise recalled him to St. Sulpice; the choir was going, the church was
+about to close. "I might as well have tried to pray," he said to
+himself, "it would have been better than to dream in the empty church on
+a chair. Pray indeed? I have no desire for it. I am haunted by
+Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and wax, I prowl
+about it, moved even to tears by its prayers, touched even to the marrow
+by its psalms and chants. I am thoroughly disgusted with my life, very
+tired of myself, but it is a far cry from that to leading a different
+existence! And yet--and yet ... If I am perturbed in these chapels, I
+become unmoved and dry again, as soon as I leave them. After all," he
+said to himself, getting up, and following the few persons who were
+moving towards a door, driven out by the Suisse, "after all, my heart is
+hardened and smoke-dried by dissipation, I am good for nothing."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+How had he again become a Catholic, and got to this point?
+
+Durtal answered himself: "I cannot tell, all that I know is that, having
+been for years an unbeliever, I suddenly believe.
+
+"Let us see," he said to himself, "let us try at least to consider if,
+however great the obscurity of such a subject, there be not common sense
+in it.
+
+"After all, my surprise depends on preconceived ideas of conversions. I
+have heard of sudden and violent crises of the soul, of a thunderbolt,
+or even of faith exploding at last in ground slowly and cleverly mined.
+It is quite evident that conversions may happen in one or other of these
+two ways, for God acts as may seem good to Him, but there must be also a
+third means, and this no doubt the most usual, which the Saviour has
+used in my case. And I know not in what this consists; it is something
+analogous to digestion in a stomach, which works though we do not feel
+it. There has been no road to Damascus, no events to bring about a
+crisis; nothing has happened, we awake some fine morning, and, without
+knowing how or why, the thing is done.
+
+"Yes, but in fact this manoeuvre is very like that of the mine which
+only explodes after it has been deeply dug. Yet not so, for in that case
+the operations are material, the objections in the way are resolved; I
+might have reasoned, followed the course of the spark along the thread,
+but in this case, no! I sprang unexpectedly, without warning, without
+even having suspected that I was so carefully sapped. Nor was it a clap
+of thunder, unless I admit that a clap of thunder can, be occult and
+silent, strange and gentle. And this again would be untrue, for sudden
+disorder of the soul almost always follows a misfortune or a crime, an
+act of which we are aware.
+
+"No, the one thing which seems certain, in my case, is that there has
+been divine impulse, grace.
+
+"But," said he, "in that case the psychology of conversion is
+worthless," and he made answer to himself,--
+
+"That seems to be so, for I seek in vain to retrace the stages through
+which I have passed; no doubt I can distinguish here and there some
+landmarks on the road I have travelled: love of art, heredity, weariness
+of life; I can even recall some of the forgotten sensations of
+childhood, the subterranean workings of ideas excited by my visits to
+the churches; but I am unable to gather these threads together, and
+group them in a skein, I cannot understand the sudden and silent
+explosion of light which took place in me. When I seek to explain to
+myself how one evening an unbeliever, I became without knowing it, on
+one night a believer, I can discover nothing, for the divine action has
+vanished, and left no trace.
+
+"It is certain," he continued, after silent thought, "that in these
+cases the Virgin acts upon us, it is she who moulds and places us in the
+hands of her Son, but her fingers are so light, so supple, so caressing,
+that the soul they have handled has felt nothing.
+
+"On the other hand, if I ignore the course and stages of my conversion,
+I can at least guess the motives which, after a life of indifference,
+have brought me into the harbours of the Church, made me wander round
+about her borders, and finally gave me a shove from behind to bring me
+in."
+
+And he said to himself, without more ado, there are three causes:--
+
+"First, the atavism of an old and pious family, scattered among the
+monasteries;" and the memories of childhood returned to him, of cousins,
+of aunts, seen in convent parlours; gentle women and grave, white as
+wafers, who alarmed him by their low voices, who troubled him by their
+looks, and asked if he were a good boy.
+
+He felt a sort of terror, and hid himself in his mother's skirts,
+trembling when he went away, and was obliged to bend his brow to those
+colourless lips, and undergo the touch of a chilly kiss.
+
+Now that he thought of them at a distance, the interviews which had
+wearied him so much in his childhood, seemed to him charming. He put
+into them all the poetry of the cloister, clothed those bare parlours
+with a faded scent of wainscotting and of wax, and he saw again the
+convent gardens through which he had passed, impregnated with the bitter
+salt scent of box, planted with clipped hedges, intermingled with
+trellises, whose green grapes never ripened, divided by benches whose
+mouldering stone kept the traces worn by water; and a thousand details
+came back to him of those silent lime alleys, of the paths where he ran
+in the interlaced shade which branches threw upon the ground. These
+gardens had seemed to him to become larger as he grew older, and he
+retained a somewhat confused memory of them, amid which was the vague
+recollection of an old stately park, and of a presbytery orchard in the
+north, always somewhat damp, even when the sun shone.
+
+It was not surprising that these sensations, transformed by time, had
+left in him some traces of pious thought, which grew deeper as his mind
+embellished them; all this might have fermented indistinctly for thirty
+years, and now began to work.
+
+But the two other causes which he knew, must have been still more
+active.
+
+These were his disgust for his life, and his passion for art; and the
+disgust was certainly aggravated by his solitude and his idleness.
+
+After having, in old days, made friends by chance, and having taken the
+impression of souls which had nothing in common with his own, he had at
+last chosen after much useless vagabondage; he had become the intimate
+friend of a certain Doctor des Hermies, a physician, who devoted much
+attention to demoniac possession and to mysticism, and of a Breton,
+named Carhaix, the bell-ringer at St. Sulpice.
+
+These friendships were not like those he had formerly made, entirely
+superficial and external, they were wide and deep, based on similarity
+of thought, and the indissoluble ties of soul, and these had been
+roughly broken; within two months of each other Des Hermies and Carhaix
+died, the former of typhoid fever, the latter of a chill that
+prostrated him in his tower, after he had rung the evening Angelus.
+
+These were frightful blows for Durtal. His life, now without an anchor,
+drifted; he wandered all astray, declaring to himself that this
+desolation was final, since he had reached an age at which new friends
+are not made.
+
+So he lived alone, apart among his books, but the solitude which he bore
+bravely, when he was occupied, when he was writing a book, became
+intolerable to him now that he was idle. He lounged in an arm-chair in
+the afternoons, and abandoned himself to his dreams: then, especially,
+fixed ideas took hold on him, and these ended by playing pantomimes of
+which the scenes never varied behind the lowered curtain of his eyes.
+Nude figures danced in his brain to the tune of psalms, and he woke from
+these dreams weak and panting, ready, if a priest had been there, to
+throw himself at his feet with tears, just as he would have abandoned
+himself to the basest pleasures, had the temptation suddenly come to
+him.
+
+"Let me chase away these phantoms by work," he cried. But at what should
+he work? He had just published the "Life of Gilles de Rais," which might
+interest a few artists, and he now remained without a subject, on the
+hunt for a book. As, in art, he was a man of extremes, he always went
+from one excess to the other, and after having dived into the Satanism
+of the Middle Ages, in his account of "Marshal de Rais," he saw nothing
+so interesting to investigate as the life of a saint. Some lines which
+he had discovered in Görres' and Ribet's "Studies in Mysticism" had put
+him on the trace of a certain Blessed Lidwine in search of new
+documents.
+
+But admitting that he could unearth anything about her, could he write
+the life of a saint? He did not believe it, and the arguments on which
+he based his opinion seemed plausible.
+
+Hagiography was now a lost branch of art, as completely lost as wood
+carving, and the miniatures of the old missals. Nowadays it is only
+treated by church officers and priests, by those stylistic agents who
+seem when they write to put the embryos of their ideas on ballast
+trucks, and in their hands it has become a commonplace of goody-goody, a
+translation into a book of the statuettes of Froc Robert, and the
+coloured images of Bouasse.
+
+The way then was free, and it seemed at first easy enough to plan it
+out, but to extract the charm of the legends needed the simple language
+of bygone centuries, the ingenuous phrases of the days that are dead.
+Who in our time can express the melancholy essence, the pale perfume of
+the ancient translations of the Golden Legend of Voragine, how bind in
+one bright posy the plaintive flowers, which the monks cultivated in
+their cloistered enclosures, when hagiography was the sister of the
+barbaric and delightful art of the illuminators and glass stainers, of
+the ardent and chaste paintings of the Early Masters?
+
+Yet we may not think of giving ourselves over to studious imitations,
+nor coldly attempt to ape such works as these. The question remains,
+whether we can with the present artistic resources, succeed in setting
+up the humble yet lofty figure of a saint; and this is at least
+doubtful, for the lack of real simplicity, the over-ingenious art of
+style, the tricks of careful design and the false craft of colour would
+probably transform the elect lady into a strolling player. She would be
+no longer a saint, but an actress who rendered the part more or less
+adroitly; and then the charm would be destroyed, the miracles would seem
+mechanical, the episodes would be absurd, then ... then ... one must
+have a lively faith, and believe in the sanctity of one's heroine, if
+one would try to exhume her, and put her alive again in a book.
+
+This is so true that we may examine Gustave Flaubert's admirable pages
+on the legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller. Their development is like a
+dazzling yet regulated tumult, evolved in superb language whose apparent
+simplicity is only due to the complicated ingenuity of consummate skill.
+All is there, all except the accent which would have made this work a
+true masterpiece. Given the subject, the fire which should course
+through these magnificent phrases is absent, there lacks the cry of the
+love that faints, the gift of the superhuman exile, the mystical soul.
+
+On the other hand, Hello's "Physionomies de Saints" are worth reading.
+Faith flashes out in each of his portraits, enthusiasm runs over in each
+chapter, unexpected allusions form deep reservoirs of thought between
+the lines; but after all Hello was so little of an artist that the
+fairest legends fade when his fingers touch them; the meanness of his
+style impoverishes the miracles and renders them ineffectual. The art is
+lacking which would rescue the book from the category of pale and dead
+publications.
+
+The example of these two men, in complete opposition as ever writers
+were, neither of whom attained perfection, one in the legend of St.
+Julian because faith was wanting, the other because his art was poor and
+narrow, thoroughly discouraged Durtal. He ought to be both at once, and
+yet remain himself, if not, there was no good in buckling to for such a
+task, it were better to be silent; and he threw himself back in his
+chair sullen and hopeless. Then the contempt of his desolate life grew
+upon him, and once more he wondered what interest Providence could have
+in thus tormenting the descendants of the first convicts. If there were
+no answer, he was obliged to admit that the Church in these disasters
+gathered up the waifs, sheltered the shipwrecked, brought them home
+again, and assured them a resting-place.
+
+No more than Schopenhauer, whom he had once admired, but whose plan of
+labelling every one before death and whose herbarium of dry sorrows had
+wearied him, has the Church deceived man, nor sought to decoy him, by
+boasting the mercy of a life which she knew to be ignoble.
+
+In all her inspired books she proclaims the horror of fate, and mourns
+over the enforced task of living. Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, the book
+of Job, the Lamentations of Jeremias manifest this sorrow in their every
+line, and the Middle Ages too in the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" cursed
+existence, and cried out loudly for death.
+
+More plainly than Schopenhauer the Church declared that there is nothing
+to wish for here below, nothing to expect, but where the mere catalogues
+of the philosopher stop, the Church went on, overpassing the limits of
+the senses, declared the end of man, and defined his limitations.
+
+"Then," he said to himself, "if it be well considered, the vaunted
+argument of Schopenhauer against the Creator, drawn from the misery and
+injustice of the world, is not irrefutable, for the world is not as God
+made it, but as man has refashioned it."
+
+Before accusing heaven for our ills, it is, no doubt, fitting to examine
+through what phases of consent, through what voluntary falls the
+creature has passed, before ending in the gloomy disaster it deplores.
+We may well curse the vices of our ancestors and our own passions which
+beget the greater part of the woes from which we suffer; we may well
+loathe the civilization which has rendered life intolerable to cleanly
+souls, and not the Lord, who, perhaps, did not create us to be shot down
+by cannon in time of war, to be cheated, robbed, and stripped in time of
+peace, by the slave drivers of commerce and the brigands of the money
+market.
+
+But that which remains for ever incomprehensible is the initial horror,
+the horror imposed on each of us, of having to live, and that is a
+mystery no philosophy can explain.
+
+"Ah!" he went on, "when I think of that horror, that disgust of
+existence which has for years and years increased in me, I understand
+how I am forced to make for the Church, the only port where I can find
+shelter.
+
+"Once I despised her, because I had a staff on which to lean when the
+great winds of weariness blew; I believed in my novels, I worked at my
+history, I had my art. I have come to recognize its absolute inadequacy,
+its complete incapacity to afford happiness. Then I understood that
+Pessimism was, at most, good to console those who had no real need of
+comfort; I understood that its theories, alluring when we are young, and
+rich, and well, become singularly weak and lamentably false, when age
+advances, when infirmities declare themselves, when all around is
+crumbling.
+
+"I went to the church, that hospital for souls. There, at least, they
+take you in, put you to bed and nurse you, they do not merely turn their
+backs on you as in the wards of Pessimism and tell you the name of your
+disease."
+
+Finally Durtal had been brought back to religion by art. More even than
+his disgust for life, art had been the irresistible magnet which drew
+him to God. The day, when out of curiosity and to kill time, he had
+entered a church, and after so many years of forgetfulness, had heard
+the Vespers for the dead fall heavily, psalm after psalm, in antiphonal
+chant, as the singers threw up, like ditchers, their shovelful of
+verses, his soul had been shaken to its depths. The evenings when he had
+listened at St. Sulpice to the admirable chanting during the Octave of
+All Souls, he had felt himself caught once for all; but that which had
+put most pressure on him, and brought him yet more completely into
+bondage were the ceremonies and music of Holy Week.
+
+He had visited the churches during that week; and they had opened to him
+like palaces ruined, like cemeteries laid waste by God. They were
+forbidding with their veiled images, their crucifixes wrapped
+lozenge-wise in purple, their organs dumb, their bells silent. The crowd
+flowed in, busy, but noiseless, along the floor over the immense cross
+formed by the nave and the two transepts, and entering by the wounds of
+which the doors were figures, they went up to the altar, where the
+blood-stained head of Christ would lie, and there on their knees eagerly
+kissed the crucifix which marked the place of the chin below the steps.
+
+And the crowd itself, as it ran in the cruciform mould of the church,
+became itself an enormous cross, living and crawling, silent and sombre.
+
+At St. Sulpice, where the whole assembled seminary lamented the ignominy
+of human justice and the fore-ordained death of a God, Durtal had
+followed the incomparable offices of those mournful days, through all
+their black minutes, had listened to the infinite sadness of the
+Passion, so nobly and profoundly expressed at Tenebrĉ by the slow
+chanting of the Lamentations and the Psalms, but when he thought it
+over, that which above all made him shudder was the thought of the
+Virgin coming on the scene on the Thursday at nightfall.
+
+The Church, till then absorbed in her sorrow, and prostrate before the
+Cross, raised herself and fell a-weeping on beholding the Mother.
+
+By all the voices of the choir, it pressed round Mary, endeavouring to
+console her, mixing the tears of the "Stabat Mater" with her own,
+sighing out that music of plaintive weeping, pressing the wound of that
+sequence, which gave forth water and blood like the wound of Christ
+Himself.
+
+Durtal left the church, worn out with these long services, but his
+temptations to unbelief were gone; he had no further doubt; it seemed to
+him that at St. Sulpice, grace mixed with the eloquent splendours of the
+liturgies, and that in the dim sorrow of the voices there had been
+appeals to him; and he therefore felt filial gratitude to that church
+where he had lived through hours so sweet and sad.
+
+Yet, in ordinary weeks he did not go there; it seemed to him too great
+and too cold, and it was so ugly. He preferred warmer and smaller
+sanctuaries, in which there were still traces of the Middle Ages.
+
+Thus on idle days when he came out of the Louvre, where he had strayed
+for a long time before the canvases of the Early Painters, he was wont
+to take refuge in the old church of St. Severin, hidden away in a corner
+of the poorer part of Paris.
+
+He carried with him the visions of the canvases he had admired at the
+Louvre, and contemplated them again, in this surrounding where they were
+thoroughly at home.
+
+Then he spent delightful moments, in which he was carried away in the
+clouds of harmony, divided by the white splendour of a child's voice
+flashing out from the rolling thunder of the organ.
+
+There, without even praying, he felt a plaintive languor, a vague
+uneasiness steal over him; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more
+than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of
+joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth of his
+senses, to weave together the regret and the terror of his soul.
+
+He often went there, especially on Sunday mornings to High Mass at ten
+o'clock.
+
+He was wont to place himself behind the high altar, in that melancholy
+and delicate apse, planted like a winter garden with rare and somewhat
+fantastic trees. It might have been called a petrified arbour of very
+old trunks in flower, but stripped of leaf, forests of pillars, squared
+or cut in broad panels, carved with regular notches near the base,
+hollowed through their whole length like rhubarb stalks, channelled like
+celery.
+
+No vegetation expanded at the summit of those trunks which bent their
+naked boughs along the vaulting, joined and met and gathered at their
+junction, and thin, engrafted knots, extravagant bunches of heraldic
+roses, armorial flowers with open tracery; and for more than four
+hundred years no sap had run, no bud had formed in these trees. The
+shafts bent for ever remained untouched, the white bark of these pillars
+was scarcely worn, but the greater part of the flowers were withered,
+the heraldic petals were wanting, some keystones of the arches had only
+stratified calices, open like nests, with holes like sponges, in rags
+like handfuls of russet lace.
+
+And among this mystic flora, amid these petrified trees, there was one,
+strange and charming, which suggested the fanciful idea, that the blue
+smoke of the rolling incense had condensed, and, as it coagulated, had
+grown pale with age, to form, in twisting, the spiral of a column which
+was inverted on itself, and ended broadening out into a sheaf, whereof
+the broken stems fell from above the arches.
+
+The corner where Durtal took refuge was faintly lighted by pointed
+stained windows, with black diamond-shaped divisions set with minute
+panes darkened by the accumulated dust of years, rendered still more
+obscure by the woodwork of the chapels, which cut off half their
+surface.
+
+This apse might have been called a frozen grove of skeleton trees, a
+conservatory of dead specimens belonging to the palm family, calling up
+the memory of an impossible phoenix and unlikely palms; but it also
+recalled by its half-moon shape and doubtful light, the image of a
+ship's prow below water. In fact it allowed to filter through its bars,
+to its windows trellised with all black network, the murmur, suggested
+by the rolling of the carriages which shook the street, of a river which
+sifted the golden light of day through the briny course of its waters.
+
+On Sundays, at the time of High Mass, the apse was empty. The public
+filled the nave before the high altar, or spread themselves somewhat
+further into a chapel dedicated to Our Lady. Durtal was therefore almost
+alone, and even the people who crossed his refuge were neither stupid
+nor hostile, like the faithful in other churches. In this district were
+beggars, the very poor, hucksters, Sisters of Charity, rag pickers,
+street arabs; above all, there were women in tatters walking on tiptoe,
+who knelt without looking round, poor creatures overwhelmed by the
+piteous splendour of the altars, looking out of the corner of their
+eyes, and bending low when the Suisse passed them.
+
+Touched by the timidity of this silent misery, Durtal listened to the
+mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of
+St. Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plain chant, better than
+it was done at St. Sulpice, where, however, the offices were as a rule
+solemn and correct. It bore it, as it were, to the top of the choir,
+and let it spread with its great wings open and almost without motion,
+above the prostrate flock, when the verse "Et homo factus est" took its
+slow and reverent flight in the low voice of the singer. It was at once
+monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed
+itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in their
+last meeting, to the united apostles of Christ.
+
+At St. Severin a powerful voice declaimed a verse as a solo, then all
+the children, sustained by the rest of the singers, delivered the
+others, and the unchangeable truths declared themselves in their order,
+more attentive, more grave, more accentuated, even a little plaintive in
+the solo voice of a man, more timid perhaps, but also more familiar and
+more joyous, in the dash, however restrained, of the boys.
+
+At such a moment Durtal was roused, and exclaimed within himself: "It is
+impossible that the alluvial deposits of Faith which have created this
+musical certainty are false. The accent of these declarations is such as
+to be superhuman, and far from profane music, which has never attained
+to the solid grandeur of this naked chant."
+
+The whole mass, moreover, at St. Severin was perfect. The "Kyrie
+eleison," solemn and sumptuous, the "Gloria in excelsis," shared by the
+grand and the choir organs, the one taking the solos, the other guiding
+and sustaining the singers, was full of exultant joy; the "Sanctus,"
+concentrated, almost haggard, resounded through the arches when the
+choir shouted the "Hosanna in excelsis," and the "Agnus Dei" was sung
+low to a clear, suppliant melody, so humble that it dared not become
+loud.
+
+Indeed, except for a contraband "O Salutaris," introduced there as in
+other churches, St. Severin maintained, on ordinary Sundays, the musical
+liturgy, sang it almost reverentially with the fragile but well-toned
+voices of the boys, the solidly built basses bringing vigorous sounds
+from the deep.
+
+It was a joy to Durtal to linger in the delightful surroundings of the
+Middle Ages, in that shadowy loneliness, amid the chants which rose
+behind him, without being annoyed by tricks of the mouths which he could
+not see.
+
+He ended by being moved to the very marrow, choked by nervous tears, and
+all the bitterness of his life came up before him; full of vague fears,
+of confused prayers which stifled him, and found no words, he cursed the
+ignominy of his life and swore to master his carnal affections.
+
+When the mass was over, he wandered in the church itself, and was
+delighted with the spring of the nave, which four centuries built and
+sealed with their arms, placing on it those strange impressions, those
+wonderful seals which expand in relief under the reversed groining of
+the arches. These centuries combined to bring to the feet of Christ the
+superhuman effort of their art, and the gifts of each are still visible.
+The thirteenth century shaped those low and stunted pillars, whose
+capitals are crowned with water-lilies, water-parsley, foliage with
+large leaves, voluted with crochets and turned in the form of a crosier.
+The fourteenth century raised the columns of the neighbouring bays on
+the sides of which prophets, monks and saints uphold the spring of the
+arches. The fifteenth and sixteenth created the apse, the sanctuary,
+some windows pierced above the choir, and though they have been restored
+by incompetent builders, they have still retained a barbaric grace, and
+a really touching simplicity.
+
+They seem to have been designed by ancestors of the Epinal foundries,
+and stained by them with crude colours. The donors and the saints who
+pass through these bright, stone-framed pictures are all awkward and
+pensive, dressed in robes of gamboge, bottle-green, prussian-blue,
+gooseberry-red, pumpkin-purple and wine lees, and these are made still
+deeper by contact with the flesh tints, either omitted or destroyed,
+which have at any rate remained uncoloured like a thin skin of glass. In
+one of these windows Christ on His cross seems limpid, all in light,
+between blue splashes of sky, and the red and green patches, formed by
+the wings of the two angels whose faces also seem cut in crystal and
+full of light.
+
+These windows differ from those of other churches, in that they absorb
+the rays of the sun, without refracting them. No doubt they have been
+deliberately divested of reflection that they may not by the insolent
+joyousness of stones on fire insult the melancholy sorrow of this church
+which rises in the squalid haunts of a quarter inhabited by beggars and
+thieves.
+
+Then these thoughts assailed Durtal. In Paris the modern churches are
+useless, they remain deaf to the prayers which break against the icy
+indifference of their walls. No man recollects himself in those naves
+where souls have left nothing of themselves, or where they have perhaps
+given themselves away, have had to turn and fall back on themselves,
+rebuffed by the insolence of a photographic glare, darkened by the
+neglect of those altars at which no saint has ever said mass. It seemed
+that God had always gone out, and would only come home to keep His
+promise to appear at the moment of consecration, and that He would
+retire immediately afterwards, despising these edifices which have not
+been built expressly for Him, since by the baseness of their form they
+might be put to any profane use, since above all they do not bring Him,
+in default of sanctity, the only gift which might please Him, the gift
+of art which He has lent to man, and which allows Him to see Himself in
+the abridged restitution of His work, and to rejoice in the development
+of that flower of which He has sowed the seed in souls which He has
+carefully chosen, in souls which are truly the elect, second only to
+those of His Saints.
+
+Ah, those charitable churches of the Middle Ages, those chapels damp and
+smoky, full of ancient song, of exquisite paintings, of the odour of
+extinguished tapers, of the perfume of burning incense!
+
+In Paris there remain now only a few specimens of this art of other
+years, a few sanctuaries whose stones really exude the Faith; among
+these St. Severin seemed to Durtal the most exquisite and the most
+certain. He only felt at home there, he believed that if he could ever
+pray in earnest he could do it in that church; and he said to himself
+that there lived the spirit of the fabric. It is impossible but that the
+burning prayers, the hopeless sobs of the Middle Ages, have not for ever
+impregnated the pillars and stained the walls; it is impossible but that
+the vine of sorrows whence of old the Saints gathered warm clusters of
+tears, has not preserved from those wonderful times emanations which
+sustain, a breath which still awakes a shame for sin, and the gift of
+tears.
+
+As Saint Agnes remained immaculate in the brothels, this church remained
+intact amid infamous surroundings, when all near it in the streets from
+the Château Rouge to the Cremerie Alexandre, only two paces off, the
+modern rabble of rascality combine their misdeeds, mingling with
+prostitutes their brewage of crime, their adulterated absinthe and
+spirits.
+
+In this especial territory of Satanism, the church rises, delicate and
+little, closely enveloped in the rags of taverns and hovels, and seen
+far off, raises above the roofs its light spire, like a netting needle,
+its point below, and lifting its eye into the light and air, through
+which can be seen a minute bell surmounting a sort of anvil. Such it
+appears, at least, from the Place Saint André des Arts. Symbolically it
+might be called a piteous appeal, always rejected by souls hardened and
+hammered by vice, of that anvil which was only an optical illusion, and
+that very real bell.
+
+"They say," thought Durtal, "they say that ignorant architects and
+unskilled archĉologists wish to free St. Severin from its rags, and
+surround it with trees in an enclosed square. But it has always lived in
+its network of black streets, and is voluntarily humble, in accordance
+with the miserable district it aids. In the Middle Ages the church was a
+monument seen only within, and not one of those impetuous basilicas
+which are put up as a show in open spaces.
+
+"Then it was an oratory for the poor, a church on its knees, and not
+standing; it would, therefore, be the most absolute nonsense to free it
+from its surroundings, to take it out of the day of an eternal twilight,
+out of those hours of shadow which brighten the melancholy beauty of a
+servant in prayer behind the impious hedge of hovels.
+
+"Ah, were it possible to steep the church in the glowing atmosphere of
+Notre Dame des Victoires, and join to its meagre psalmody the powerful
+choir of St. Sulpice, that would be complete," said Durtal, "but alas,
+here below, nothing whole, nothing perfect exists!"
+
+Indeed from an artistic point of view, it was the only church which
+satisfied him, for Notre Dame de Paris was too grand, and too much
+overrun by tourists; there were few ceremonies there, just the necessary
+amount of prayers were weighed out, and the greater part of the chapels
+remained closed; and lastly the voices of the choir boys always wanted
+mending; they broke, while the advanced age of the basses made them
+hoarse. At St. Etienne du Mont it was worse still; the shell of the
+church was charming, but the choir was an offshoot of the school of
+Sanfourche, you might think yourself in a kennel, where a medley pack of
+sick beasts were growling; as for the other sanctuaries on the right
+bank of the river, they were worthless, plain chant was as far as
+possible suppressed, and the poverty of the voices was everywhere
+ornamented with promiscuous tunes.
+
+Yet on the right bank were the more self-respecting churches, for
+religious Paris stops on that side of the Seine, and comes to an end as
+you pass the bridges.
+
+In fact, to sum up all, he might believe that St. Severin by its scent,
+and the delightful art of its old nave, St. Sulpice by its ceremonies
+and its chanting, had brought him back towards Christian art, which in
+its turn had directed him to God.
+
+Then when once urged on this way, he had pursued it, had left
+architecture and music, to wander in the mystic territories of the other
+arts, and his long visits to the Louvre, his researches into the
+breviaries, into the books of Ruysbröck, Angela da Foligno, Saint
+Teresa, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, had confirmed
+him in his belief.
+
+But the upheaval of all his ideas which he had undergone was too recent
+for his soul at once to regain its equilibrium. From time to time it
+seemed to wish to go back, and he discussed with himself in order to set
+it at rest. He spent himself in disputation, came to doubt the reality
+of his conversion, and said: "After all I am united to the church only
+on the side of art. I only go there to see or hear and not to pray; I do
+not seek the Lord, but my own pleasure. This is not business. Just as in
+a warm bath I do not feel the cold if I am motionless, but if I move I
+freeze, so in the church my impulses are upset when I move, I am almost
+on fire in the nave, less warm in the porch, and I become perfectly icy
+outside. These are literary postulates, vibrations of the nerves,
+skirmishes of thought, spiritual brawls, whatever you please, except
+Faith."
+
+But what disquieted him still more than the need of helps to feeling,
+was that his shameless senses rebelled at the contact of religious
+ideas. He floated like wreckage between Licentiousness and the Church,
+they each threw him back in turn, obliging him as he approached one to
+return at once to that which he had left, and he was inclined to ask if
+he were not a victim to some mystification of his lower instincts,
+seeking to revive themselves, without his consciousness, by the cordial
+of a false piety.
+
+In fact he had often seen realized in himself that unclean miracle, when
+he had left St. Severin, almost in tears. Insensibly, without connection
+of ideas, without any welding together of sensations, without the
+explosion of a spark, his senses took fire, and he was powerless to let
+them burn themselves out, to resist them.
+
+He loathed himself afterwards, and it was high time. Then came the
+reverse movement; he longed to run to some chapel, there to wash and be
+clean, and he was so disgusted with himself that now and then he went as
+far as the door and dared not enter.
+
+At other times, on the contrary, he rebelled against himself, and cried
+in fury: "It is monstrous, I have in fact spoiled for myself the only
+pleasure that remained to me--the flesh. Once I amused myself without
+blame, now I pay for my poor debauches with torments. I have added one
+more weariness to existence--would that I could undo it."
+
+He lied to himself in vain, trying to justify himself by suggesting
+doubts.
+
+"Suppose all this were not true, if there were nothing in it, if I were
+deceiving myself, what if the freethinkers were right?"
+
+But he was obliged to be sorry for himself, for he felt distinctly to
+the bottom of his soul, that he held unshaken the certitude of true
+Faith.
+
+"These discussions are miserable, and the excuses I make for my
+filthinesses are odious," he said to himself, and a flame of enthusiasm
+sprang up within him.
+
+How doubt the truth of dogmas, how deny the divine power of the Church,
+for she commands assent?
+
+First she has her superhuman art and her mysticism, then she is most
+wonderful in the persistent folly of conquered heresies. All since the
+world began have had the flesh as their spring-board. Logically and
+humanly speaking they should have triumphed, for they allowed man and
+woman to satisfy their passions, saying to themselves there was no sin
+in these, even sanctifying them as the Gnostics, rendering homage to God
+by the foulest uncleanness.
+
+All have suffered shipwreck. The Church, unbending in this matter, has
+remained upright and entire. She orders the body to be silent, and the
+soul to suffer, and contrary to all probability, humanity listens to
+her, and sweeps away like a dung-heap the seductive joys proposed to
+her.
+
+Again, the vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves her in
+spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the
+disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the
+awkwardness and lack of ability in her defenders, a very strong point.
+
+"No, the more I think of her," he cried, "the more I think her
+prodigious, unique, the more I am convinced that she alone holds the
+truth, that outside her are only weaknesses of mind, impostures,
+scandals. The Church is the divine breeding ground, the heavenly
+dispensary of souls; she gives them suck, nourishes them, and heals
+them; she bids them understand, when the hour of sorrow comes, that true
+life begins, not at birth, but at death. The Church is indefectible,
+before all things admirable, she is great--
+
+"Yes, but then we must follow her directions and practise the sacraments
+she orders!"
+
+And Durtal, shaking his head, gave himself no further answer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Before his conversion he had said like all unbelievers: "If I believed
+that Jesus Christ is God, and that eternal life is not a decoy, I would
+not hesitate to change all my habits, to follow as far as possible the
+rules of religion, and, in any case, to live chaste." And he was
+surprised that people he knew, who were in these conditions, did not
+maintain an attitude higher than his own. He who had so long indulgently
+forgiven himself became singularly intolerant, so soon as he had to do
+with a Catholic.
+
+He now understood the injustice of his judgments, and confessed that
+between faith and practice was a gulf difficult to overpass.
+
+He did not like to discuss this question with himself, but it returned
+and took possession of him all the same, and he was obliged to admit the
+meanness of his arguments, the despicable reasons for his resistance.
+
+He was still honest enough to say: "I am no longer a child; if I have
+Faith, if I admit Catholicism, I cannot conceive it as lukewarm and
+unfixed, warmed up again and again in the saucepan of a false zeal. I
+will have no compromise or truce, no alternations of debauch and
+communions, no stages of licentiousness and piety, no, all or nothing;
+to change from top to bottom, or not change at all."
+
+Then he drew back in alarm, endeavoured to escape the part he was about
+to take, endeavoured to exculpate himself, cavilling for hours, invoking
+the most wretched motives for remaining as he was, and not budging a
+jot.
+
+"What am I to do? If I do not obey orders, which I feel with increasing
+force, I am preparing for myself a life of uneasiness and remorse, for I
+know well I ought not to remain for ever on the threshold, but to
+penetrate into the sanctuary and stay there. And if I make up my
+mind--no indeed--for then I must bind myself to a heap of observances,
+bend to a series of rules, assist at mass on Sunday, abstain on Friday,
+live like a bigot, and look like a fool."
+
+And then to help his revolt, he thought of the air, the look of people
+who frequented the churches; for two men who looked intelligent and
+clean, how many were without doubt rascals and impostors!
+
+Almost all had a side-long look, an oily voice, downcast eyes, immovable
+spectacles, clothes like sacristans as if of black wood, almost all told
+thin beads ostentatiously, and with more strategy and more knavery than
+the wicked, took toll from their neighbours on leaving God.
+
+The devout women were still less reassuring, they invaded the church,
+walking about as if quite at home, disturbing everybody, upsetting
+chairs, knocking against you without begging pardon; then they knelt
+down with much ado, in the attitude of contrite angels, murmured
+interminable paternosters, and left the church more arrogant and sour
+than before.
+
+"It is not encouraging to have to mix with this flock of pious geese,"
+he exclaimed.
+
+But soon, against his will, he made answer to himself: "You have nothing
+to do with others, were you more humble, these people would certainly
+seem less offensive; at any rate they have the courage you lack, they
+are not ashamed of their faith, and are not afraid to kneel to God in
+public."
+
+And Durtal remained dumfounded, for he had to admit that the riposte
+struck home. It was clear his humility was at fault, but what was worse,
+he could not free himself from human respect.
+
+He was afraid of being taken for a fool; the prospect of being seen on
+his knees, in church, made his hair stand on end; the idea, that, if he
+ever had to communicate, he would have to rise and go to the altar in
+the sight of all, was intolerable to him.
+
+"If that moment ever come it will be hard to bear," said he; "and yet I
+am an idiot, for what have I to do with the opinion of people I do not
+know?" but much as he might repeat that his alarms were absurd, he
+could not get over them, or free himself from the fear of ridicule.
+
+"After all," he said, "even if I decide to jump the ditch, to confess
+and communicate, that terrible question of the senses would always have
+to be resolved. I must determine to fly the lusts of the flesh, and
+accept perpetual abstinence. I could never attain to that.
+
+"Without counting that in any case, the time would be ill-chosen were I
+now to make such an effort, for never have I been so tormented as since
+my conversion; Catholicism unfortunately excites unclean suggestions
+when I prowl about it, without entering."
+
+And to this exclamation another answered at once: "Yes, but you must
+enter."
+
+He was irritated at this change of front without change of place, and he
+tried to turn the conversation, as though it had been held with another,
+whose questions perplexed him; but he came back to it all the same, and,
+in his annoyance, summoned all his reasoning powers to his aid.
+
+"Come, let us try to take stock at any rate! It is plain that as I have
+drawn near the Church, my unclean desires have become more frequent and
+more persistent; and yet another fact is certain that I have been so
+used up by twenty years of debauchery that I ought not to have any
+further carnal appetites. In fact, if I chose it, I could perfectly well
+remain chaste; but then I must bid my miserable brain be silent, and I
+have no power to do so! It is frightful all the same that I am more
+excited than in youth, for now my desires go a-travelling, and since
+they have not their ordinary shelter they go off in search of evil
+haunts. How may this be explained? It is a sort of dyspepsia of the
+soul, which cannot digest ordinary meats, and tries to feed on spiced
+dreams, highly seasoned thoughts; it is then want of appetite for
+wholesome meals which has begotten this greediness for strange dishes,
+this trouble of the mind, this wish to escape from myself, and jump were
+it but for a moment over the permitted limits of the senses.
+
+"In that case Catholicism would play a part at once repellent and
+depressing. It would stimulate these sick desires, and weaken me at the
+same time, would give me over to nervous emotions without strength to
+resist them."
+
+Wandering thus in self-examination, he came to a dead stand where was no
+issue, arriving at this conclusion: "I do not practise my religion,
+because I yield to my baser instincts, and I yield to these instincts
+because I do not practise my religion."
+
+Brought up thus by a dead wall, he resisted, asking if this last
+observation were indeed true; for, after all, nothing proved that if he
+approached the Sacraments he would not be attacked with even greater
+violence. It was even probable he would be, for the devil makes a dead
+set at pious people.
+
+Then he rebelled against the cowardice of these remarks, and cried: "I
+lie, for I know well, that if I made the least sign of resistance, I
+should be powerfully aided from on high."
+
+Clever at self-torture, he continued to harass his soul, always on the
+same line. "Suppose," he said, "for the sake of argument, that I have
+tamed my pride, and subdued my body, suppose that at present there were
+nothing to do, but to go forward, I am still brought up, for the final
+obstacle terrifies me.
+
+"Up to now I have been able to walk alone, without earthly assistance,
+without advice; I have been converted without the help of anyone, but
+now I cannot make a step without a guide, I cannot approach the altar
+without the aid of an interpreter, and the bulwark of a priest."
+
+And once more, he drew back, for in former times he had been intimate
+with a certain number of ecclesiastics, and had found them so mediocre,
+so lukewarm, above all so hostile to Mysticism, that he was revolted at
+the very notion of laying before them the schedule of his requirements
+and his regrets.
+
+"They will not understand me," he thought; "they will answer that
+Mysticism was interesting in the Middle Ages, but has now become disused
+and is in any case quite out of touch with the modern spirit. They will
+think me mad, will assure me, moreover, that God does not want so much,
+will advise me with a smile, not to make myself singular, to do as
+others, and to think like them.
+
+"I have indeed no intention of entering on the way of Mysticism, but
+they may at least allow me to envy it and not inflict on me their
+middle-class ideal of a God.
+
+"For, not to deceive oneself, Catholicism is not only that moderate
+religion that they offer us; it is not composed only of petty cases and
+formulas; it is not wholly confined to rigid observances, and the toys
+of old maids, to all that goody-goody business, which spreads itself
+abroad in the Rue Saint Sulpice; it is far more exalted, far purer, but
+then we must penetrate its burning zone, and seek in Mysticism, the art,
+the essence, and the very soul of the Church.
+
+"Using the powerful means at her disposal, we then have to empty
+ourselves, and strip the soul, so that Christ if He will may enter it;
+we have to purify the house, to cleanse it with the disinfectant of
+prayer and the sublimate of Sacraments; in a word, to be ready when the
+Guest shall come and bid us to empty ourselves wholly into Him, as He
+will pour Himself into us.
+
+"I know thoroughly well, that this divine alchemy, this transmutation of
+the human creature into God, is generally impossible, for the Saviour,
+as a rule, keeps His singular favours for His elect; but after all,
+every one, however unworthy, is presumably able to attain that majestic
+end, since God only decides, and not man, whose humble acquiescence
+alone is requisite.
+
+"I see myself saying that to the priests! They will tell me I have no
+business with mystical ideas, and will give me in exchange the petty
+religion of rich women; they will wish to mix themselves up with my
+life, to inquire about the state of my soul, to insinuate their own
+tastes; they will try to convince me that art is dangerous, will
+sermonize me with imbecile talk, and pour over me their flowing bowls of
+pious veal broth.
+
+"I know what I am; at the end of a couple of interviews I shall rebel,
+and become wicked."
+
+Durtal shook his head, remained in thought, and began again,--
+
+"Yet one must be just; perhaps the secular clergy are only the leavings,
+for the contemplative orders and the missionary army carry away every
+year the pick of the spiritual basket; the mystics, priests athirst for
+sorrows, drunk with sacrifice, bury themselves in cloisters or exile
+themselves among savages whom they teach. So when the cream is off, the
+rest of the clergy are plainly but skim milk, the scourings of the
+seminaries.
+
+"Yes, but after all," he continued, "the question is not whether they
+are intelligent or narrow, it is not my business to take the priest to
+pieces to discover under the consecrated rind the nothingness of the
+man; not my business to abuse his inadequacy since it is thoroughly
+suited to the understanding of the crowd. Would it not be, after all,
+more courageous and more humble to kneel before a being of whose brains
+you know the weakness?
+
+"And then ... then ... I am not reduced to that, for indeed I know one
+in Paris, a true mystic. Suppose I go and see him!"
+
+And he thought of a certain Abbé Gévresin, with whom he had formerly
+some acquaintance; he had often met him at a bookseller's in the Rue
+Servandoni, old Tocane, who had rare books on liturgy and the lives of
+the saints.
+
+Learning that Durtal was looking for works on Blessed Lidwine, the
+priest was at once interested in him, and on leaving the shop they had a
+long conversation. The abbé was very old and walked with difficulty,
+therefore he willingly took Durtal's arm, who saw him home.
+
+"The life of that victim of the sins of her time is a magnificent
+subject," he said; "you remember it, do you not?" and as they walked he
+sketched its lines, broadly.
+
+"Lidwine was born towards the end of the fourteenth century, at
+Schiedam, in Holland. Her beauty was extraordinary, but she lost it
+through illness at the age of fifteen. She recovered, but while skating
+one day with her companions on the frozen canals, she fell and broke a
+rib. From the time of that accident to her death she was bed-ridden. She
+was afflicted with most frightful ailments, her wounds festered, and
+worms bred in her putrefying flesh. Erysipelas, that terrible malady of
+the Middle Ages, consumed her. Her right arm was eaten away, a single
+muscle held it to the body, her brow was cleft in two, one of her eyes
+became blind, and the other so weak that it could not bear the light.
+
+"While she was in this condition, the plague ravaged Holland, and
+decimated the town in which she lived; she was the first attacked. Two
+boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the heart. 'Two boils,
+it is well,' she said to the Lord, 'but three would be better in honour
+of the Holy Trinity,' and immediately a third pustule broke out on her
+face.
+
+"For thirty-five years she lived in a cellar, taking no solid food,
+praying and weeping, so chilly in winter, that each morning her tears
+formed two frozen streams down her cheeks.
+
+"She thought herself still too fortunate, and entreated the Lord not to
+spare her, and obtained from Him the grace that by her sufferings she
+might expiate the sins of others. Christ heard her prayers, visited her
+with His angels, communicated her with His own hand, gave her the
+delight of heavenly ecstasies, and caused her festering wounds to exhale
+delicious perfumes.
+
+"At the moment of her death He stood by her, and restored her poor body
+to its former soundness. Her beauty, so long vanished, shone out again,
+the town was moved, the sick came in crowds, and all who drew near were
+healed.
+
+"She is the true patroness of the sick," concluded the abbé, and, after
+a silence, he added,--
+
+"From the point of view of the higher mysticism, Lidwine is wonderful,
+for in her we can verify that plan of substitution which was, and is,
+the glorious reason for the existence of convents."
+
+And as, without answering, Durtal questioned him with a look, he went
+on,--
+
+"You are aware, sir, that in all ages, nuns have offered themselves to
+heaven as expiatory victims. The lives of saints, both men and women,
+who desired these sacrifices abound, of those who atoned for the sins of
+others by sufferings eagerly demanded and patiently borne. But there is
+a task still more arduous and more painful than was desired by these
+admirable souls. It is not now that of purging the faults of others, but
+of preventing them, hindering their commission, by taking the place of
+those who are too weak to bear the shock.
+
+"Read Saint Teresa on this subject; you will see that she gained
+permission to take on herself, and without flinching, the temptations of
+a priest who could not endure them. This substitution of a strong soul
+freeing one who is not strong from perils and fears is one of the great
+rules of mysticism.
+
+"Sometimes this exchange is purely spiritual, sometimes on the contrary
+it has to do only with the ills of the body. Saint Teresa was the
+surrogate of souls in torment, Sister Catherine Emmerich took the place
+of the sick, relieved, at least, those who were most suffering; thus,
+for instance, she was able to undergo the agony of a woman suffering
+from consumption and dropsy, in order to permit her to prepare for death
+in peace.
+
+"Well, Lidwine took on herself all bodily ills, she lusted for physical
+suffering, and was greedy for wounds; she was, as it were, the reaper of
+punishments, and she was also the piteous vessel in which everyone
+discharged the overflowings of his malady. If you would speak of her in
+other fashion than the poor hagiographies of our day, study first that
+law of substitution, that miracle of perfect charity, that superhuman
+triumph of Mysticism; that will be the stem of your book, and naturally,
+without effort, all Lidwine's acts graft themselves on it."
+
+"But," asked Durtal, "does this law still take effect?"
+
+"Yes: I know convents which apply it. Moreover, Orders like the
+Carmelites and the Poor Clares willingly accept the transfer to them of
+temptations we suffer; then these convents take on their backs, so to
+speak, the diabolical expiations of those insolvent souls whose debts
+they pay to the full."
+
+"All the same," said Durtal, shaking his head, "if you consent to take
+on yourself the assaults intended for your neighbour, you must make
+pretty sure not to sink."
+
+"The nuns chosen by our Lord," replied the abbé, "as victims of
+expiation, as whole burnt-offerings, are in fact few, and they are
+generally, especially in this age, obliged to unite and coalesce in
+order to bear without failing the weight of misdeeds which try them, for
+in order that a soul may bear alone the assaults of Satan, which are
+often terrible, it must be indeed assisted by the angels and elect of
+God." And after a silence the old priest added,--
+
+"I believe I may speak with some experience in these matters, for I am
+one of the directors of those nuns who make reparation in their
+convents."
+
+"And yet," cried Durtal, "the world asks what is the good of the
+contemplative Orders."
+
+"They are the lightning conductors of society," said the abbé, with
+great energy. "They draw on themselves the demoniacal fluid, they absorb
+temptations to vice, preserve by their prayers those who live, like
+ourselves, in sin; they appease, in fact, the wrath of the Most High
+that He may not place the earth under an interdict. Ah! while the
+sisters who devote themselves to nursing the sick and infirm are indeed
+admirable, their task is easy in comparison with that undertaken by the
+cloistered Orders, the Orders where penance never ceases, and the very
+nights spent in bed are broken by sobs."
+
+"This priest is far more interesting than his brethren," said Durtal to
+himself as they parted; and, as the abbé invited his visits, he had
+often called on him.
+
+He had always been cordially welcomed. On several occasions he had
+warily sounded the old man on several questions. He had answered
+evasively in regard to other priests. But he did not seem to think much
+of them, if Durtal might judge by what he said one day in regard to
+Lidwine, that magnet of sorrows.
+
+"Notice," he said, "that a weak and honest soul has every advantage in
+choosing a confessor, not from the clergy who have lost the sense of
+Mysticism, but from the monks. They alone know the effects of the law of
+substitution, and if they see that in spite of their efforts the
+penitent succumbs, they end by freeing him by taking his trials on
+themselves, or by sending them off to some convent in the country where
+resolute people can use them."
+
+Another time the question of nationalities was discussed in a newspaper
+which Durtal showed him. The abbé shrugged his shoulders, putting aside
+the patriotic twaddle. "For me," he said calmly, "for me my country is
+that where I can best pray."
+
+Durtal could not make out what this priest was. He understood from the
+bookseller, that the Abbé Gévresin on account of his great age and
+infirmity was incapacitated for the regular duties of the priesthood. "I
+know that, when he can, he still says his mass each morning in a
+convent; I believe also he receives a few of his brethren for confession
+in his own house;" and Tocane added with disdain, "He has barely enough
+to live on, and they do not look on him with favour at the archbishop's
+because of his mystical notions."
+
+There ended all he knew about him. "He is evidently a very good priest,"
+repeated Durtal; "his physiognomy declares it, and his mouth and eyes
+contradict each other; his eyes certainly declare his entire goodness,
+his lips, somewhat thick, purple and always moist, have on them an
+affectionate but somewhat sad smile, and to this his blue eyes give the
+lie--blue, childlike eyes which laugh out astonished under white
+eyebrows in a rather red face, touched on the cheeks like a ripe
+apricot, with little points of blood.
+
+"In any case," said Durtal, waking from his meditations, "I am very
+wrong not to continue the relations into which I have entered with him.
+
+"Yes, but then nothing is so difficult as to become really intimate with
+a priest; first by the very education he receives at the seminary the
+ecclesiastic thinks himself obliged to disperse his affections and not
+concentrate himself on particular friendships; then, like a doctor, he
+is a man harassed with business, who is never to be found. You can catch
+them now and then between two confessions or two sick calls. Nor even
+then are you quite certain that the eager welcome of the priest rings
+true, for he is just the same to all who come to him, and indeed, since
+I do not call on the Abbé Gévresin for his help or advice, I am afraid
+of being in his way, and of taking up his time, hence I am acting with
+discretion in not going to see him.
+
+"Yet I am sorry; suppose I write, or go to him one morning, but what
+have I to say to him? I ought to know what I want before I allow myself
+to trouble him. If I go only to complain, he will answer I am wrong not
+to be a communicant, and I have nothing to answer. No: the better plan
+is to meet him as by chance, on the quays, where no doubt he sometimes
+looks over the book-stalls, or at Tocane's, for then I can talk to him
+more intimately, at least less officially, about my vacillations and
+regrets."
+
+So Durtal searched the quays, and never once met the abbé. He went to
+the bookseller's, and pretended to look over his stock, but as soon as
+he pronounced the name Gévresin, Tocane exclaimed, "I have heard nothing
+of him, he has not been here for the last two months."
+
+"I will not turn back, but just disturb him in his own house," said
+Durtal, "but he will wonder why I came back after so long an absence.
+Besides the awkwardness I feel in calling on people whom I have
+neglected, I am also troubled by thinking the abbé may suspect some
+interested object in my visit. That is not convenient; if I had but a
+good pretext; there is certainly that life of Lidwine which interests
+him, I might consult him on various points. Yes, but which? I have not
+concerned myself with that saint for a long time, and must read over
+again the meagre old books on her biography. After all, it will be
+simpler and better to be frank, and say, 'This is why I have come; I
+want to ask advice, which I have not determined to follow, but I have so
+much need of speaking, of giving the reins to my soul, that I beg you to
+be so kind as to lose an hour for my sake.'
+
+"He will do it certainly and willingly.
+
+"Then that is agreed on; suppose I go to-morrow?" But he checked himself
+at once. "There was nothing pressing; there was plenty of time; better
+take time and think; ah, yes, here is Christmas close upon us, I cannot
+decently trouble a priest who has his penitents to confess, for there
+are many communicants on that day. Let him get his hard work over, and
+then we will see."
+
+He was at first pleased at having invented that excuse, then he had to
+admit in his heart that, after all, there was not much in it, for there
+was nothing to show that this priest, who was not attached to a parish,
+was busy in hearing confessions.
+
+It was hardly probable, but he tried to convince himself that it might
+be so after all, and his hesitation began again. Angry at last with the
+discussion, he adopted a middle course. For greater certainty, he would
+not call on the abbé till after Christmas, but he would not be later
+than a given time; he took an almanack, and swore to keep his
+promise--three days after that feast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Oh! that midnight mass! He had had the unfortunate idea of going to it
+at Christmas. He went to St. Severin, and found a young ladies' day
+school installed there, instead of the choir, who, with sharp voices
+like needles, knitted the worn-out skeins of the canticles. He had fled
+to St. Sulpice, and plunged into a crowd which walked and talked as if
+in the open air; had heard there choral-society marches, tea-garden
+waltzes, firework tunes, and had come away in a rage.
+
+It had seemed to him superfluous to try St. Germain-des-Près, for he
+held that church in horror. Besides the weariness inspired by its heavy,
+ill-restored shell, and the miserable paintings with which Flandrin
+loaded it, the clergy there were specially, almost alarmingly, ugly, and
+the choir was truly infamous. They were like a set of bad cooks, boys
+who spat vinegar, and elderly choir-men, who cooked in the furnace of
+their throats a sort of vocal broth, a thin gruel of sound.
+
+Nor did he think of taking refuge in St. Thomas Aquinas, where he
+dreaded the barking and the choruses; there was indeed St. Clotilde,
+where the psalmody, at least, is upright, and has not, like that of St.
+Thomas, lost all shame. He went there, but again encountered dance music
+and profane tunes, a worldly orgie.
+
+At last he went to bed in a rage, saying to himself, "In Paris, at any
+rate, a singular baptism of music is reserved for the New-Born."
+
+Next day, when he woke, he felt he had no courage to face the churches;
+the sacrileges of last night would, he thought, continue; and as the
+weather was almost fine, he went out, wandered in the Luxembourg, gained
+the square of the Observatoire, and the Boulevard de Port Royal, and
+mechanically made his way along the interminable Rue de la Santé.
+
+He knew that street of old, and had taken melancholy walks in it,
+attracted by its poor houses, like those of a provincial town; then it
+was fit for a dreamer, for it was bounded on the right by the Prison de
+la Santé and Sainte Anne's madhouse, and on the left by convents. Light
+and air circulated in the street, but, behind it, all was black; it was
+a kind of prison corridor, with cells on either side, where some were
+condemned to temporary sentences, and others, of their own free will,
+suffered lasting sorrows.
+
+"I can imagine," thought Durtal, "how it would have been painted by an
+Early Flemish master; the long street paved by patient pencils, the
+stories open from top to bottom, and the cupboards the same; and on one
+side massive cells with iron bedsteads, a stoneware jug; little
+peepholes in the doors secured by strong bolts, inside, scoundrels and
+thieves, gnashing their teeth, turning round and round, their hair on
+end, howling like caged animals; on the other side little rooms,
+furnished with a pallet-bed, a stoneware jug, a crucifix, these also
+closed by doors iron-banded, and within nuns or monks, kneeling on the
+flags, their faces clean cut against the light of a halo, their eyes
+lifted to heaven, their hands joined, raised from the ground in ecstasy,
+a pot of lilies at their side."
+
+Then at the back of the canvas, between these two rows of houses, rises
+a great avenue, at the end of which in a dappled sky sits God the Father
+with Christ on His right, choirs of Seraphim playing on guitar and viol;
+God the Father immovable under his lofty tiara, His breast covered by
+His long beard, holds scales which balance exactly, the holy captives
+expiating precisely by their penances and prayers the blasphemies of the
+rascals and the insane.
+
+"It must be admitted," thought Durtal, "that this street is very
+peculiar, that there is probably none like it in Paris, for it unites in
+its course virtues and vices, which in other quarters, in spite of the
+efforts of the Church, trend apart as far as possible from each other."
+
+Thus thinking he had come as far as St. Anne's, where the street grows
+lighter and the houses are lower, with only one or two stories, then,
+gradually, there is greater space between them, and they are only
+joined to each other by blank ends of walls.
+
+"At any rate," thought Durtal, "if this street has no distinction, it is
+very private; here at least one need not admire the impertinent
+decoration of those modern shops which expose in their windows as
+precious commodities, chosen piles of firewood, and in glass sweetmeat
+jars, coal drops and coke lollipops."
+
+And here is an odd lane, and he looked at an alley which led down a
+sharp decline into a main street, where was to be seen the tricolor flag
+in zinc on a washhouse; he read the name: Rue de l'Ebre.
+
+He entered it, it was but a few yards long; the whole of one side was
+occupied by a wall, behind which were half seen some stunted buildings,
+surmounted by a bell. An entrance-gate with a square wicket was placed
+in the wall, which was raised higher as it sloped downwards, and at the
+end was pierced by round windows, and rose into a little building,
+surmounted by a clock-tower so low that its point did not even reach the
+height of the two-storied house opposite.
+
+On the other side three hovels sloped down, closely packed together;
+zinc pipes ran everywhere, growing like vines, ramifying like the stalks
+of a hollow vine along the walls, windows gaped on rusty leaden hinges.
+Dim courts of wretched hovels could be seen; in one was a shed where
+some cows were reposing; in two others were coach-houses for
+wheel-chairs, and a rack behind the bars of which appeared the capsuled
+necks of bottles.
+
+"But this must be a church," thought Durtal, looking at the little clock
+tower, and the three or four round bays, which seemed cut out in emery
+paper to look like the black rough mortar of the wall; "where is the
+entrance?"
+
+He found it on turning out of the alley into the Rue de la Glacière. A
+tiny porch gave access to the building.
+
+He opened the door, and entered a large room, a sort of closed shed,
+painted yellow, with a flat ceiling, with small iron beams coloured
+grey, picked out with blue, and ornamented with gas-jets like a wine
+shop. At the end was a marble altar, six lighted tapers, and gilt
+ornaments, candelabra full of tapers, and under the tabernacle, a very
+small monstrance, which sparkled in the light of the tapers.
+
+It was almost dark, the panes of the windows having been crudely daubed
+with bands of indigo and yellowish green; it was freezing, the stove was
+not alight, and the church, paved like a kitchen floor, had no matting
+or carpet.
+
+Durtal wrapped himself up as best he could and sat down. His eyes
+gradually grew accustomed to the obscurity of the room, and what he saw
+was strange; in front of the choir on rows of chairs were seated human
+forms, drowned in floods of white muslin. No one stirred.
+
+Suddenly there entered by a side door a nun equally wrapped from head to
+foot in a large veil. She passed along the altar, stopped in the middle,
+threw herself on the ground, kissed the floor, and by a sudden effort,
+without helping herself by her arms, stood upright, advanced silently
+into the church, and brushed by Durtal, who saw under the muslin a
+magnificent robe of creamy white, an ivory cross at her neck, at her
+girdle a white cord and beads.
+
+She went to the entrance-door, and there ascended a little staircase
+into a gallery which commanded the church.
+
+He asked himself what could be this Order so sumptuously arrayed, in
+this miserable chapel, in such a district?
+
+Little by little the room filled, choir-boys in red with capes trimmed
+with rabbit's skin lighted the candelabra, went out, and ushered in a
+priest, vested in a grand cope, with large flowers, a priest tall and
+young, who sat down, and in a sonorous tone chanted the first antiphon
+of vespers.
+
+Suddenly Durtal turned round. In the gallery an harmonium accompanied
+the responses of voices never to be forgotten. It was not a woman's
+voice, but one having in it something of a child's voice, sweetened,
+purified, sharpened, and something of a man's, but less harsh, finer and
+more sustained, an unsexed voice, filtered through litanies, bolted by
+prayers, passed through the sieves of adoration and tears.
+
+The priest, still sitting, chanted the first verse of the unchanging
+psalm, "Dixit Dominus Domino meo."
+
+And Durtal saw in the air, in the gallery, tall white statues, holding
+black books in their hands, chanting slowly with eyes raised to heaven.
+A lamp cast its light on one of these figures, which for a second leant
+forward a little, and he saw under the lifted veil a face attentive and
+sorrowful, and very pale.
+
+The verses of the vesper psalms were now sung alternately, by the nuns
+above and by the congregation below. The chapel was almost full; a
+school of girls in white veils filled one side; little girls of the
+middle-class, poorly dressed brats who played with their dolls occupied
+the other. There were a few poor women in _sabots_, and no men.
+
+The atmosphere became extraordinary. The warmth of the souls thawed the
+ice of the room; here were not the vespers of the rich, such as were
+celebrated on Sundays at St. Sulpice, but the vespers of the poor,
+domestic vespers, in the plain chant of the country side, followed by
+the faithful with mighty fervour in silent and singular devotion.
+
+Durtal could fancy himself transported beyond the city, to the depths of
+some village cloister; he felt himself softened, his soul rocked by the
+monotonous amplitude of these chants, only recognizing the end of the
+psalms by the return of the doxology, the "Gloria Patri et Filio," which
+separated them from each other.
+
+He had a real impulse, a dim need of praying to the Unknowable,
+penetrated to the very marrow by this environment of aspiration, it
+seemed to him that he thawed a little, and took a far-off part in the
+united tenderness of these bright spirits. He sought for a prayer, and
+recalled what St. Paphnutius taught Thais, when he cried, "Thou art not
+worthy to name the name of God, thou wilt pray only thus: 'Qui plasmasti
+me miserere mei;' Thou who hast formed me have mercy on me." He
+stammered out the humble phrase, prayed not out of love or of
+contrition, but out of disgust with himself, unable to let himself go,
+regretting that he could not love. Then he thought of saying the Lord's
+Prayer, but stopped at the notion that this is the hardest of all
+prayers to pronounce, when the phrases are weighed in the balance. For
+in it we declare to God that we forgive our neighbours' trespasses. Now
+how many who use these words forgive others? How many Catholics do not
+lie when they tell the All-knowing that they hate no one?
+
+He was roused from these reflections by sudden silence; vespers were
+over. Then the organ played again, and all the voices of the nuns
+joined, those in the choir below and in the gallery above, singing the
+old carol "Unto us a child is born."
+
+He listened, moved by the simplicity of the strain, and suddenly, in a
+minute, brutally, without understanding why, infamous thoughts filled
+his mind.
+
+He resisted in disgust, wished to repulse the assault of these shameful
+feelings, and they were persistent. He seemed to see before him a woman
+whose perverse ways had long maddened him.
+
+All at once this hallucination ceased; his eye was mechanically
+attracted towards the priest, who was looking at him, while speaking in
+a low voice to a beadle.
+
+He lost his head, imagining that the priest guessed his thoughts and was
+turning him out, but this notion was so foolish, that he shrugged his
+shoulders, and more sensibly thought that men were not admitted to this
+convent of women, and that the abbé who had seen him was sending the
+beadle to beg him to leave.
+
+The beadle came straight to him; Durtal was ready to take his hat, when
+in persuasive and gentle tones that functionary said that the procession
+was about to begin, that it was the custom for the gentlemen to follow
+the Blessed Sacrament, and that although he was the only man there, the
+abbé thought he would not refuse to follow the procession about to
+start.
+
+Overwhelmed by this request, Durtal made a vague gesture, in which the
+beadle seemed to see assent.
+
+"No," he thought as soon as he was left alone; "I will not meddle with
+the ceremony; first I know nothing about it, and I should spoil it all,
+and again I will not make a fool of myself." He prepared to slip away
+quietly, but he had no time to carry out his intention; the usher
+brought him a lighted candle and asked him to accompany him. He put the
+best face he could on the matter, and while thinking that he was
+blushing all over, he followed the beadle to the altar.
+
+There the beadle stopped him and bid him not to move. The whole
+congregation was now standing, the girls' school divided into two files,
+preceded by a woman carrying a banner. Durtal came in front of the first
+rank of nuns.
+
+Their veils lowered before the profane, even in church, were raised
+before the Blessed Sacrament, before God. Durtal was able to look at
+these sisters for a moment; at first his disillusion was complete. He
+had supposed them pale and grave like the nun he had seen in the
+gallery, and almost all of them were red, freckled, crossing their poor
+hands swelled and wounded by chilblains. Their faces were puffy and all
+seemed at the beginning or end of a cold; they were evidently country
+girls, and the novices, known by their grey robes under the white veil,
+were still more common looking; they had certainly been accustomed to
+farm labour, and yet on seeing them all turned to the altar, the poverty
+of their faces, the ugliness of their hands blue with cold, their broken
+nails, injured in the wash, disappeared; their eyes, modest and humble
+under their long lashes, changed their coarse features into pious
+simplicity. Lost in prayer, they did not even see his curious looks, and
+did not even suspect a man was there examining them.
+
+Durtal envied the admirable wisdom of these poor girls who alone
+understood it was mad to wish to live. He thought: "Ignorance leads to
+the same result as knowledge. Among the Carmelites are rich and pretty
+women who have lived in the world and left it, wholly convinced of the
+vainness of its joys; and these nuns, who evidently know nothing, have
+had an intuition of that vacuity which it has needed years of experience
+for the others to gain. By different ways they have arrived at the same
+meeting-place. Then what clearness of thought is revealed by their
+entrance into an Order! for if indeed they had not been gathered by
+Christ, what would have become of these unhappy girls? Married to
+drunkards and hammered by beatings; or perhaps maids in taverns,
+ill-treated by their masters, brutalized by the other servants, destined
+to the scorn of the streets and the dangers of ill-usage. And without
+knowing anything they have avoided it all, have remained innocent, far
+from these perils, and far from this defilement, under an obedience
+which is not ignoble, disposed by their very way of life to experience,
+should they be worthy, the most powerful joys which the soul of a human
+creature can feel. They remain, perhaps, beasts of burthen, but at any
+rate God's beasts of burthen."
+
+He had got so far in his reflections when the beadle beckoned to him.
+The priest, who had descended from the altar, held the little
+monstrance; the girls' procession was moving before him. Durtal passed
+in front of the line of nuns who did not take part in the ceremony, and
+torch in hand he followed the beadle, who carried behind the priest an
+open white silk parasol.
+
+Then the harmonium in the gallery filled the church with its drawling
+tones, like an enlarged accordion, and the nuns standing beside it
+intoned the old chant, rhythmical as a march, the "Adeste Fideles,"
+while below the novices and the faithful repeated after each stanza the
+sweet chorus of invitation, "Venite adoremus."
+
+The procession went several times round the chapel, above the heads
+bowed in the smoke from the censers, which the choir boys swung, turning
+at each pause to face the priest.
+
+"Well, after all, I have not come so badly out of it," said Durtal to
+himself, when they had returned to the altar. He thought his part was
+finished, but, this time without asking his permission, the beadle asked
+him to kneel at the communion rail in front of the altar.
+
+He was ill at ease and annoyed, at knowing that the whole school and the
+whole convent was behind him, nor was he accustomed to kneel; it seemed
+as if wedges were thrust into his limbs, as if he were subjected to the
+tortures of the Middle Ages. Embarrassed by his taper, which was
+guttering, and threatened to cover him with spots, he shifted his
+position quietly, trying to make himself more comfortable by slipping
+the skirts of his great coat between his knees and the steps; but in
+moving he only increased the evil, his flesh was folded back between the
+bones, and his skin was chafed and burning. He sweated at last with the
+pain, and feared to distract the fervour of the community by falling;
+while the ceremony went on for ever, the nuns sang in the gallery, but
+he listened no more and deplored the length of the service.
+
+At last the moment of Benediction approached.
+
+Then in spite of himself, seeing himself there, so near to God, Durtal
+forgot his sufferings, and bowed his head, ashamed to be so placed, like
+a captain at the head of his company, in the first rank of this maiden
+troop; and when in a great silence, the bell tinkled, and the priest
+turning, lightly cut the air in the form of a cross, and, with the
+Blessed Sacrament, blessed the congregation kneeling at his feet, Durtal
+remained, his body bent, his eyes closed, seeking to hide himself, to
+make himself small, and not be seen there in front amid that pious
+crowd.
+
+The psalm "Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes," rang out when the beadle came
+to take his taper. Durtal could hardly resist a cry, when he had to
+stand up; his benumbed knees cracked, and their joints would hardly
+work.
+
+Yet he regained his place somehow; let the crowd pass, and approaching
+the beadle, asked him the name of the convent, and the order to which
+the nuns belonged.
+
+"They are the Franciscan missionaries of Mary," answered the man, "but
+the chapel is not theirs as you seem to think; it is a chapel of ease
+for the parish of St. Marcel de la Maison Blanche: it is only joined by
+a corridor to the house those sisters occupy behind us there in the Rue
+de l'Ebre. They join in the offices, in fact, just as you and I may do,
+and they keep a school for the children of the district."
+
+"It is a touching little chapel," thought Durtal, when he was alone. "It
+is well matched with the neighbourhood it shelters, with the gloomy
+brook of the tanners, which runs through the yards below the Rue de la
+Glacière. It gives me the effect of being to Notre Dame de Paris what
+its neighbour the Bièvre is to the Seine. It is the streamlet of the
+church, the pious pavement, the miserable suburb of worship.
+
+"How poor and yet how exquisite are those nuns' voices, which seem
+non-sexual and mellow! God knows how I hate the voice of a woman in the
+holy place, for it still remains unclean. I think woman always brings
+with her the lasting miasma of her indispositions and she turns the
+psalms sour. Then, all the same, vanity and concupiscence rise from the
+worldly voice, and its cries of adoration accompanied by the organ are
+only cries of carnal desire, its very pleadings in the most sombre
+liturgical hymns are only addressed to God from the lips outward, for at
+bottom a woman only mourns the mediocre ideal of earthly pleasure to
+which she cannot attain. Thus I thoroughly understand that the Church
+has rejected woman from her offices, and that the musical robe of her
+sequences may not be contaminated she employs the voices of the boy and
+the man.
+
+"Yet in convents of women, that is changed; it is certain that prayer,
+communion, abstinence and vows purify the body and the soul, as well as
+the vocal odour which proceeds from them. The emanations from them give
+to the voices of the nuns, however crude, however ill-trained they may
+be, their chaste inflexions, their simple caresses of pure love, they
+recall to it the ingenuous sounds of childhood.
+
+"In certain orders, they seem even to prune it of the greater part of
+its branches, and concentrate the threads of sap which remain in a few
+twigs;" and he thought of a Carmelite convent to which he had gone from
+time to time, remembered their failing, almost expiring voices, where
+the little health that remained to them was concentrated in three notes,
+voices which had lost the musical colours of life, the tints of open
+air, keeping only in the cloister those of the costumes they seemed to
+reflect, white and brown, chaste and sombre tones.
+
+Ah! those Carmelites, he thought of them now, as he descended the Rue de
+la Glacière, and he called up the memory of a profession, the thought of
+which took entire possession of him every time he meditated on convents.
+He saw again in memory a morning in the little chapel in the Avenue de
+Saxe, a chapel, Spanish Gothic in style, with narrow windows glazed with
+panes so dark that the light which remained in their colours did not
+pass through them.
+
+At the end rose the high altar in shade, raised on six steps; on the
+left a large iron grating in an arch was covered with a black curtain,
+and on the same side, but almost at the base of the altar, a little arch
+traced on the plain wall, like a lancet window, with an aperture in the
+middle, a sort of square, a frame, without a panel, empty.
+
+That morning the chapel, cold and dark, sparkled, lighted by groves of
+candles; and the odour of incense, not adulterated as in other churches
+by spices and gums, filled it with a dull smoke; it was crammed with
+people. Crouched in a corner, Durtal had turned round, and like his
+neighbours looked at the backs of the thurifers and priests, who were
+going towards the entrance. The door opened suddenly, and he saw, in a
+burst of daylight, a red vision of the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris,
+passing up the nave, turning from side to side a horse-like head, in
+front of it a big spectacled nose, bending his tall form all on one
+side, blessing the congregation with a long twisted hand, like a crab's
+claw.
+
+He and his suite ascended the altar steps, and knelt at a prie-Dieu,
+then they took off his tippet, and vested him in a silk chasuble with a
+white cross embroidered in silver, and the mass began. Shortly before
+the communion, the black veil was gently withdrawn; behind the high
+grating, and in a blueish light like that of the moon, Durtal faintly
+saw white phantoms gliding and stars twinking in the air, and close to
+the grating a woman's form, kneeling motionless on the ground, she too
+holding a star at the end of a taper. The woman did not move but the
+star shook; then when the moment of communion was at hand, the woman
+rose, then disappeared, and her head, as if decapitated, filled the
+square of the wicket opened in the arch.
+
+Then as he leant forward he saw, for a second, a dead face, with closed
+lids, white, eyeless, like ancient marble statues. And all passed away,
+as the Cardinal bent above the grating, with the ciborium in his hand.
+
+All was so rapid that he asked himself if he were not dreaming; the mass
+was over. Behind the iron grating resounded mournful psalms, slow chants
+drawn out, weeping, always on the same notes, wandering lights and white
+forms passed in the azure fluid of the incense. Monseigneur Richard was
+sitting, mitre on head, interrogating the postulant who had returned to
+her place, and was kneeling before him behind the grating.
+
+He spoke in a low voice, and could not be heard. The whole congregation
+bent to listen to the novice as she pronounced her vows, but only a long
+murmur was heard. Durtal remembered that he had elbowed his way, and got
+near the choir, where, through the crossed bars of the grating, he saw
+the woman clad in white, prostrate on her face, in a square of flowers,
+while the whole convent filed past, bending over her, intoning the
+psalms for the dead, and sprinkling her with holy water, like a corpse.
+
+"It is admirable," he cried, moved in the street by the memory of the
+scene, and he thought of what a life was that of these women! To lie on
+an hair mattress without pillow or sheets, to fast seven months out of
+the twelve, except on Sundays and feasts; always to eat, standing,
+vegetables and abstinence fare; to have no fire in winter, to chant for
+hours on ice-cold tiles, to scourge the body, to become so humble as,
+however tenderly nurtured, to wash up dishes with joy, and attend to the
+meanest tasks, to pray from morning to midnight even to fainting, to
+pray there till death. They must indeed pity us, and set themselves to
+expiate the imbecility of a world which treats them as hysterical fools,
+for it cannot even understand the joy in suffering of souls like these.
+
+"We cannot be proud of ourselves, in thinking of the Carmelites, or even
+of those humble Franciscan Tertiaries, who are after all more vulgar. It
+is true they do not belong to a contemplative order, but all the same
+their rules are very strict, their existence is so hard that they too
+can atone by their prayers and good works for the crimes of the city
+they protect."
+
+He grew enthusiastic in thinking of the convents. Ah! to be earthed up
+among them, sheltered from the herd, not to know what books appear, what
+newspapers are printed, never to know what goes on outside one's cell,
+among men--to complete the beneficent silence of this cloistered life,
+nourishing ourselves with good actions, refreshing ourselves with plain
+song, saturating ourselves with the inexhaustible joys of the liturgies.
+
+Then, who knows? By force of good will, and by ardent prayer, to succeed
+in coming to Him, in entertaining Him, feeling Him near us, perhaps
+almost satisfied with His creature. And he called up before him the joys
+of those abbeys in which Jesus abode. He remembered that astonishing
+convent of Unterlinden, near Colmar, where in the thirteenth century not
+only one or two nuns, but the whole convent, rose distractedly before
+Christ with cries of joy, nuns were lifted above the ground, others
+heard the songs of seraphim, and their emaciated bodies secreted balm;
+others became transparent or were crowned with stars; all these
+phenomena of the contemplative life were visible in that cloister, a
+high school of Mysticism.
+
+Thus wrapped in thought, he found himself at his own door, without
+remembering the road he had taken, and as soon as he was in his room,
+his whole soul dilated and burst forth. He desired to thank, to call
+for mercy, to appeal to someone, he knew not whom, to complain of he
+knew not what. All at once the need of pouring himself forth, of going
+out of himself, took shape, and he fell on his knees saying to Our Lady,
+
+"Have pity on me, and hear me; I would rather anything than continue
+this shaken existence, these idle stages without an aim. Pardon me, Holy
+Virgin, unclean as I am, for I have no courage for the battle. Ah,
+wouldest thou grant my prayer! I know well that I am over bold in daring
+to ask, since I am not even resolved to turn out my soul, to empty it
+like a bucket of filth, to strike it on the bottom, that the lees may
+trickle out and the scales fall off, but ... but ... thou knowest I am
+so weak, so little sure of myself, that in truth I shrink.
+
+"Oh, all the same I would desire to flee away, a thousand miles from
+Paris, I know not where, into a cloister. My God! yet this is very
+madness that I speak, for I could not stay two days in a convent; nor
+indeed would they take me in."
+
+Then he thought,--
+
+"Though this once I am less dry, less unclean than is my wont, I can
+find nothing to say to Our Lady but insanities and follies, when it
+would be so simple to ask her pardon, to beg her to have pity on my
+desolate life, to aid me to resist the demands of my vices, not to pay
+as I do the royalties on my nerves, the tax on my senses.
+
+"All the same," he said, rising, "enough of this, I will at least do
+what little I can; without more delay I will go to the abbé to-morrow. I
+will explain the struggle of my soul, and we will see what happens
+afterwards."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+He was really comforted when the servant said that Monsieur l'Abbé was
+at home. He entered a little drawing-room, and waited till the priest,
+whom he heard speaking to someone in the next chamber, was alone.
+
+He looked at the little room, and marked that nothing was changed since
+his last visit. It was still furnished with a velvet sofa, of which the
+red, once crimson, had become the faded rose colour of raspberry jam on
+bread. There were also two tall arm-chairs on either side of the
+chimney, which was ornamented by an Empire clock, and some china vases
+filled with sand, in which were stuck some dry stalks of reed. In a
+corner against the wall, under an old wooden crucifix, was a prie-dieu,
+marked by the knees, an oval table in the centre, some sacred engravings
+on the walls; and that was all.
+
+"It is like an hotel, or an old maid's lodging," thought Durtal. The
+commonness of the furniture, the curtains in faded damask, the panels
+hung with a paper covered with bouquets of poppies and field-flowers in
+false colours, were like lodgings by the month, but certain details,
+above all the scrupulous cleanliness of the room, the worked cushions on
+the sofa, the grass mats under the chairs, an hortensia like a painted
+cauliflower placed in a flower-pot covered with lace, looked on the
+other hand like the futile and icy room of a devout woman.
+
+"Nothing was wanting but a cage of canaries, photographs in plush
+frames, shell-work and crochet mats."
+
+Durtal had got so far in his reflections when the abbé came in with
+extended hand, gently finding fault with his long absence.
+
+Durtal made what excuses he could, unusual occupations, long weariness.
+
+"And our Blessed Lidwine, how do you get on with her?"
+
+"Ah, I have not even begun her life; I am not in a state of mind which
+allows me to engage in it."
+
+Durtal's accent of discouragement surprised the priest.
+
+"Come, what is the matter? Can I be of any use to you?"
+
+"I do not know, Monsieur l'Abbé. I am almost ashamed to talk to you
+about such troubles," and suddenly he burst out, telling his sorrows in
+any chance words, declaring the unreality of his conversion, his
+struggles with the flesh, his human respect, his neglect of religious
+practices, his aversion from the rites demanded of him, in fact from all
+yokes.
+
+The abbé listened without moving, his chin on his hand.
+
+"You are more than forty," he said, when Durtal was silent; "you have
+passed the age when without any impulse from thought, the awakening of
+the flesh excites temptations, you are now in that period when indecent
+thoughts first present themselves to the imagination, before the senses
+are agitated. We have then to fight less against your sleeping body than
+your mind, which stimulates and vexes it. On the other hand, you have
+arrears and prizes of affection to put out, you have no wife or children
+to receive them, so that your affections being driven back by celibacy,
+you will end by taking them there where at first they should have been
+placed; you try to appease your soul's hunger in chapels, and as you
+hesitate, as you have not the courage to come to a decision, to break
+once for all with your vices, you have arrived at this strange
+compromise; to reserve your tender feeling for the church and the
+manifestations of that feeling for women. That, if I do not mistake, is
+your correct balance-sheet. But, good heavens, you have not too much to
+complain of, for do you not see that the important thing is to care for
+woman only with your bodily senses? When Heaven has given you grace to
+be no longer taken captive by thought, all may be arranged with a little
+effort of will."
+
+"This is an indulgent priest," thought Durtal.
+
+"But," continued the abbé, "you cannot always sit between two stools,
+the moment will come when you must stick to the one, and push the other
+away."
+
+And looking at Durtal, who looked down without answering,--
+
+"Do you pray? I do not ask if you say your morning prayers, for not all
+those, who end by entering on the divine way, after wandering for years
+where chance might take them, call on the Lord so soon as they awake.
+At break of day the soul thinks itself well, thinks itself firmer, and
+at once takes occasion of this fleeting energy to forget God. It is with
+the soul as with the body when it is sick. When night comes our
+sensations are stronger, pain which was quieted awakes, the fever which
+slept blazes up again, filth revives and wounds bleed anew, and then it
+thinks of the divine Miracle-worker, it thinks of Christ. Do you pray in
+the evening?"
+
+"Sometimes--and yet it is very difficult; the afternoon is tolerable,
+but you say truly when the daylight goes, evils spring up. A whole
+cavalcade of obscene ideas then pass through my brain; how can any one
+be recollected at such moments?"
+
+"If you do not feel able to resist in the street or at home, why do you
+not take refuge in the churches?"
+
+"But they are closed when one has most need of them; the clergy put
+Jesus to bed at nightfall."
+
+"I know it, but if most churches are closed, there are a few which
+remain partly open very late. Ah, St. Sulpice is among the number, and
+there is one which remains open every evening, and where those who visit
+it are always sure of prayers and Benediction: Notre Dame des Victoires,
+I think you know it."
+
+"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbé. It is ugly enough to cause tears, it is
+pretentious, it is in bad taste, and the singers churn up a margarine of
+rancid tones. I do not go there then as I go to St. Severin and St.
+Sulpice, to admire there the art of the old 'Praisers of God,' to
+listen, even if they are incorrectly given, to the broad, familiar
+melodies of plain chant. Notre Dame des Victoires is worthless from the
+ĉsthetic point of view, and yet I go there from time to time, because
+alone in Paris it has the irresistible attraction of true piety, it
+alone preserves intact the lost soul of the Time. At whatever hour one
+goes there people are praying there, prostrate in absolute silence; it
+is full as soon as it is open, and full at its closing, there is a
+constant coming and going of pilgrims from all parts of Paris, arriving
+from the depths of the provinces, and it seems that each one, by the
+prayers that he brings, adds fuel to the immense brazier of Faith whose
+flames break out again under the smoky arches like the thousands of
+tapers which constantly burn, and are renewed from morning till evening,
+before Our Lady.
+
+"Well, I who seek the most deserted corners and the darkest places in
+the chapels, I who hate mobs, mix almost willingly with those I find
+there; because there everyone is isolated, no one is concerned with his
+neighbour, you do not see the human bodies which throng you, but you
+feel the breath of souls around. However refractory, however damp you
+may be, you end by taking fire at this contact, and are astonished to
+find yourself all at once less vile; it seems to me that the prayers
+which elsewhere when they leave my lips fall back to the ground
+exhausted and chilled, spring upwards in that place, are borne on by
+others, grow warm and soar and live.
+
+"At St. Severin I have indeed experienced the sensation of a help
+spreading from the pillars and running through the arches, but, as I
+think, the aid is less strong. Perhaps since the Middle Ages that church
+makes use of, but cannot renew the celestial effluvia with which it is
+charged; while at Notre Dame the help which springs up from the very
+pavement is for ever vivified by the uninterrupted presence of an ardent
+crowd. In the one it is the impregnate stone, the church itself which
+brings consolation, in the other it is above all things the fervour of
+the crowds which fill it.
+
+"And then I have the strange impression that the Virgin, attracted and
+retained by so great faith, only spends a little while in other
+churches, goes there as a visitor, but has made her home, and really
+resides in Notre Dame."
+
+The abbé smiled.
+
+"Come, I see that you know and love it; and yet the church is not on our
+left bank, beyond which, you said to me one day, there is no sanctuary
+worth having."
+
+"Yes, and I am surprised at it, especially as it is placed in a
+thoroughly commercial quarter, two paces from the Exchange, whose
+ignoble shouts can be heard in it."
+
+"It was itself an Exchange," said the abbé.
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"After having been baptized by the monks, and having served as a chapel
+for the discalced Augustinians, it was horribly desecrated in the
+Revolution, and the Exchange was set up within its walls."
+
+"I was not aware of that detail," said Durtal.
+
+"But," continued the abbé, "it was with it, as with those holy women,
+who, if we believe their biographers, recovered by a life of prayer the
+virginity they had formerly lost. Our Lady washed it from its violation,
+and though it is comparatively modern, it is at the present day
+saturated with emanations, infused by effluences of angels, penetrated
+with divine drugs, it is for sick souls what certain thermal springs are
+for the body. People keep their season there, make their novenas, and
+obtain their cure.
+
+"Now to come back to our point; I tell you you will do wisely, if on
+your bad evenings you will attend Benediction in that church. I shall be
+surprised if you do not come out cleansed and at peace."
+
+"If he have only that to offer me, it is little enough," thought Durtal.
+And after a disappointed silence he rejoined,
+
+"But, Monsieur l'Abbé, even were I to visit that sanctuary, and follow
+the offices in other churches, when temptations assail me, even were I
+to confess and draw near the Sacraments, how would that advantage me? I
+should meet as I came out the woman whose very sight inflames my senses,
+and it would be with me as after my leaving St. Severin all unnerved;
+the very feeling of tenderness which I had in the chapel would destroy
+me, and I should fall back into sin."
+
+"What do you know about it?" and the priest suddenly rose, and took long
+strides through the room.
+
+"You have no right to speak thus, for the virtue of the Sacrament is
+formal, the man who has communicated is no longer alone. He is armed
+against others and defended against himself," and crossing his arms
+before Durtal he exclaimed,--
+
+"To lose one's soul for the pleasure of momentary gratification! what
+madness. And since the time of your conversion, does not that disgust
+you?"
+
+"Yes, I am disgusted with myself, but only after my swinish desires are
+satisfied. If only I could gain true repentance."
+
+"Rest assured," said the abbé, who sat down again, "you will find it."
+
+And, seeing that Durtal shook his head,
+
+"Remember what Saint Teresa said: 'One trouble of those who are
+beginning is, that they cannot recognize whether they have true
+repentance for their faults; but they have it, and the proof is their
+sincere resolution to serve God.' Think of that sentence, for it applies
+to you; that repugnance to your sins which wearies you is witness to
+your regret, and you have a desire to serve the Lord, since you are in
+fact struggling to go to Him."
+
+There was a moment of silence.
+
+"Well, then, Monsieur l'Abbé, what is your advice?"
+
+"I advise you to pray in your own house, in church, everywhere, as much
+as you can. I do not prescribe any religious remedy, I simply invite you
+to profit by some precepts of pious hygiene, afterwards we will see."
+
+Durtal remained undecided, discontented, like those sick persons who
+find fault with doctors, who, to satisfy them, prescribe only colourless
+drugs.
+
+The priest laughed.
+
+"Confess," he said, looking him in the face, "confess that you are
+saying to yourself, 'It was not worth while to put myself out, for I am
+no further advanced, this good fellow, the priest, practises expectant
+medicine; instead of cutting short my crises with energetic remedies, he
+palters, advises me to go to bed early, not to catch cold--'"
+
+"Oh, Monsieur l'Abbé," protested Durtal.
+
+"Yet I do not wish to treat you like a child, or talk to you like a
+woman; now attend to me!
+
+"The way in which your conversion has worked leaves me in no doubt
+whatever. There has been what Mysticism calls the divine touch,
+only--note this--God has dispensed with human intervention, even with
+the interference of a priest, to bring you back into the road you have
+left for more than twenty years.
+
+"Now we cannot reasonably suppose that the Lord has acted lightly, and
+that He will now leave His work unaccomplished. He will carry it through
+if you put no obstacle in His way.
+
+"In fact you are at this moment like a block in His hands; what will He
+do with it? I do not know, but since He has kept to Himself the conduct
+of your soul, let Him act; be patient, He will explain His action; trust
+in Him, He will help you; be content to protest with the Psalmist: 'Doce
+me facere voluntatem tuam, quia Deus meus es tu.'
+
+"I tell you again I believe in the preventive virtue, the formal power
+of the Sacraments. I quite understand the system of Père Milleriot, who
+obliged those persons to communicate whom he thought would afterwards
+fall again into sin. For their only penance he obliged them to
+communicate again and again, and he ended by purifying them with the
+Sacred Species, taken in large doses. It is a doctrine at once realistic
+and exalted.
+
+"But reassure yourself," continued the abbé, looking at Durtal, who
+seemed wearied, "I do not intend to experiment on you in this way; on
+the contrary, my advice is that in the state of ignorance in which we
+are of God's will, you abstain from the Sacraments.
+
+"For you should desire them, and it should come from you rather than
+from Him; be sure that sooner or later you will thirst for Penance,
+hunger for the Eucharist. Well, when unable to restrain yourself longer,
+you ask for pardon and entreat to be allowed to approach the Holy Table,
+we shall see, we will ask Him what way He will choose to take, in order
+to save you."
+
+"But there are not, I presume, several ways of confessing and
+communicating?"
+
+"Certainly not, that is just what I meant to say ... but ..."
+
+And the priest hesitated, at a loss for words.
+
+"It is quite certain," he began again, "that art has been the principal
+means which the Saviour has used to make you absorb the Faith. He has
+taken you on your weak side--or strong side, if you like that better. He
+has infused into your nature the chief mystical works; he has persuaded
+and converted you, less by the way of reason than the way of the senses;
+and indeed those are the special conditions you have to take into
+account.
+
+"On the other hand your soul is not humble and simple, you are a sort of
+'sensitive,' whom the least imprudence, the least stupidity of a
+confessor would at once repel.
+
+"Therefore that you may not be at the mercy of a troublesome impression,
+certain precautions must be taken. In the state of weakness and
+feebleness in which you are, a disagreeable face, an unlucky word,
+antipathetic surroundings, a mere nothing would be enough to rout
+you--is it not so?"
+
+"Alas!" sighed Durtal, "I am obliged to answer that you are right; but,
+Monsieur l'Abbé, I do not think I shall have to fear such disillusions
+if when the moment you predict has come you will allow me to make my
+confession to you."
+
+The priest was silent for a while; then said,
+
+"No doubt, since I have met you, I may probably be useful to you, but I
+have an idea that my part will be confined to pointing out the road to
+you; I shall be a connecting link, and nothing more, you will end as you
+have begun, without help, alone." The abbé remained in thought, then
+shook his head, and went on: "Let us leave the subject, however, for we
+cannot anticipate the designs of God; to sum up, try to stifle in prayer
+your attacks of the flesh, it is a less matter not to be overcome at the
+moment, than to direct all your efforts not to be so."
+
+Then the priest added gently to rouse the spirits of Durtal, whom he saw
+to be depressed,
+
+"If you fall do not despair, and throw the handle after the hatchet. Say
+to yourself, that, after all Lust is not the most unpardonable of
+faults, that it is one of two sins for which the human being pays cash,
+and which are consequently expiated in part at least before death. Say
+to yourself that wantonness and avarice refuse all credit and will not
+wait; and in fact, whoever unlawfully commits a fleshly act is almost
+always punished in his lifetime. For some there are bastards to provide
+for, sickly wives, low connections, broken careers, abominable
+deceptions on the part of those they have loved. On whichever side we
+turn when women are concerned we have to suffer, for she is the most
+powerful instrument of sorrow which God has given to man.
+
+"It is the same with the passion for gain. Every being who allows
+himself to be overcome by that hateful sin, pays for it as a rule before
+his death. Look at the Panama business. Cooks, housekeepers, small
+proprietors who till then had lived in peace, seeking no inordinate
+gains, no illicit profit, threw themselves like madmen into that
+business. They had one only thought, to gain money; the chastisement of
+their cupidity was, as you know, sudden."
+
+"Yes," said Durtal, laughing, "the de Lesseps were the agents of
+providence, when they stole the savings of fools, who had moreover got
+them probably by thieving."
+
+"In a word," said the abbé, "I repeat my last advice: do not be at all
+discouraged if you sink. Do not despise yourself too much; have the
+courage to enter a church afterwards; for the devil catches you by
+cowardice, the false shame, the false humility he suggests, nourish,
+maintain, solidify your wantonness in some measure.
+
+"Well! no good-bye; come and see me soon again."
+
+Durtal found himself in the street a little confused. "It is evident,"
+he murmured, as he stalked along, "that the Abbé Gévresin is a clever
+spiritual watchmaker. He has dexterously taken to pieces the movement of
+my passions, and made the hours of idleness and weariness strike, but,
+after all, his advice comes only to this: stew in your own juice and
+wait.
+
+"Indeed he is right; if I had come to the point I should not have gone
+to him to chatter, but really to confess. What is strange is that he
+does not at all seem to think he will have to put me through the
+wash-tub; and to whom does he mean me to go--to the first comer who will
+wind about me his spool of commonplaces, and stroke me with his big
+hands without seeing clearly?
+
+"Well, well ... what is the time?" He looked at his watch. "Six o'clock,
+and I do not care to go home. What shall I do till dinner?"
+
+He was near St. Sulpice. He went in and sat down, to clear his thoughts
+a little, taking a place in the Chapel of Our Lady, which at that hour
+was almost empty.
+
+He felt no wish to pray, and rested there, looking at the great arch of
+marble and gold, like a scene in a theatre, where the Virgin, the only
+figure in the light, advances towards the faithful, as from a decorated
+grotto, on plaster clouds.
+
+Meanwhile two Little Sisters of the Poor came and knelt not far from
+him, and meditated, their heads between their hands.
+
+He thought as he looked at them,--
+
+"Those souls are to be envied who can thus be abstracted in prayer. How
+do they manage it? For, in fact, it is not easy, if one thinks of the
+sorrows of the world, to praise the vaunted mercy of God. It is all very
+fine to believe that He exists, to be certain that He is good; in fact,
+we do not know Him--we are ignorant of Him. He is, and, in fact, He can
+only be, immanent, permanent, and inaccessible. He is we know not what,
+and at most we know what He is not. Try to imagine Him, and the senses
+fail, for He is above, about, and in each one of us. He is three and He
+is one; He is each and He is all; He is without beginning, and He will
+be without end; He is above all and for ever incomprehensible. If we try
+to picture Him to ourselves and give Him a human wrappage, we come back
+to the simple conception of the early times, we represent Him under the
+features of an ancestor. Some old Italian model, some old Father
+Tourgéneff, with a long beard, and we cannot but smile, so childish is
+the likeness of God the Father.
+
+"He is, in fact, so absolutely above the imagination and the senses,
+that He comes only nominally into prayer, and the impulses of humanity
+ascend especially to the Son, Who only can be addressed, because He
+became man, and is to us somewhat of an elder brother, because, having
+wept in human form, we think He will hear us more readily, and be more
+compassionate to our sorrows.
+
+"As to the third Person, He is even more disconcerting than the first.
+He is especially the unknowable. How can we imagine this God formless
+and bodiless, this Substance equal to the two others, who, as it were,
+breathe Him forth? We think of Him as a brightness, a fluid, a breath;
+we cannot even lend to Him as to the Father the face of a man, since on
+the two occasions that He took to Himself a body, He showed Himself
+under the likenesses of a dove and of tongues of fire, and these two
+different aspects do not help to a suggestion of the new appearance He
+might assume.
+
+"Certainly the Trinity is terrible, and makes the brain reel. Ruysbröck
+has moreover said admirably, 'Let those who would know and study what
+God is, know that it is forbidden; they will go mad.'
+
+"So," he continued, looking at the two Little Sisters, who were now
+telling their beads, "these good women are right not to try to
+understand, and to confine themselves to praying with all their heart to
+the Mother and the Son.
+
+"Moreover, in all the lives of the saints which they have read, they
+have made certain that Jesus and Mary always appeared to the elect to
+console and strengthen them.
+
+"In fact, how stupid I am. To pray to the Son is to pray to the two
+others, for in praying to one among them I pray at the same time to the
+three, since the three make but one. And the Substances are, however,
+special, because if the divine Essence is one and simple, it is so in
+the threefold distinction of the Persons; but, again, what is the use of
+fathoming the Impenetrable?
+
+"Yet," he continued, remembering the interview he had just had with the
+priest, "how will all this end? If the abbé be right, I no longer
+belong to myself; I am about to enter the unknown, which frightens me.
+If only the sound of my vices consents to be silent, but I feel that
+they rise furiously within me. Ah, that Florence"--and he thought of a
+woman to whose vagaries he was riveted--"continues to walk about in my
+brain. I see her behind the lowered curtain of my eyes, and when I think
+of her I am a terrible coward."
+
+He endeavoured once more to put her away, but his will was overcome at
+the sight of her.
+
+He hated, despised, and even cursed her, but the madness of his
+illusions excited him; he left her disgusted with her and with himself;
+he swore he would never see her again, but did not keep his resolve.
+
+He saw her now in vision extend her hand to him.
+
+He recoiled, struggling to free himself; but his dream continued
+mingling her with the form of one of the sisters whose gentle profile he
+saw.
+
+Suddenly he started, returned to the real world, and saw that he was at
+St. Sulpice, in the chapel. "It is disgusting that I should come here to
+soil the church with my horrible dreams; I had better go."
+
+He went out in confusion, thinking, "Perhaps if I visit Florence once
+again, I may perhaps put an end to this haunting sense of her presence,
+seeing and knowing the reality."
+
+And he was obliged to answer himself that he was becoming idiotic, for
+he knew by experience that past desire grows in proportion as it is
+nourished. "No, the abbé was right; I have to become and to remain
+penitent. But how? Pray? How can I pray, when evil imaginations pursue
+me even in church? Evil dreams followed me to La Glacière; here they
+appear again, and smite me to the ground. How can I defend myself? for
+indeed it is frightful to be thus alone, to know nothing and have no
+proof, to feel the prayers which one tears out of oneself fall into the
+silence and the void without a gesture to answer, without a word of
+encouragement, without a sign. I do not even know if He be there, and if
+He listens. The abbé tells me to wait an indication, an order from on
+high; but, alas! they come to me from below."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Many months passed. Durtal continued his alternation of wanton and pious
+ideas. Without power to resist, he saw himself slipping. "All this is
+far from clear," he cried, one day, in a rage, when, less apathetic than
+usual, he forced himself to take stock. "Now, Monsieur l'Abbé, what does
+this mean? Whenever my sensual obsessions are weaker, so also are my
+religious impressions."
+
+"That means," said the priest, "that your adversary is holding out to
+you the most treacherous of his baits. He seeks to persuade you that you
+will never attain to anything unless you will give yourself up to the
+most repugnant excesses. He tries to convince you that satiety and
+disgust of these acts alone will bring you back to God; he incites you
+to commit them that they may, so to speak, bring about your deliverance;
+he leads you into sin under pretext of delivering you from it. Have a
+little energy, despise these sophistries and resist him."
+
+He went to see the Abbé Gévresin every week. He liked the patient
+discretion of the old priest, who let him talk when he was in a
+confidential humour, listened to him carefully, manifested no surprise
+at his frequent temptations and his falls. Only the abbé always returned
+to his first advice, insisted on regular prayer, and that Durtal should
+each day, if possible, visit a church. He also now said, "The hour is
+important for the success of these practices. If you wish that the
+chapels should be favourable to you, get up in time to be present at
+daybreak at the first mass, the servants' mass, and also be very often
+in the sanctuaries at nightfall."
+
+The priest had evidently formed a plan; Durtal did not yet wholly
+understand it, but he was bound to admit that this discipline of
+temporizing, this constant call to thought always directed to God, by
+his daily visits to the churches, acted upon him at last, and little by
+little softened his soul. One fact proved it: that he who for so long a
+time had been unable to meditate in the morning, now prayed as soon as
+he awoke. Even in the afternoon he found himself on some days seized
+with the need of speaking humbly with God, with an irresistible desire
+to ask His pardon and implore His help.
+
+It seemed then that the Lord knocked at his door with gentle touches,
+wishing so to recall his attention, and draw him to Him; but when,
+softened and troubled, Durtal would enter into himself to seek God, he
+wandered vaguely, not knowing what he said, and thinking of other things
+while speaking to Him.
+
+He complained of these wanderings and distractions to the priest, who
+answered,--
+
+"You are on the threshold of the probationary life; you cannot yet
+experience the sweet and familiar friendship of prayer. Do not sadden
+yourself because you cannot close behind you the gate of your senses.
+Watch and wait; pray badly if you can do nothing else, but pray all the
+same.
+
+"Be very sure too that every one has experienced the troubles which
+distress you; above all, believe that we do not walk blindfold, that
+Mysticism is an absolutely exact science. It can foretell the greater
+part of the phenomena which occur in that soul which the Lord intends
+for a perfect life; it follows also spiritual operations with the same
+clearness as physiology observes the different states of the body. For
+ages and ages it has disclosed the progress of grace and its effects,
+now impetuous and now slow; it has even pointed out the modifications of
+material organs which are transformed when the soul entirely loses
+itself in God.
+
+"Saint Denys the Areopagite, Saint Bonaventure, Hugh and Richard of
+Saint Victor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bernard, Ruysbröck, Angela of
+Foligno, the two Eckharts, Tauler, Suso, Denys the Carthusian, Saint
+Hildegarde, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint
+Magdalen of Pazzi, Saint Gertrude, and others have set forth in a
+masterly way the principles and theories of Mysticism, and it has found
+at last an admirable psychologist to sum up its rules and their
+exceptions; a Saint who has verified in her own person the supernatural
+phases she has described--a woman whose lucidity was more than
+human--Saint Teresa. You have read her life, and her 'Castles of the
+Soul'!"
+
+Durtal nodded assent.
+
+"Then you have your information; you ought to know that before reaching
+the shores of Blessedness, before arriving at the fifth dwelling of the
+interior castle, at that prayer of union wherein the soul is awakened in
+regard to God, and completely asleep to all things of earth and to
+herself, she must pass through lamentable states of dryness, and the
+most painful strainings. Take heart therefore; say to yourself that this
+dryness should be a source of humility, and not a cause of disquietude;
+do, in fact, as Saint Teresa would have you: carry your cross, and not
+drag it after you."
+
+"That magnificent and terrible Saint frightens me," sighed Durtal. "I
+have read her works, and, do you know, she gives me the idea of a
+stainless lily, but a metallic lily, forged of wrought iron; you will
+admit that those who suffer have scant consolations to expect from her."
+
+"Yes; in the sense that she does not think of the creature except in the
+way of Mysticism. She supposes the fields already ploughed, the soul
+already freed from its more vehement temptations, and sheltered from
+crises; her starting-point is as yet too high and too distant for you,
+for, in fact, she is addressing nuns, women of the cloister, beings who
+live apart from the world, and who are consequently already advanced on
+those ascetic ways wherein God is leading them.
+
+"But make an effort in the spirit to free yourself from this mud, cast
+away for a few moments the memory of your imperfections and your
+troubles, and follow her. See then how experienced she is in the domain
+of the supernatural, how, in spite of her repetitions and tediousness,
+she explains wisely and clearly the mechanism of the soul unfolding when
+God touches it. In subjects where words fail and phrases crumble away,
+she succeeds in making herself understood, in showing, making felt,
+almost making visible, the inconceivable sight of God buried in the
+soul, and taking His pleasure there.
+
+"And she goes still further into the mystery, even to the end; bounds
+with a final spring to the very gates of heaven, but then she faints on
+adoration, and being unable to express herself further, she soars,
+describing circles like a frightened bird, wandering beyond herself, in
+cries of love."
+
+"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbé, I recognize that Saint Teresa has explored deeper
+than any other the unknown regions of the soul; she is in some measure
+its geographer, has drawn the map of its poles, marked the latitudes of
+contemplation, the interior lands of the human sky. Other Saints have
+explored them before her, but they have not left us so methodical nor so
+exact a topography.
+
+"But in spite of this I prefer those mystical writers who have less
+self-analysis, and discuss less, who always do throughout their works
+what Saint Teresa did at the end of hers--that is, who are all on fire
+from the first page to the last, and are consumed and lost at the feet
+of Christ. Ruysbröck is among these. The little volume which Hello has
+translated is a very furnace; and, again, to quote a woman, take Saint
+Angela of Foligno, not so much in the book of her visions which may not
+be always effectual, as in the wonderful life which she dictated to
+Brother Armand, her confessor. She too explains, and much earlier than
+Saint Teresa, the principles and effects of Mysticism; but if she is
+less profound, less clever in defining shades, on the other hand she is
+wonderfully effusive and tender. She caresses the soul; she is a
+Bacchante of divine love, a Mĉnad of purity. Christ loves her, holds
+long conversations with her; the words she has retained surpass all
+literature, and are manifestly the most beautiful ever written. This is
+no longer the rough Christ, the Spanish Christ who begins by trampling
+on His creature to make him more supple; He is the merciful Christ of
+the Gospels, the gentle Christ of Saint Francis, and I like the Christ
+of the Franciscans better than the Christ of the Carmelites."
+
+"What will you say, then," said the abbé, with a smile, "of St. John of
+the Cross? You compared Saint Teresa just now to a flower in wrought
+iron; he too is such, but he is the lily of tortures, the royal flower
+which the executioners were wont of old time to stamp on the heraldic
+flesh of convicts. Like red-hot iron, he is at the same time burning and
+sombre. As you turn over the pages, Saint Teresa now and then bends over
+and sorrows and compassionates us; he remains impenetrable, buried in
+his internal abyss, occupied, above all things, in describing the
+sufferings of the soul which, after having crucified its desires, passes
+through the 'Night obscure,' that is to say, through the renunciation of
+all which comes from the sensible and the created.
+
+"He wills that we should extinguish our imagination--so lethargize it
+that it can no longer form images--imprison our senses, annihilate our
+faculties. He wills that he who desires to unite himself to God should
+place himself under an exhausted receiver, and make a vacuum within, so
+that, if he choose, the Pilgrim should descend therein, and purify
+himself, tearing out the remains of sins, extirpating the last relics of
+vice.
+
+"Then the sufferings which the soul endures overpass the bounds of the
+possible, it lies lost in utter darkness, falls under discouragement and
+fatigue, believes itself for ever abandoned by Him to whom it cries, who
+now hides Himself and answers not again, happy still when in that agony,
+the pangs of the flesh are not added, and that abominable spirit which
+Isaias calls the spirit of confusion, and which is none other than the
+disease of scrupulousness pushed to its extreme.
+
+"Saint John makes you shudder when he cries out that this night of the
+soul is bitter and terrible, and that the being who suffers it is
+plunged alive into hell. But when the old man is purged out, when he is
+scraped at every seam, raked over every face, light springs out, and God
+appears. Then the soul casts itself like a child into His arms, and the
+incomprehensible fusion takes place.
+
+"You see Saint John penetrates more deeply than others into the depths
+of mystical initiation. He also, like Saint Teresa and Ruysbröck, treats
+of the spiritual marriage, of the influx of grace, and its gifts; but he
+first dared to describe minutely the dolorous phases which till then had
+been but hinted at with trembling.
+
+"Then if he is an admirable theologian, he is also a rigorous and
+clear-sighted saint. He has not those weaknesses which are natural to a
+woman; he does not lose himself in digressions, nor return continually
+on his own steps; he walks straight forward, but you often see him at
+the end of the road, blood-stained and terrible, with dry eyes."
+
+"But, but," said Durtal, "surely not all souls whom Christ will lead in
+the ways of mysticism are tried thus?"
+
+"Yes, almost always, more or less."
+
+"I will confess that I thought the spiritual life was less arid and less
+complex. I imagined that by leading a pure life, praying one's best, and
+communicating, one would attain without much trouble, not indeed to
+taste the infinite joys reserved for the saints, but at last to possess
+the Lord, and live, at least, near Him, at rest.
+
+"And I should be quite content with this middle class joy. The price
+paid in advance for the exaltation described by Saint John disconcerts
+me."
+
+The abbé smiled, but made no answer.
+
+"But do you know that if it be so," replied Durtal, "we are very far
+from the Catholicism that is taught us? It is so practical, so benign,
+so gentle, in comparison with Mysticism."
+
+"It is made for lukewarm souls--that is to say, for almost all the pious
+souls which are about us; it lives in a moderate atmosphere, without too
+great suffering or too much joy; it only can be assimilated by the
+masses, and the priests are right to present it thus, since otherwise
+the faithful would cease to understand it, or would take flight in
+alarm."
+
+"But if God judge that a moderate religion is amply sufficient--for the
+masses believe that he demands the most painful efforts on the part of
+those whom he deigns to initiate into the supremely adorable mysteries
+of His Person--it is necessary and just that he should mortify them
+before allowing them to taste the essential intoxication of union with
+Him."
+
+"In fact, the end of Mysticism is to render visible, sensible, almost
+palpable, the God who remains silent and hidden from all."
+
+"And to throw us into His deep, into the silent abyss of joy! But in
+order to speak correctly, we must forget the ordinary use of expressions
+which have been degraded. In order to describe this mysterious love, we
+are obliged to draw our comparisons from human acts, and to inflict on
+the Lord the shame of our words. We have to employ such terms as
+'union,' 'marriage,' 'wedding feast'; but it is impossible to speak of
+the inexpressible, and with the baseness of our language declare the
+ineffable immersion of the soul in God."
+
+"The fact is," murmured Durtal ... "but to return to Saint Teresa...."
+
+"She too," interrupted the abbé, "has treated of this 'Night obscure'
+which terrifies you; but she only speaks of it in a few lines. She calls
+it the soul's agony--a sadness so bitter that she strove in vain to
+depict it."
+
+"No doubt, but I prefer her to Saint John of the Cross, for she is not
+so discouraging as that inflexible saint. Admit that he belongs too much
+to the land of those large Christs who bleed in caverns."
+
+"Of what nationality then was Saint Teresa?"
+
+"Yes, I know she was a Spaniard, but so complex, so strange, that race
+seems obliterated in her, less clearly defined.
+
+"It is clear she was an admirable psychologist, but also how strange is
+in her the mixture of an ardent mystic and a cool woman of business.
+For, in fact, she has a double nature; she is a contemplative outside
+the world, and at the same time a statesman, a female Colbert of the
+cloister. In fact, never was woman so consummate a skilled artisan and
+so powerful an organizer. When we consider that, in spite of incredible
+difficulties, she founded thirty-two nunneries, that she put them all
+under obedience to a rule which is a model of wisdom, a rule which
+foresees and rectifies the most ignored mistakes of the heart, it is
+astonishing to hear her treated by strong-minded people as an hysterical
+madwoman."
+
+"One of the distinctive marks of the mystics," answered the abbé, with a
+smile, "is just their absolute balance, their entire common sense."
+
+These conversations cheered Durtal; they planted on him seeds of
+reflection which sprang up when he was alone; they encouraged him to
+trust to the advice of this priest, and follow his counsels. He found
+himself all the better for this conduct, in that his visits to the
+churches, his prayers and readings occupied his objectless life, and he
+was no longer wearied.
+
+"I have at least gained peaceable evenings and quiet nights," he said to
+himself.
+
+He knew the soothing help of a pious evening.
+
+He visited St. Sulpice at those times when, under the dull gleam of the
+lamps, the pillars opened out and threw long panels of darkness on the
+ground. The chapels which remained open were in shade, and in the nave
+before the high altar a single cluster of lamps, above in the darkness,
+shone out like a luminous bunch of red roses.
+
+In the stillness no sounds were heard but the dull thud of a door, the
+creaking of a chair, the short paces of a woman, the hurried stride of a
+man.
+
+Durtal was almost isolated in the obscure chapel which he had chosen; he
+kept himself there so far from all, so far from the city whose full
+pulse was beating only two paces from him. He knelt down and remained
+still, he prepared to speak, and had nothing to say, felt himself
+carried away by an impulse, but no words came. He ended by falling into
+a vague languor, experiencing that indolent ease, that dim sense of
+comfort, which the body feels in a medicated bath.
+
+He fell a-dreaming of the lot of the women who were round about him here
+and there, in chairs. Ah! those poor little black shawls, those
+miserable pleated caps, those wretched tippets, those doleful seed
+rosaries they fingered in the shade.
+
+Some in mourning, sobbed still inconsolable; others, overwhelmed, bent
+their backs and hung their heads on one side; others prayed, their
+shoulders shaking, their head in their hands.
+
+The task of the day was over; those wearied of their life came to ask
+for mercy. Everywhere misfortune was kneeling, for the rich, the
+healthy, the happy hardly pray; all around in the church were women,
+widowed or old, without love, women deserted, women whose home was a
+torture, praying that existence might become more merciful, that the
+dissoluteness of their husbands might cease, the vices of their sons
+amend, the health of those they loved grow stronger.
+
+A lamentable perfume went up like incense to Our Lady from a very sheaf
+of woes.
+
+Few men came to this hidden meeting-place of trouble; still fewer young
+people, for these have not yet suffered enough; there were only a few
+old men, and a few sick who dragged themselves along by the backs of the
+chairs, and a little hunchback, whom Durtal saw coming there every
+evening, an outcast who could only be loved by Her who does not even see
+the body.
+
+A burning pity seized on Durtal at the sight of those unhappy ones who
+came to beg from Heaven a little of the love refused them by men; and
+he who could not pray on his own account ended by joining himself to
+their pleadings, and praying for them.
+
+So indifferent in the afternoon, the churches were truly persuasive,
+truly sweet, in the evening; they seemed to bestir themselves at
+nightfall, and to compassionate in their solitude the sufferings of
+those sick creatures whose complaints they heard.
+
+And their first mass in the morning, the mass of working women and
+servant maids was no less touching; there were there no bigots nor
+curious persons, but poor women who came to seek in communion strength
+to live their hours of onerous tasks and servile needs. They knew as
+they left the church that they were the living custodians of a God, of
+Him who was ever while on earth the Poor Man, who took pleasure only in
+souls who had scarce where to lay their head; they knew themselves His
+chosen, and did not doubt that when He entrusted to them under the form
+of bread the memorial of His suffering, He demanded of them in exchange
+that they should live in sorrow and humility. And what harm then could
+do to them the cares of a day spent in the salutary shame of base
+occupations?
+
+"I now understand," thought Durtal, "why the abbé made such a point of
+my seeing the churches early or late; those are, in fact, the only times
+in which the soul expands."
+
+But he was too idle to be often present at early mass; he was content to
+take his relaxation after dinner in the chapels. He came out with a
+feeling of peace, even if he had prayed badly or not prayed at all. On
+other evenings, on the contrary, he felt tired of solitude, tired of
+silence, tired of darkness, and then he abandoned St. Sulpice and went
+to Notre Dame des Victoires.
+
+In this well-lighted sanctuary there was no longer that depression, that
+despair of poor wretches who dragged themselves to the nearest church
+and sat down in the shade. The pilgrims to Notre Dame des Victoires
+brought a surer confidence, and that faith softened their sorrows, whose
+bitterness was dissipated in the explosions of hope, the stammering
+adoration, which spouted up all around. There were two currents in that
+refuge, that of people who asked for favours, and that of those who,
+having gained them, were profuse in thankfulness and in acts of
+gratitude. Therefore, that church had its especial physiognomy, more
+joyous than sad, less melancholy, more ardent under all circumstances
+than that of other churches.
+
+It had, moreover, the peculiarity of being much frequented by men, but
+less by hypocrites, who will not look you in the face, or with upturned
+eyes, than by men of all classes whose features were not degraded by
+false piety. There alone were to be seen clear expressions and clean
+faces; there, above all, was not that horrible grimace of the working
+man of the Catholic clubs--that hideous creature in a blouse, whose
+breath belies the ill-defined unction of his features.
+
+In that church, covered with _ex votos_, plastered even above the arches
+with inscriptions on marble celebrating the joy for prayers granted and
+benefits received, before that altar of Our Lady where hundreds of
+tapers pierced the air blue with incense with the gilded blades of their
+lances, there were public prayers every evening at eight. A priest in
+the pulpit said the rosary, sometimes the Litany of Our Lady was sung to
+a singular air, a sort of musical cento, but it was impossible to say
+whence it was constructed, very rhythmical, and continually changing its
+tone, now fast, now slow, bringing with it, for a moment, a vague
+recollection of seventeenth-century airs, then turning sharply at a
+tangent, to a barrel-organ tune, a modern, almost vulgar, melody.
+
+Yet, after all, there was something taking in this singular confusion of
+sounds after the "Kyrie eleison" and the opening invocations. The Virgin
+came upon the scene to a dance measure like a ballet girl; but when
+certain of her attributes were paraded, and certain of her symbolical
+names declared, the music became singularly respectful; it became lower,
+halting and solemn, thrice repeating, on the same motive, some of her
+attributes, the "Refugium Peccatorum" among others; then it went on
+again, and began her graces again with a skip.
+
+When by chance there was no sermon, the Benediction took place
+immediately afterwards.
+
+Then with raspings of the choir, a bass with a cold, and two boys who
+snivelled began their liturgical chants: "Inviolata," that languishing
+and plaintive Sequence, with its clear and drawling tune so weak, so
+frail, that it would seem as if it should only be sung by voices in a
+hospital; then the "Parce Domine," that antiphon so suppliant and so
+sad; lastly, that scrap, detached from the "Panga Lingua," the "Tantum
+ergo," humble and thoughtful, attentive and slow.
+
+When the organ sounded out the first chords, and that plain chant melody
+began, the choir had only to cross their arms and hold their tongues. As
+tapers which are lighted by threads of fulminate attached one to the
+other, the faithful caught fire, and, accompanied by the organs, struck
+up for themselves the humble and glorious strains. They were then
+kneeling on the chairs, prostrate on the pavement, and when, after the
+exchange of antiphons and responses, after the "oremus," the priest
+ascended to the altar, his shoulders and hands enfolded in the white
+silk scarf, to take the monstrance, then, at the shrill and hurried
+sounds of the bells, a wind passed which at once bent every head like
+the mowing of grass.
+
+In these groups of souls on fire there was a fulness of devotion, a
+complete and absolute silence, till the bells again rang out, and
+invited human life which had been interrupted to wrap itself in a great
+sign of the Cross and resume its course.
+
+The "Laudate" was not ended when Durtal left the church, before the
+crowd began to move.
+
+"Verily," he said, as he entered his lodgings, "the fervour of that
+congregation, who do not come as in other churches from the districts,
+but are pilgrims from everywhere and one knows not where, is out of tune
+with the blackguardism of this foolish age."
+
+Then at Notre Dame at least one hears curious singing, and he bethought
+him of those strange litanies which he had heard nowhere else, and yet
+he had experienced all kinds, in churches. At St. Sulpice, for example,
+it was recited to two tunes. When the choir sang it was set to a plain
+chant melody, bellowed by the gong of a bass to which the sharp fife of
+the boys made answer; but during Rosary month, on every day except
+Thursday the task of singing it was entrusted to young ladies; then in
+the evening round a wheezy old harmonium, a troup of young and old
+geese, made Our Lady run round on her litanies as on hobby horses to the
+music of a fair.
+
+In other churches, at St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, where they were
+also dropped out by women, the litanies were sprinkled with powder and
+perfumed by bergamot and ambergris. They were, in fact, adapted to a
+minuet tune, and therefore did not disagree with the operatic
+architecture of the church, where they presented a Virgin walking with
+mincing steps, pinching her petticoat with two fingers, bending in
+beautiful curtseys, and recovering herself with a fine bow. This has
+evidently nothing to do with church music, but it was none the less
+disagreeable to hear. It would have made the whole performance complete
+if the harpsichord had been substituted for the organ.
+
+Far more interesting than this lay quavering was the plain chant, given
+more or less badly, as it was moreover given, but yet given, when there
+was no special ceremony at Notre Dame.
+
+It was not arranged there as at St. Sulpice and the other churches where
+the "Tantum ergo" is almost always dressed up in foolish flourishes,
+tunes for military ceremonials or public dinners.
+
+The Church has not allowed the actual text of Saint Thomas Aquinas to be
+altered, but she has let any and every choirmaster suppress the plain
+chant in which it has been wrapped from its birth, which has penetrated
+to its marrow, has clung to each of its phrases, and become with it one
+body and one soul.
+
+It was monstrous, and it must really be that these curés have lost, not
+the sense of art, for that they never had, but the most elementary sense
+of the liturgy, to accept such heresies, and tolerate such outrages in
+their churches.
+
+These thoughts enraged Durtal, but he returned little by little to Notre
+Dame des Victoires and grew calmer. It was well he should examine it
+under all aspects, but it remained none the less mysterious nor the less
+unique in Paris.
+
+At La Salette, at Lourdes, there have been apparitions. "Whether these
+have been authentic or controverted matters little," he thought. "For
+even supposing Our Lady were not there at the moment her coming was
+announced, she was attracted there, and dwells there now, retained there
+by the tide of prayer and the emanations cast up by the faith of
+crowds. Miracles have happened there; it is therefore not astonishing
+that pious crowds flock thither. But here at Notre Dame des Victoires
+has been no apparition; no Mélanie, no Bernadette, have seen and
+described the luminous appearance of a 'beautiful Lady.' There are no
+piscinas, no medical staff, no public cures, no mountain top, no grotto,
+nothing. One fine day in 1836 the curé of the parish, the Abbé Dufriche
+Des Genettes, declared that while he was celebrating mass Our Lady
+manifested to him her desire that the sanctuary should be specially
+consecrated to her, and that alone was enough. The church, then a
+desert, has never since been empty, and thousands of _ex votos_ declare
+the graces which since that day the Madonna has accorded to the
+visitors."
+
+"Yes, but in fact," concluded Durtal, "all these suppliants are not
+specially extraordinary souls, for indeed the most part of them are like
+me, they come in their own interests, for themselves and not for Her."
+
+And he remembered the answer of the Abbé Gévresin, to whom he had
+already made the observation.
+
+"You must be singularly far advanced on the road to perfection if you go
+there for Her only."
+
+Suddenly, after so many hours spent in the chapels, there was a
+reaction; the flesh extinguished under the cinders of prayers took fire,
+and the conflagration, springing up from below, became terrible.
+
+Florence seemed present, to Durtal's imagination, at his lodgings, in
+the churches, in the street, everywhere, and he was constantly on the
+watch against her recurrent attractions.
+
+The weather was mixed up with it all; the heaven broke up, a stormy
+summer raged, shattering the nerves, enfeebling the will, letting the
+awakened troop of vices loose in their gloomy moisture. Durtal blenched
+before the dread of long evenings and the abominable melancholy of days
+that never ended. At eight o'clock in the evening the sun had not set,
+and at three in the morning it seemed to wake again; the week was only
+one uninterrupted day, and life was never arrested.
+
+Oppressed by the ignominy of this angry sunshine and these blue skies,
+disgusted at bathing in Niles of sweat, and feeling Niagaras run from
+his hat, he did not stir from home, and then, in his solitude, foul
+thoughts assailed him.
+
+It was an obsession by thought, by vision, in all ways, and the haunting
+was all the more terrible that it was so special, that it never turned
+aside, but concentrated itself always on the same point, the face and
+figure of Florence.
+
+Durtal resisted, then in distraction, took to flight, tried to tire
+himself out by long walks, and to divert his mind by excursions, but the
+ignoble desire followed him in his course, sat before him in the Café,
+came between his eyes and the newspaper he strove to read, becoming ever
+more definite. He ended, after hours of struggle, by giving way and
+going to see this woman; he left her overwhelmed, half dead with disgust
+and shame, almost in tears.
+
+Nor did he thus find any solace in his struggle, but the contrary; far
+from escaping it, the hateful charm took more violent and tenacious
+possession of him. Then Durtal thought of and accepted a strange
+compromise, to visit another woman he knew, and in her society to break
+this nervous state, to put an end to this possession, this weariness and
+remorse; and in doing so he strove to persuade himself that in thus
+acting he would be more pardonable, less sinful.
+
+The clearest result of this attempt was to bring back the memory of
+Florence, and her vicious charm.
+
+He continued therefore his intimacy with her, and then he had, during a
+few days, such a revolt from his slavery, that he extricated himself
+from the sewer, and stood on firm ground.
+
+He succeeded in recovering and pulling himself together, and he loathed
+himself. During this crisis he had somewhat neglected the Abbé Gévresin,
+to whom he dared not avow his foulness, but since certain indications
+warned him of new attacks, he took fright, and went to see him.
+
+He explained his crises in veiled words, and he felt so unnerved, so
+sad, that tears stood in his eyes.
+
+"Well, are you now certain that you have that repentance which you
+assure me you have not experienced up to this time?"
+
+"Yes, but what is the good of it, if one is so weak, that in spite of
+all efforts one is certain to be overthrown at the first assault?"
+
+"That is another question. Come, I see that at present you are in fact
+in a state of fatigue requiring help."
+
+"Comfort yourself therefore; go in peace and sin less, the greater part
+of your temptations will be remitted you; you can, if you choose, bear
+the remainder, only take care, if you fall henceforward, you will be
+without excuse, and I do not answer for it, that instead of mending,
+your condition will not be aggravated."
+
+And as Durtal, stupefied, stammered out: "You believe--"
+
+"I believe," said the priest, "in the mystical substitution of which I
+spoke to you; you will moreover experience it in yourself; the saints
+will enter into the lists to help you; they will take the overplus of
+the assaults which you cannot conquer; without even knowing your name,
+from their secluded province, nunneries of Carmelites and Poor Clares
+will pray for you, on receiving a letter from me."
+
+And in fact, from that very day the most acute attacks ceased. Did he
+owe that cessation, that truce, to the intercession of the cloistered
+Orders, or to a change in the weather, which then took place, to the
+less heat of the sun, which gave way to floods of rain? He could not
+tell, but one thing was certain, his temptations were less frequent, and
+he could bear them with impunity.
+
+This idea of convents in their compassion dragging him out of the mud in
+which he had stuck, and by their charity bringing him to the bank,
+excited him. He chose to go to the Avenue de Saxe, to pray in the home
+of the sisters of those who suffered for him.
+
+This time there were no lights, no crowds, as on the morning when he had
+been present at a Procession, no odour of wax or incense, no sweeping by
+of robes of scarlet and cope of gold, all was deserted and dark.
+
+He was there alone, in the sombre and dank chapel, smelling like
+stagnant water, and without saying rosaries mechanically, or repeating
+prayers by rote, he fell into a reverie, endeavouring to look somewhat
+clearly into his life, and take stock of himself. And while he thus
+pulled himself together, far-off voices came behind the grating, drew
+nearer and nearer, passed by the black sieve of the veil, and dropped
+round the altar, whose form rose dimly in the shadow.
+
+These voices of the Carmelites aided Durtal to probe his despair deeply.
+
+Seated in a chair, he said to himself: "When any one is as incapable as
+I am when I speak to Him, it is almost shameful to dare to pray, for
+indeed, if I think of Him, it is that I may ask for a little happiness;
+and that is foolish. In the immediate shipwreck of human reason, wishing
+to explain the terrible enigma of the meaning of life, one only idea
+comes to the surface, in the midst of the wreckage of thoughts which
+sink, the idea of an expiation felt rather than understood, the idea
+that the sole end assigned to life is sorrow.
+
+"Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever
+does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only
+lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in
+advance on a future succession of sorrows.
+
+"Who knows in that case whether anĉsthetics which suppress corporal pain
+do not bring into debt those who use them? Who knows whether chloroform
+is not a means of revolt, and if the shrinking of the creature from
+suffering is not seditious, a rebellion against the will of Heaven? If
+this be so, the arrears of torture, the balance of distress, the
+warrants of pain avoided must accumulate terrible interest above, and
+justify the war cry of Saint Teresa, 'Lord, let me always suffer, or
+die;' this explains why, in their trials, the saints rejoice, and pray
+the Lord not to spare them, for they know that the purifying amount of
+ills must be paid in order to be free from debt after death.
+
+"To be just, human nature would be too ignoble without pain, for it
+alone can raise the soul while purifying it, but all that is nothing
+less than consoling," he added. "What an accompaniment to these sad
+thoughts are the wailing voices of these nuns; it is truly frightful."
+
+He ended by fleeing, and taking refuge, to shake off his depression, in
+the neighbouring convent at the bottom of the alley de Saxe, in a
+suburban lane, full of little cottages with gardens in front, where
+serpentine paths of pebbles wound round tufts of pot-herbs.
+
+This was the convent of the Poor Clares of the Ave Maria, an Order
+still more strict than that of the Carmelites, poorer, less fashionable,
+more humble.
+
+This cloister was entered by a little door, partly ajar; you ascended to
+the second storey without meeting anyone, and found a little chapel,
+through whose windows trees were visible, rocking to the chirping of
+riotous sparrows.
+
+This too was a place of burial, but no longer, as though opposite a tomb
+at the bottom of a dark cavern, but rather a cemetery where birds sang
+in the sun among the branches, you might have thought yourself in the
+country, twenty miles from Paris.
+
+The decoration of this bright chapel tried, however, to be gloomy; it
+was like those wine shops whose walls are made to look like those of
+caves, with false stones painted in the imitation plaster. Only the
+height of the nave manifested the childishness of the imposture, and
+declared the vulgarity of the deception.
+
+At the end was an altar above a smooth waxed floor, and on either side
+of it a grating with a black veil. According to the rule of Saint
+Francis, all the ornaments, the crucifix, the candlesticks, the
+tabernacle, were of wood, no object was to be seen in metal, no flower,
+the only luxury in the chapel consisted of two modern stained windows,
+one of which represented Saint Francis, the other Saint Clare.
+
+Durtal thought the sanctuary airy and delightful, but he only stayed
+there a few minutes, for there was not here, as at the Carmelites, an
+absolute solitude, a sombre peace; here there were always two or three
+Poor Clares trotting about the chapel, who looked at him while they were
+arranging the chairs, and seemed surprised at his presence.
+
+They were annoying to him, and he feared he was the same to them, so
+much so that he went away; but this short stay was enough to efface, or
+at least to lessen the funereal impression of the neighbouring convent.
+
+Durtal returned home, at once much appeased and much disquieted--much
+appeased in regard to his temptations, much disquieted about what he
+should do next.
+
+He felt rising in him, and increasing ever more and more, the desire to
+have done with these strifes and fears, but he grew pale when he thought
+of reversing his life, once for all.
+
+But if he still had hesitation and fear, he had no longer the firm
+intention of resisting; he now accepted in principle the idea of a
+change of existence, only he tried to retard the day, and put off the
+hour; he tried to gain time.
+
+Then like people who grow angry at having to wait, on other days he
+wished to put off the inevitable moment no longer, and cried within
+himself that this must end; anything rather than remain as he was.
+
+Then as this desire did not seem heard, he grew discouraged, would no
+longer think of anything, regretted the time past, and deplored that he
+felt himself carried along by such a current.
+
+And when he was rather more cheerful, he tried again to examine himself.
+"In fact I do not at all know how I stand," he thought; "this flux and
+reflux of different wishes alarms me, but how have I come to this point,
+and what is the matter with me?" What he felt, since he became more
+lucid, was so intangible, so indefinite, and yet so continuous that he
+was obliged to give up understanding it. Indeed every time he tried to
+examine his soul, a curtain of mist arose, and hid from him the unseen
+and silent approach of he knew not what. The only impression which he
+carried with him as he rose, was that it was less that he advanced
+towards the unknown, but that this unknown invaded him, penetrated him,
+and little by little took possession of him.
+
+When he spoke to the abbé of this state, at once cowardly and resigned,
+imploring and fearful, the priest only smiled.
+
+"Busy yourself in prayer, and bow down your back," he said one day.
+
+"But I am tired of bending my back, and of trampling always on the same
+spot," cried Durtal. "I have had enough of feeling myself taken by the
+shoulders and led I know not where, it is really time that in one way or
+another this situation came to an end."
+
+"Plainly." And standing up, and looking him in the face, the abbé said,
+impressively,
+
+"This advance towards God which you find so obscure and so slow is, on
+the contrary, so luminous and so rapid that it astonishes me, only as
+you yourself do not move, you do not take account of the swiftness with
+which you are borne along.
+
+"Before long you will be ripe, and then without need to shake the tree
+you will fall off of yourself. The question we have now to answer is
+into what receptacle we must put you, when at last you fall away from
+your life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+"But ... but ..." thought Durtal, "we must at any rate come to an
+understanding; the abbé wearies me with his quiet assumptions, his
+receptacle in which he must place me. He does not, I suppose, think of
+making me a seminarist or a monk; the seminary, at my age, is devoid of
+interest, and as to the convent, it is attractive from the mystical
+point of view, and even enticing from the artistic standpoint, but I
+have not the physical aptitudes, still less the spiritual
+predispositions to shut myself up for ever in a cloister; but putting
+that aside, what does he mean?
+
+"On the other hand he has insisted on lending me the works of Saint John
+of the Cross, and has made me read them; he has then an aim, for he is
+not a man to feel his way as he walks, he knows what he wishes and where
+he is going; does he imagine that I am intended for the perfect life,
+and does he intend to put me on my guard by this course of reading
+against the disillusions which, according to him, beginners experience?
+His scent seems to fail him there. I have a very horror of bigotry, and
+pious polish, but though I admire, I do not feel at all drawn towards
+the phenomena of Mysticism. No, I am interested in seeing them in
+others, I like to see it all from my window, but will not go downstairs,
+I have no pretension to become a saint, all that I desire is to attain
+the intermediate state, between goody-goodiness and sanctity. This is a
+frightfully low ideal, perhaps, but in practice it is the only one I am
+capable of attaining, and yet!
+
+"Then these questions have to be faced! If I am mistaken and am obeying
+false impulses, I am, as I advance, on the verge of madness. How, except
+by a special grace, am I to know whether I am in the right way, or
+walking in the dark towards the abyss? Here, for instance, are those
+conversations between God and the soul so common in the mystical life;
+how can one be sure that this interior voice, these distinct words not
+heard with bodily ears, but perceived by the soul in a clearer fashion
+than if they came by the channels of sense, are true, how be sure that
+they emanate from God, not from our imagination or from the devil
+himself?
+
+"I know, indeed, that Saint Teresa treats this matter at length in her
+'Castles of the Soul,' and that she points out the signs by which we can
+recognize the origin of the words, but her proofs do not seem to me
+always as easy to discern as she thinks.
+
+"'If these expressions come from God,' she says, 'they are always
+accompanied by an effect, and bring with them an authority which nothing
+can resist; thus a soul is in affliction, and the Lord simply suggests
+the words "trouble not thyself," and at once the whirlwind passes, and
+joy revives. In the second place, these words leave an indissoluble
+peace of mind, they engrave themselves on the memory, and often cannot
+be effaced.'
+
+"'In the other case,' she continues, 'if these words proceed from
+imagination or from the demon, none of these effects are produced, a
+kind of uneasiness, anguish and doubt torments you, moreover the
+expressions evaporate in part, and fatigue the soul which endeavours in
+vain to recall them in their entirety.'
+
+"In spite of these tokens, we are, in fact, standing on shifting ground
+in which we may sink at every step, but in his turn Saint John of the
+Cross intervenes, and tells you not to move. What then is to be done?
+
+"'No one,' he says, 'ought to aspire to these supernatural
+communications and rest there, for two motives; first, humility, the
+perfect abnegation of refusing to believe in them; the second, that in
+acting thus, we deliver ourselves from the labour necessary to assure
+ourselves whether these vocal visions are true or false, and so we are
+dispensed from an examination which has no other profit for the soul
+than loss of time and anxiety.'
+
+"Good--but if these words are really pronounced by God, we rebel against
+His will if we remain deaf to them. And then, as Saint Teresa declares,
+it is not in our power not to listen to them, and the soul can only
+think of what it hears when Jesus speaks to it. Moreover, all the
+discussions on this subject are uncertain, for one does not enter of
+one's own will into the strait way, as the Church calls it, we are led,
+and even thrown into it often against the will, and resistance is
+impossible, phenomena occur, and nothing in the world has power to check
+them; witness Saint Teresa, who, resist as she would by humility, fell
+into ecstasy under the divine breath, and was raised from the ground.
+
+"No, these superhuman conditions alarm me, and I do not hold to knowing
+them by experience. As to Saint John of the Cross, the abbé is not wrong
+in calling him unique, but though he sounds the lowest strata of the
+soul, and reaches where human auger has never penetrated, he wearies me
+all the same in my admiration, for his work is full of nightmares which
+repel me; I am not certain that his hell is correct, and some of his
+assertions do not convince me. What he calls the 'night obscure' is
+incomprehensible; 'The sufferings of that darkness surpass what is
+possible,' he cries on each page. Here I lose foothold. I can imagine,
+though I have not experienced them, the moral and terrible pangs, of the
+deaths of friends and relations, love betrayed, hopes which failed,
+spiritual sorrows of all kinds, but such a martyrdom as he proclaims as
+superior to all others, is beyond me, for it is outside our human
+interests, beyond our affections; he moves in an inaccessible sphere, in
+an unknown world very far off.
+
+"I am certainly afraid that this terrible saint, a true man of the
+south, abuses metaphor, and is full of Spanish affectation.
+
+"Moreover I am astonished at the abbé on another point. He, who is so
+gentle, shows a certain leaning to the dry bread of Mysticism; the
+effusions of Ruysbröck, of Saint Angela, of Saint Catherine of Genoa,
+touch him less than the arguments of saints who are hard reasoners; yet
+by the side of these he has advised me to read Marie d'Agreda, whom he
+ought not to fancy, for she has none of those qualities which are
+admired in the works of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross.
+
+"Ah! he may flatter himself that he has inflicted on me a complete
+disillusion, by lending me her 'Cité Mystique.'
+
+"From the renown of this Spanish woman, I expected the breath of
+prophecy, wide outlooks, extraordinary visions. Not at all; her book is
+simply strange and pompous, wearisome and cold. Then the phraseology of
+her book is intolerable. All the expressions which swarm in those
+ponderous volumes, 'my divine princess,' 'my great queen,' when she
+addresses Our Lady, who in her turn speaks to her as 'my dearest,' just
+as Christ calls her 'my spouse,' 'my well-beloved,' and speaks of her
+continually as 'the object of my pleasure and delight,' the way in which
+she speaks of the angels as 'the courtiers of the great King,' set my
+nerves on edge and weary me.
+
+"They smell of perriwigs and ruffles, bows and dances like Versailles, a
+sort of court mysticism in which Christ pontificates, attired in the
+costume of Louis XIV.
+
+"Moreover Marie d'Agreda enters into most extravagant details. She tells
+us of the milk of Our Lady which cannot grow sour, of female complaints
+from which she was exempt, she explains the mystery of the conception by
+three drops of blood which fell from the heart into the womb of Mary,
+and which the Holy Ghost used to form the child; lastly, she declares
+that Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel played the part of midwives, and
+stood living, under human forms, at the lying-in of the Virgin.
+
+"This is too strong. I know well that the abbé would say that we need
+not concern ourselves with these singularities and these errors, but
+that the 'Cité Mystique' is to be read in relation to the inner life of
+the Blessed Virgin. Yes, but then the book of M. Ollier, which treats of
+the same subject, seems to me curious and trustworthy in quite a
+different way."
+
+Was the priest forcing the note, playing a part? Durtal asked himself
+this, when he saw how determined he was not to avoid the same questions
+during a certain time. He tried now and then, in order to see how the
+matter was, to turn the conversation, but the abbé smiled, and brought
+it back to the point he wished.
+
+When he thought that he had saturated Durtal with mystical works, he
+spoke of them less, and seemed to attach himself mainly to the religious
+Orders, and especially to that of Saint Benedict. He very cleverly
+induced Durtal to become interested in this institution, and to ask him
+about it, and when once he had entered on this ground, he did not depart
+from it.
+
+It began one day when Durtal was talking with him about plain chant.
+
+"You have reason to like it," said the abbé, "for even independently of
+the liturgy and of art, this chant, if I may believe Saint Justin,
+appeases the desires and concupiscences of the flesh, 'affectiones et
+concupiscentias carnis sedat,' but let me assure you, you only know it
+by hearsay, there is no longer any true plain chant in the churches,
+these are like the products of therapeutics, only more or less audacious
+adulterations presented to you.
+
+"None of the chants which are to some extent respected by choirs, the
+'Tantum ergo,' for example, are now exact. It is given almost faithfully
+till the verse 'Prĉstet fides,' and then it runs off the rails, taking
+no account of the shades, which are, however, quite perceptible, that
+the Gregorian melody introduces when the text declares the impotence of
+reason and the powerful aid of Faith; these adulterations are still more
+apparent, if you listen to the 'Salve Regina' after Compline. This is
+abridged more than half, is enervated, blanched, half its pauses are
+taken away, it is reduced to a mere stump of ignoble music, if you had
+even heard this magnificent chant among the Trappists, you would weep
+with disgust at hearing it bawled in the churches at Paris.
+
+"But besides the textual alteration of the melody as we now have it, the
+way in which the plain chant is bellowed is everywhere absurd. One of
+the first conditions for rendering it well, is that the voices should go
+together, that they should all chant in the same time syllable for
+syllable and note for note, in one word it must be in unison.
+
+"Now, you can verify it yourself, the Gregorian melody is not thus
+treated; every voice takes its own part, and is isolated. Next, plain
+music allows no accompaniment, it must be chanted alone, without organ,
+it bears at most that the instrument should give the intonation and
+accompany it very softly, just enough if need be to sustain the pitch
+taken by the voices; it is not so that you will hear it given in the
+churches."
+
+"Yes, I know it well," said Durtal. "When I hear it at St. Sulpice, St.
+Severin, or Notre Dame des Victoires, I am aware that it is
+sophisticated, but you must admit that it is even then superb. I do not
+defend the tricks, the addition of fiorituri, the falseness of the
+musical pauses, the felonious accompaniment, the concert-room tone
+inflicted on you at Saint Sulpice, but what can I do? in default of the
+original I must be content with a more or less worthless copy, and I
+repeat, even executed in that fashion the music is so admirable that I
+am enchanted by it."
+
+"But," said the abbé quietly, "nothing obliges you to listen to the
+false plain chant, when you can hear the true, for saving your presence,
+there exists, even in Paris, a chapel where it is intact, and given
+according to the rules of which I have spoken."
+
+"Indeed, and where is that?"
+
+"At the Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament in the Rue Monsieur."
+
+"And can anyone enter the convent and be present at the offices?"
+
+"Anyone. Every day in the week, Vespers are sung at three o'clock, and
+on Sundays High Mass is said at nine."
+
+"Ah, had I but known this chapel earlier," said Durtal, the first time
+he came out.
+
+In fact it combined all the conditions he could wish. Situated in a
+solitary street, it had the completest privacy. The architect who built
+it had introduced no innovations or pretentiousness, had built a Gothic
+church, and introduced no fancies of his own.
+
+It was cruciform, but one of the arms was scarcely the full length, for
+want of room, while the other was prolonged into a hall, separated from
+the choir by an iron grating above which the Blessed Sacrament was
+adored by two kneeling angels, whose lilac wings were folded over thin
+rose-coloured backs. Except these two figures, of which the execution
+was truly sinful, the rest was at least veiled by shadow, and was not
+too afflicting to the eyes. The chapel was dim, and always at the time
+of the offices, a young sacristan-sister, tall and pale, and rather
+bent, entered like a shadow, and each time that she passed before the
+altar she fell on one knee and bowed her head profoundly.
+
+She seemed strange and scarcely human, gliding noiselessly over the
+pavement, her head bowed, with a band as low as her eyebrows, and she
+seemed to fly like a large bat when standing before the tabernacle she
+turned her back, moving her large black sleeves as she lighted the
+tapers. Durtal one day saw her features, sickly but charming, her
+eyelids dark, her eyes of a tired blue, and he guessed that her body was
+wasted by prayers, under her black robe drawn together by a leathern
+girdle ornamented by a little medal of the Blessed Sacrament of gilt
+metal, under the trimming, near her heart.
+
+The grating of the enclosure, on the left of the altar, was large, and
+well lighted from behind, so that even when the curtains were drawn it
+was possible to see the whole chapter drawn up in file in their oaken
+stalls surmounted at the end by a higher stall in which the abbess sat.
+A lighted taper stood in the middle of the hall, and before it a nun
+prayed day and night, a cord round her neck, to expiate the insults
+offered to Jesus under His Eucharistic form.
+
+The first time Durtal had visited the chapel, he had gone there on
+Sunday a little before the time of Mass, and he had been thus able to be
+present at the entry of the Benedictine nuns, behind the iron screen.
+They advanced two and two, stopped in the middle of the grating, turned
+to the altar and genuflected, then each bowed to her neighbour, and so
+to the end of this procession of women in black, only brightened by the
+whiteness of the head-band and the collar, and the gilt spot of the
+little monstrance on the breast. The novices came last, to be recognized
+by the white veils which covered their heads.
+
+And when an old priest, assisted by a sacristan, began the mass softly
+at the end of the chapter, a small organ gave the tone to the voices.
+
+Then Durtal might well wonder, for he had never before heard a sole and
+only voice made up of perhaps some thirty, of a tone so strange, a
+superterrestrial voice, which burnt upon itself, in the air, and
+intertwined its soft cooings.
+
+This bore no resemblance to the icy and obstinate lament of the
+Carmelites, nor was it like the unsexed tone, the child's voice,
+squeaking, rounded off at the end of the Franciscan nuns, but quite
+another thing.
+
+At La Glacière in fact those raw voices, though softened and watered by
+prayers, kept somewhat of the drawling, almost vulgar, inflexion of the
+people from whom they came; they were greatly purified, but remained
+none the less human. Here the tenderness of tones was rendered angelic,
+that voice with no defined origin long bolted through the divine sieve,
+patiently modelled for the liturgical chant, caught fire as it unfolded,
+blazed in virginal clusters of white sound, died down, flowered out
+again in pale pleadings, distant, seraphic at the end of certain chants.
+
+Thus interpreted the Mass gave a special accent to the sense of the
+sequences.
+
+Standing, behind the grating, the convent answered the priest.
+
+Durtal had then heard, after a mournful and solemn "Kyrie Eleison,"
+sharp and almost tragic, the decided cry, so loving and so grave, of the
+"Gloria in Excelsis," to the true plain chant; he had listened to the
+Credo, slow and bare, solemn and pensive, and he was able to affirm that
+these chants were totally different from those which were sung
+everywhere in the churches. St. Severin and St. Sulpice now seemed to
+him profane; in the place of their gentle warmth, their curls and their
+fringes, the angles of their polished melodies, their modern endings,
+their incoherent accompaniments arranged for the organ, he found himself
+in the presence of a chant, thin, sharp and nervous, like the work of an
+early master, and saw the ascetic severity of its lines, its sonorous
+colouring, the brightness of its metal hammered out with the rude yet
+charming art of Gothic jewels, he heard under the woven robe of sound,
+the beating of a simple heart, the ingenuous love of ages, and he
+noticed that curious shade in Benedictine music; it ended all cries of
+adoration, all tender cooings in a timid murmur, cut short, as though
+shrinking in humility, effacing itself modestly as though asking pardon
+of God for daring to love Him.
+
+"Ah, you were very right to send me there," said Durtal to the abbé when
+next he saw him.
+
+"I had no choice," answered the priest, smiling, "for the plain chant is
+respected only in convents under the Benedictine rule. That grand Order
+has restored it. Dom Pothier has done for it what Dom Guéranger has done
+for the liturgy.
+
+"Moreover, beyond the authenticity of the vocal text, and the manner of
+rendering it, there are still two essential conditions for restoring the
+special life of these melodies, and they are hardly found except in
+cloisters, first Faith, and next the understanding the meaning of the
+words sung."
+
+"But," interrupted Durtal, "I do not suppose that the Benedictine nuns
+know Latin."
+
+"I beg your pardon, among the nuns of Saint Benedict, and even among the
+cloistered sisters of other Orders there are a certain number who study
+the language enough to understand the Breviary and the Psalms. That is a
+serious advantage which they have over the choirs, composed for the most
+part of artisans without instruction and without piety, only simple
+workers with their voices.
+
+"Now without wishing to abate your enthusiasm for the musical honesty of
+these nuns, I am bound to say, that in order to understand this
+magnificent chant in its height and breadth, you must hear it, not
+winnowed by the mouths of virgins, even if unsexed, but as it issues,
+unsmoothed, untrimmed from the lips of men. Unfortunately, though there
+are at Paris, in the Rue Monsieur and the Rue Tournefort, two
+communities of Benedictine nuns, there is not on the other hand a single
+monastery of Benedictine monks."
+
+"At the Rue Monsieur do they absolutely follow the rule of Saint
+Benedict?"
+
+"Yes; but over and above the usual vows of poverty, chastity, remaining
+in the cloister, obedience, they make a further vow of separation and
+adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, as formulated by Saint Mechtilde.
+
+"And so they lead the most austere existence of any nuns. They scarcely
+taste flesh; they rise at two in the morning to sing Matins and Lauds,
+night and day, summer and winter, they take turns before the taper of
+reparation, and before the altar. It need not be said," continued the
+abbé after a pause, "that woman is stronger and braver than man; no male
+ascetic could live and lead such a life, especially in the enervating
+atmosphere of Paris."
+
+"What perhaps astounds me still more," said Durtal, "is the kind of
+obedience exacted of them. How can a creature endowed with free will
+annihilate herself to such an extent?"
+
+"Oh," said the abbé, "the obedience is the same in all the great
+Orders, absolute, without reserve; its formula is well summed up by
+Saint Augustine. Listen to this sentence which I remember to have read
+in a commentary on his rule:
+
+"'We must enter into the feelings of a beast of burthen, and allow
+ourselves to be led like a horse or a mule, which have no understanding;
+or rather, that obedience may be still more perfect, since these animals
+kick against the spur, we must be in the hands of a superior like a
+block, or the stock of a tree, which has neither life, nor movement, nor
+action, nor will, nor judgment.' Is that clear?"
+
+"It is most frightful! I quite admit," said Durtal, "that in exchange
+for such abnegation, the nuns must be powerfully aided from on high, but
+are there not some moments of falling away, some cases of despair, some
+instants in which they pine for a natural life in the open air, in which
+they lament that death in life which they have made for themselves; are
+there not days in which their senses wake and cry aloud?"
+
+"No doubt; in the cloistered life the age of twenty-nine is terrible to
+pass, then a passionate crisis arises; if a woman doubles that cape, and
+she almost always does so, she is safe.
+
+"But carnal emotions are not, to speak correctly, the most troublesome
+assault they have to undergo. The real punishment they endure in those
+hours of sorrow is the ardent, wild regret for that maternity of which
+they are ignorant; the desolate womb of woman revolts, and full of God
+though she be, her heart is breaking. The child Jesus whom they have
+loved so well then appears so far off and so inaccessible, and His very
+sight would hardly satisfy them, for they have dreamed of holding Him in
+their arms, of swathing and rocking Him, of giving Him suck, in one
+word, of being mothers.
+
+"Other nuns undergo no precise attack, no assault to which a name can be
+given, but without any definite reason they languish and die suddenly,
+like a taper, blown out. The torpor of the cloister kills them."
+
+"But indeed, Monsieur l'abbé, these details are far from encouraging."
+
+The priest shrugged his shoulders. "It is the poor reverse of a splendid
+stuff," he said, "wonderful recompenses are granted, even in this
+world, to souls in convents."
+
+"Nor do I suppose that if a nun fall, stricken in the flesh, she is
+abandoned. What does the Mother abbess in such a case?"
+
+"She acts according to the bodily temperament and state of the soul of
+the sick person. Note that she has been able to follow her during the
+years of her probation, that she has necessarily gained an influence
+over her; at such times therefore she will watch her daughter very
+closely, endeavour to turn the course of her ideas, breaking her by hard
+work, and by occupying her mind; she must not leave her alone, must
+diminish her prayers, if need be, restrict her hours of office, lessen
+her fasts, give her, if the case demands it, better food. In other
+cases, on the contrary, she will have recourse to more frequent
+communions, lessen her food or cause her to be blooded, mix cooling
+meats with her diet, and above all things she and all the community must
+pray for her.
+
+"An old Benedictine abbess, whom I knew at Saint-Omer, an incomparable
+guide of souls, limited before all things the length of confessions. The
+moment she saw the least symptoms arise she gave two minutes, watch in
+hand, to the penitent, and when the time was up she sent her back from
+the confessional, to mix with her companions."
+
+"Why so?"
+
+"Because in convents, even for souls which are well, confession is a
+most dangerous relaxation, it is as it were too long and too warm a
+bath. In it nuns go to excess, open their hearts uselessly, dwell upon
+their troubles, accentuate them, and revel in them; they come out more
+weakened and more ill than before. Two minutes ought indeed to be enough
+for a nun in which to tell her little sins.
+
+"Yet ... yet ... I must admit it, the confessor is a danger for a
+convent, not that I suspect his honour, that is not at all what I mean,
+but as he is generally chosen from among the bishop's favourites, there
+are many chances that he may be a man who knows nothing, and quite
+ignorant of how to deal with such souls, ends by unsettling them while
+he consoles them. Again, if demoniac attacks, so common in nunneries,
+occur, the poor man can only gape, gives all sorts of confused counsel,
+and hinders the energy of the abbess, who in such matters knows far
+better than he."
+
+"And," said Durtal, who chose his words carefully, "tell me, I suppose
+that tales like those which Diderot gives in his foolish volume 'La
+Religieuse' are incorrect?"
+
+"Unless a community is rotted by a superior given over to Satanism,
+which, thank God, is rare, the filthy stories told by that writer are
+false, and there is moreover a good reason why it should be so, for
+there is a sin which is the very antidote of the other, the sin of
+zeal."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Yes: the sin of zeal which causes the denunciation of our neighbour,
+gives scope to jealousy, creates spying to satisfy hate, that is the
+real sin of the cloister. Well, I assure you that if two sisters became
+quite shameless they would be denounced at once."
+
+"But I thought, Monsieur l'Abbé, that tale-bearing was allowed by the
+rules of most orders?"
+
+"It is, but perhaps there is a temptation to carry it somewhat to
+excess, especially in convents of women; for you can imagine that if
+nunneries contain pure mystics, real saints, they have in them also some
+nuns less advanced in the way of perfection, and who even still retain
+some faults...."
+
+"Come, since we are in the chapter of minute details, dare I ask if
+cleanliness is not just a little neglected by these good women?"
+
+"I cannot say; all that I know is, that in the Benedictine abbeys I have
+known, each nun was free to act as seemed good to her; in certain
+Augustinian constitutions, the case was provided for in contrary
+fashion, it was forbidden to wash the body, except once a month. On the
+other hand, amongst the Carmelites cleanliness is exacted. Saint Teresa
+hated dirt, and loved white linen, her daughters have even, I think, a
+right to have a flask of Eau de Cologne in their cells. You see this
+depends on the order, and probably also, when the rule does not
+expressly mention it, on the ideas which the superior may have on the
+subject. I will add that this question must not be looked at only from
+the worldly point of view, for corporal dirt is for certain souls an
+additional suffering and mortification which they impose on themselves,
+as Benedict Labre."
+
+"He who picked up vermin which left him, and put them piously in his
+sleeve. I prefer mortifications of another kind."
+
+"There are harder ones, believe me, and I think they would suit you
+better. Would you like to imitate Suso, who, to subdue his passions,
+bore on his naked shoulders, for eighteen years, an enormous cross set
+with nails, whose points pierced his flesh? More than that, he
+imprisoned his hands in leather gloves which also bristled with nails,
+lest he should be tempted to dress his wounds. Saint Rose of Lima
+treated herself no better, she bound a chain so tightly round her body
+that it penetrated the skin, and hid itself under the bleeding pad of
+flesh, she wore also a horsehair girdle set with pins, and lay on shards
+of glass; but all these trials are nothing in comparison of those
+inflicted on herself by a Capuchin nun, the venerable Mother Pasidée of
+Siena.
+
+"She scourged herself with branches of juniper and holly, then poured
+vinegar into her wounds, and sprinkled them with salt, she slept in
+winter on the snow, in summer on bunches of nettles, or pebbles, or
+brushes, put drops of hot lead in her shoes, knelt upon thistles, thorns
+and sticks. In January she broke the ice in a cask and plunged into it,
+and she even half-stifled herself by hanging head downwards in a chimney
+in which damp straw was lighted, but that is enough; indeed," said the
+abbé laughing, "if you had to choose, you would like best the
+mortifications which Benedict Labre imposed on himself."
+
+"I would rather have none at all," answered Durtal.
+
+There was a moment's pause.
+
+Durtal's thoughts went back to the Benedictine nuns: "But," said he,
+"why do they put in the 'Semaine religieuse,' after their title
+Benedictine Nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, this further name, 'Convent
+of Saint Louis du Temple?'"
+
+"Because," said the abbé, "their first convent was founded on the actual
+ruins of the Temple prison, given them by royal warrant, when Louis
+XVIII. returned to France.
+
+"Their foundress and superior was Louise Adélaïde de Bourbon Condé, an
+unfortunate princess of many wanderings, almost the whole of whose life
+was spent in exile. Expelled from France by the Revolution and the
+Empire, hunted in almost every country in Europe, she wandered by
+chance among convents seeking shelter, now among the nuns of the
+Annunciation at Turin and the Capuchins in Piedmont, now among the
+Trappistines in Switzerland and the Sisters of the Visitation at Vienna,
+now among the Benedictines of Lithuania and Poland. At last she found
+shelter among the Benedictines in Norfolk, till she could again enter
+France.
+
+"She was a woman singularly trained in monastic science and experienced
+in the direction of souls.
+
+"She desired that in her abbey every sister should offer herself to
+heaven in reparation for crimes committed; and that she should accept
+the most painful privations to make up for those which might be
+committed; she instituted there the perpetual adoration, and introduced
+the plain chant, in all its purity, to the exclusion of all others.
+
+"It is, as you have been able to hear, there preserved intact; it is
+true that since her time, her nuns have had lessons from Dom Schmitt,
+one of the most learned monks in that matter.
+
+"Then, after the death of the princess, which took place, I think, in
+1824, it was perceived that her body exhaled the odour of sanctity, and
+though she has not been canonized her intercession is invoked by her
+daughters in certain cases. Thus, for example, the Benedictine nuns of
+the Rue Monsieur ask her assistance when they lose anything, and their
+experience shows that their prayer is never in vain, since the object
+lost is found almost at once.
+
+"But," continued the abbé, "since you like the convent so well, go
+there, especially when it is lighted up."
+
+The priest rose and took up a "Semaine religieuse," which lay upon the
+table.
+
+He turned over the leaves. "See," he said, and read, "'Sunday 3 o'clock,
+Vespers chanted; ceremony of clothing, presided over by the Very
+Reverend Father Dom Etienne, abbot of the Grande Trappe, and
+Benediction.'"
+
+"That is a ceremony which interests me much."
+
+"I too shall probably be there."
+
+"Then we can meet in the chapel?"
+
+"Just so."
+
+"These ceremonies of clothing have not now the gaiety they had in the
+eighteenth century in certain Benedictine institutions, amongst others
+the Abbey de Bourbourg in Flanders," said the abbé smiling, after a
+silence.
+
+And since Durtal looked at him questioningly--
+
+"Yes, there was no sadness about it, or at least it had a special
+sadness of its own; you shall judge. On the eve of the day that the
+postulant was to take the habit, she was presented to the abbess of
+Bourbourg by the governor of the town. Bread and wine were offered to
+her, and she tasted them in the church itself. On the morrow she
+appeared, magnificently dressed, at a ball which was attended by the
+whole community of nuns, where she danced, then she asked her parents'
+blessing, and was conducted, with violins playing, to the chapel, where
+the abbess took possession of her. She had for the last time seen, at
+the ball, the joys of the world, for she was immediately shut up, for
+the rest of her days in the cloister."
+
+"The joy of the Dance of Death," said Durtal, "monastic customs and
+congregations were strange in old days."
+
+"No doubt, but they are lost in the night of time. I remember, however,
+that in the fifteenth century there existed under the rule of Saint
+Augustine an order strange indeed, called the Order of the Daughters of
+Saint Magloire, whose convent was in the Rue Saint Denys at Paris. The
+conditions of admission were the reverse of those of all other charters.
+The postulant had to swear on the holy Gospels that she had been
+unchaste, and no one believed her oath; she was examined, and if her
+oath were false, she was declared unworthy to be received. Nor might she
+have brought about this condition expressly in order to enter the
+convent, she must have well and truly given herself over to sin, before
+she came to ask the shelter of the cloister.
+
+"They were in fact a troop of penitent girls, and the rule of their
+subjection was savage. They were whipped, locked up, subjected to the
+most rigid fasts, made their confessions thrice in the week, rose at
+midnight, were under the most unremitting surveillance, were even
+attended in their most secret retirement; their mortifications were
+incessant and their closure absolute. I need hardly add that this
+nunnery is dead."
+
+"Nor likely to revive," cried Durtal. "Well then, Monsieur l'Abbé, we
+meet on Sunday in the Rue Monsieur?"
+
+And on the assent of the abbé, Durtal went his way, with the strangest
+ideas in his head about the monastic orders. The thing would be, he
+thought, to found an abbey where one could work at ease in a good
+library, there should be several monks, with decent meals, plenty of
+tobacco, and permission to take a turn on the quays now and then. And he
+laughed; but then that would not be a monastery! or only a Dominican
+monastery, with monks who dine out, and have, at least, the amusement of
+preaching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+On Sunday morning, on his way to the Rue Monsieur, Durtal chewed the cud
+of his reflections on the Monasteries. "It is certain," he thought,
+"that in the accumulated filth of ages, they alone have remained clean,
+are truly in relation with heaven, and serve as interpreters between it
+and earth. But we must thoroughly understand and specify that we are
+speaking only of the cloistered orders, which have remained, as far as
+possible, poor...."
+
+And thinking of the communities of women, he murmured as he hastened his
+steps: "Here is a surprising fact, which proves once more, the
+incomparable genius with which the Church is endowed; she has been able
+to bring into common life women who do not assassinate each other, and
+obey without recalcitrancy the orders of another woman--wonderful!
+
+"Well, here I am"--and Durtal, who knew he was late, hastened into the
+court of the Benedictine nunnery, took the steps of the little church
+four at a time, and pushed the door open. He paused in hesitation on the
+threshold, dazzled by the blaze of the lighted chapel. Lamps were lit
+everywhere, and overhead the altar flamed with a forest of tapers
+against which stood out as on a gold ground, the ruddy face of a bishop
+all in white.
+
+Durtal glided among the crowd, elbowing his way till he saw the Abbé
+Gévresin beckoning to him. He joined him, and sat down on the chair the
+priest had kept for him, and examined the abbot of Grande Trappe,
+surrounded by priests in chasubles, and choir boys some in red and
+others in blue, followed by a Trappist with shaven crown, surrounded by
+a fringe of hair, holding a wooden cross, on the reverse of which was
+carved the small figure of a monk.
+
+Clad in a white cowl, with long sleeves and a gold button on his hood,
+his abbot's cross on his breast, his head covered with an old French
+mitre of low form, Dom Etienne, with his broad shoulders, his greyish
+beard, his ruddy colour, had a look of an old Burgundian, tanned by the
+sun while working at his vines; he seemed, moreover, a good sort of man,
+uneasy under his mitre, oppressed by his honours.
+
+A sharp perfume which burnt the nose as a spice burns the tongue, the
+perfume of myrrh, floated in the air, the crowds surged; behind the
+grating from which the curtain was withdrawn, the nuns standing sang the
+hymn of Saint Ambrose, "Jesu corona virginum," while the bells of the
+abbey rang a peal; in the short aisle leading from the porch to the
+choir, a bending line of women on either side, a cross-bearer and
+torch-bearers entered, and behind them appeared the novice dressed as a
+bride.
+
+She was dark, slight, and very short, and came forward shyly with
+downcast eyes, between her mother and sister. At first sight Durtal
+thought her insignificant, scarcely pretty, a mere nobody; and he looked
+instinctively for the other party, put out in his sense of fitness, by
+the absence of a man in the marriage procession.
+
+Striving against her agitation the postulant walked up the nave into the
+choir, and knelt on the left before a large taper, her mother and sister
+on either side as bridesmaids.
+
+Dom Etienne genuflected to the altar, mounted the steps, and sat down in
+a red velvet arm-chair, placed on the highest step.
+
+Then one of the priests conducted the girl, who knelt alone, before the
+monk.
+
+Dom Etienne was motionless as a figure of Buddha; with the same gesture,
+he lifted one finger, and said gently to the novice,--
+
+"What is it you ask?"
+
+She spoke so low as scarcely to be heard.
+
+"Father, feeling in myself an ardent desire to sacrifice myself to God,
+as a victim in union with our Lord Jesus Christ, immolated on our
+altars, and to spend my life in perpetual adoration of His divine
+Sacrament, under the observance of the rule of our glorious Father Saint
+Benedict, I humbly ask of you the grace of the holy habit."
+
+"I will give it you willingly if you believe you can conform your life
+to that of a victim devoted to the Holy Sacrament."
+
+And she answered in a firmer tone,
+
+"I trust so, leaning on the infinite goodness of my Saviour Jesus
+Christ."
+
+"God give you perseverance, my daughter," said the prelate; he rose,
+turned to the altar, genuflected, and with uncovered head began the
+chant "Veni Creator," taken up by the voices of the nuns behind the
+light screen of iron.
+
+Then he replaced his mitre, and prayed, while the chanted psalms rose
+under the arches. The novice, who in the meantime had been reconducted
+to her place at the prie-Dieu, rose, genuflected to the altar, and then
+knelt between her two bridesmaids before the abbot of La Trappe, who had
+reseated himself.
+
+Her two companions lifted the veil of the bride, took off her wreath of
+orange flowers, unrolled the coils of her hair, while a priest spread a
+napkin on the knees of the prelate, and the deacon presented a pair of
+long scissors on a salver.
+
+Then before the gesture of this monk, making himself ready, like an
+executioner, to shear the condemned person, whose hour of expiation was
+at hand, the terrible beauty of innocence becoming like crime, in
+substitution for sins of which she was ignorant, which she could not
+even understand, was evident to the public who had come to the chapel
+out of curiosity, and in consternation at the superhuman denial of
+justice, it trembled when the bishop seized the entire handful of her
+hair, and drew it towards him over her brow.
+
+Then there was as it were a flash of steel in a dark shower.
+
+In the death-like silence of the church the grinding of the scissors was
+heard in the mass of hair which fell under the blades, and then all was
+silent. Dom Etienne opened his hand, and the rain fell on his knees in
+long black threads.
+
+There was a sigh of relief when the priests and bridesmaids led away the
+bride, looking strange in her train, with her head discrowned and her
+neck bare.
+
+The procession returned almost immediately. There was no longer a bride
+in a white skirt, but a nun in a black robe.
+
+She bowed before the Trappist, and again knelt between her mother and
+sister.
+
+Then, while the abbot prayed the Lord to bless his handmaid, the master
+of the ceremonies and the deacon took, from a credence near the altar, a
+basket, wherein under loose rose leaves were folded a girdle of untanned
+leather, emblem of the end of that luxury which the Fathers of the
+Church placed in the region of the reins, a scapular, symbol of a life
+crucified to the world, a veil, which signifies the solitude of the life
+hidden in God, and the prelate explained the sense of these emblems to
+the novice, then taking the lighted taper from the candlestick before
+her, he gave it to her, declaring in one phrase the meaning of his
+action: "Accipe, charissima soror, lumen Christi."
+
+Then Dom Etienne took the sprinkler which a priest handed him with an
+inclination, and as in the general absolution of the dead, he sprinkled
+the girl with holy water in the form of a cross, then he sat down and
+spoke gently and quietly without using a single gesture.
+
+He spoke to the postulant alone, praising the august and humble life of
+the cloister. "Look not back," he said, "have no regrets, for by my
+voice Jesus repeats to you the promise once made to the Magdalen, 'yours
+is the better part, which shall not be taken away from you.' Say also to
+yourself, my daughter, that, henceforward, taken away from the eternal
+trifling of labours in vain, you will accomplish a useful work upon
+earth, you will practise charity in its highest form, you will make
+expiation for others, you will pray for those who never pray, you will
+aid, so far as your strength permits, to make amends for the hate the
+world bears to the Saviour.
+
+"Suffer and you will be happy; love your spouse, and you will see how
+tender He is to His elect. Believe me, His love is such that He will not
+even wait till you are purified by death to recompense you for your
+miserable mortifications, your poor sufferings. Even before your hour is
+come, He will heap His graces upon you, and you will beg Him to let you
+die, so greatly will the excess of these joys exceed your strength."
+
+Little by little the old monk grew warm, and returned to the words of
+Christ to the Magdalen, showing how in reference to her Jesus set
+forward the excellence of the contemplative over the other Orders, and
+gave brief advice, dwelling on the necessity of humility and poverty,
+which are, as Saint Clare says, the two great walls of cloistered life.
+Then he blessed the novice, who kissed his hand, and when she had
+returned to her place, he prayed to the Lord, lifting his eyes to
+heaven, that He would accept this nun, who offered herself as a victim
+for the sins of the world. Then, standing, he intoned the "Te Deum."
+
+Every one rose, and preceded by the cross and torch bearers, the
+procession passed out of the church, and was massed in the court.
+
+Then Durtal might have believed himself carried back far from Paris,
+into the heart of the Middle Ages.
+
+The court, surrounded by buildings, was closed opposite the
+entrance-gate by a high wall, in the midst of which was a folding-door;
+on each side six thin pines rocked to and fro, and chanting was heard
+behind the wall.
+
+The postulant, in front, alone, near the closed door, held her torch,
+with her head bent. The abbot of La Trappe, leaning on his crosier,
+waited, unmoving, a few paces from her.
+
+Durtal examined their faces, the girl, so commonplace in her bridal
+costume, had become charming, her body was now full of a timid grace,
+the lines, somewhat too marked under her worldly dress, were softened,
+under her religious shroud her outline was only a simple sketch, it was
+as though the years had rolled back, and as though there was a return to
+the forms only prophesied in childhood.
+
+Durtal drew near to examine her better, he tried to look at her face,
+but under the chill bandage of her head-dress, she remained mute, and as
+if absent from life, with her eyes closed, and as though she lived only
+in the smile of her happy lips.
+
+Seen nearer, the monk who had seemed so stout and ruddy in the chapel,
+seemed also changed, his frame remained robust, and his complexion
+bright, but his eyes of a light blue, like chalk water, water without
+reflections or waves, eyes wonderfully pure, changed the common
+expression of his features, and took away from him that look of a
+vine-dresser which he had at a distance.
+
+"It is clear," thought Durtal, "that the soul is everything in these
+people, and their faces are modelled by it. There is a holy clearness in
+their eyes, and their lips, in those only apertures through which the
+soul comes to look out of the body, and almost shows itself."
+
+The chants behind the wall suddenly ceased, the girl made a step
+forward, and knocked with her closed fingers at the door, and then with
+a failing voice she sang,--
+
+"Aperite mihi portas justitiae: Ingressa in eas, confitebor Domino."
+
+The door opened. Another large court, paved with pebbles was seen,
+bounded at the end by a building, and all the community, in a sort of
+semicircle, with black books in their hands, cried,--
+
+"Haec porta Domini: Justi intrabunt in eam."
+
+The novice made another step to the sill and answered in her far-away
+voice,--
+
+"Ingrediar in locum tabernaculi admirabilis: usque ad domum Dei."
+
+And the choir of nuns, unmoving, answered,--
+
+"Haec est domus Domini firmiter aedificata: Bene fundata est supra
+firmam petram."
+
+Durtal hastily looked at those faces which could only be seen for a few
+minutes and on the occasion of such a ceremony. It was a row of dead
+bodies standing in black shrouds. All were bloodless, with white cheeks,
+lilac eyelids and grey lips, the voices of all were exhausted and fined
+down by prayer, and most of them, even the young, were bent. "Their poor
+bodies are worn with austere fatigue," thought Durtal.
+
+But his reflections were cut short, the bride, now kneeling on the
+threshold, turned to Dom Etienne and chanted in a low voice,--
+
+"Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi: Hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam."
+
+The monk laid aside his mitre and crosier and said,--
+
+"Confirma hoc Deus, quod operatus es in nobis."
+
+And the postulant murmured,--
+
+"A templo sacro tuo quod est in Jerusalem."
+
+Then before re-covering his head and resuming his crosier, the prelate
+prayed God Almighty to pour the dew of His blessing on His handmaid;
+then directing the girl towards a nun who left the group of sisters and
+advanced to the threshold, he said to her,--
+
+"Into your hands, Madame, we commit this new bride of the Lord, sustain
+her in the holy resolution she has so solemnly taken upon her, in asking
+to sacrifice herself to God as a victim, and to dedicate her life in
+honour of our Lord Jesus Christ, sacrificed on our altars. Lead her in
+the way of the divine Commandments, in the practice of the counsels of
+the Holy Gospel, and in the observance of the monastic rule. Prepare her
+for the eternal union to which the heavenly Spouse invites her, and from
+this blessed increase of the flock committed to your charge draw a new
+motive for maternal care. The peace of the Lord rest upon you."
+
+This was all: the nuns one by one turned and disappeared behind the
+wall, while the girl followed them like a poor dog, who with drooping
+head accompanies at a distance a new master.
+
+The folding doors closed.
+
+Durtal remained stupefied, looking at the outline of the white bishop,
+the backs of the priests who were mounting the steps to give Benediction
+in the church, while behind them came in tears, their faces in their
+handkerchiefs, the mother and sister of the novice.
+
+"Well?" said the abbé, passing his arm through Durtal's.
+
+"Well, this scene is to my mind the most touching alibi of death that it
+is possible to see, this living woman, who buries herself in the most
+frightful of tombs--for in it the flesh continues to suffer--is
+wonderful.
+
+"I remember that you have yourself told me of the pressure of this
+observance, and I shivered in thinking of perpetual Adoration, in those
+winter nights, when a child like this is awakened out of her first
+sleep, and cast into the darkness of a chapel where unless she faints
+from weakness or terror, she must pray alone, through the freezing hours
+on her knees on the pavement.
+
+"What passes in that conversation with the unknown, that interview with
+the Shadow? Does she succeed in escaping from self, and in leaving the
+earth, in gaining, on the threshold of Eternity, the inconceivable
+Spouse, or does the soul, powerless to spring on high, remain riveted to
+the soil?
+
+"We figure her to ourselves, her face bent forward, her hands joined,
+making appeal to herself, concentrating herself, in order to pour
+herself forth the better, and we imagine her thus sickly, with no
+strength left, trying to set her soul on fire in a shivering frame. But
+who can tell if on certain nights she attains to it?
+
+"Ah! those poor lamps of exhausted oil, of flames almost dead, which
+tremble in the obscurity of the sanctuary, what will God make of them?
+
+"Then there was the family present at the taking the habit, and if the
+daughter filled me with enthusiasm I could not restrain myself from
+pitying the mother. Think if the daughter died, the mother would embrace
+her, would perhaps speak to her, or if she did not recognize her, it
+would at least not be with her own good will; but in this case it is not
+the body, but the very soul of her child that dies before her eyes. Of
+her own accord her child knows her no longer, it is the contemptuous end
+of an affection. You will admit that for a mother this is very hard."
+
+"Yes, but this so-called ingratitude, gained at the price of God knows
+what struggles, is it not, even apart from the divine vocation, the most
+equitable repartition of human love? Think that this elect creature
+becomes the scapegoat of sins committed, and like a lamentable daughter
+of Danaus she will unceasingly pour the offering of her mortifications
+and prayers, of her vigils and fastings, into the bottomless vessel of
+offences and crimes. Ah! if you knew what it was to repair the sins of
+the world. In regard to this I remember that one day the abbess of the
+Benedictines in the Rue Tournefort said to me: 'Since our tears are not
+holy enough, nor our souls pure enough, God makes trial of us in our
+bodies.' Here are long illnesses which cannot be cured, illnesses which
+doctors fail to understand, and we make thus much expiation for others.
+
+"But if you will think over the ceremony which is just ended, you need
+not be affected beyond measure or compare it to the well-known
+ceremonies of a funeral; the postulant whom you saw has not yet
+pronounced her final vows, she can if she choose leave the convent, and
+return to her own home. At present she is in regard to her mother, a
+child in a foreign country, a child at school, but she is not a dead
+child.
+
+"You may say what you please, but there is a tragedy in that door which
+closed upon her."
+
+"Therefore in the Benedictine convent in the Rue Tournefort, the scene
+takes place in the interior of the convent, and the family is not
+present, the mother is spared, but mitigated thus, the ceremony is but a
+mere form, almost a foolish rule in the seclusion wherein the Faith is
+hidden."
+
+"Those nuns are also Benedictines of the perpetual Adoration, are they
+not?"
+
+"Yes, do you know their convent?"
+
+And as Durtal shook his head, the abbé continued,--
+
+"It is older, but less interesting than that in the Rue Monsieur, the
+chapel is mean, full of plaster statuettes, cotton flowers, bunches of
+grapes and ears of corn in gold paper, but the old building of the
+nunnery is curious. It contains, what shall I call it? a school
+dining-room, and a retreatant's drawing-room, and so gives at once the
+impression of old age and childhood."
+
+"I know that class of convents," said Durtal. "I used often to see one,
+when I used to visit an old aunt at Versailles. It always used to
+impress me as a Maison Vauquer, brought to devotional uses, it had the
+air at once of a _table d'hôte_ in the Rue de la Clef and the sacristy
+of a country church."
+
+"Just so," and the abbé went on with a smile,--
+
+"I had many interviews with the abbess in the Rue Tournefort; you guess
+at rather than see her, for you are separated from her by a screen of
+black wood, behind which is stretched a black curtain which she draws
+aside."
+
+"I can see it," thought Durtal, who, remembering the Benedictine custom,
+saw in a second a little face confused in neutral tinted light, and
+lower, at the top of her habit, the gleam of a medal of the Blessed
+Sacrament in red enamelled in white.
+
+He laughed and said to the abbé,--
+
+"I laugh, because having had some business to transact with my nun aunt
+of whom I was speaking, only visible like your abbess through a trellis,
+I found out how to read her thoughts a little."
+
+"Ah! how was that?"
+
+"In this way. Since I could not see her face, which was hidden behind
+the lattice of her cage, and disappeared behind her veil, and if she
+should answer me, having nothing to guide me but the inflexions of her
+voice, always circumspect and always calm, I ended by trusting only to
+her great glasses, round, with buff frames, which almost all nuns wear.
+Well, all the repressed vivacity of this woman burst out there; suddenly
+in a corner of her glasses, there was a glimmer, and I then understood
+that her eye had lighted up, and gave the lie to the indifference of her
+voice, the determined quietness of her tone."
+
+The abbé in his turn began to laugh.
+
+"Do you know the Superior of the Benedictines, in the Rue Monsieur?"
+said Durtal.
+
+"I have spoken with her once or twice; there the parlour is monastic,
+there is not the provincial and middle-class side of the Rue Tournefort,
+it is composed of a sombre room, of which all the breadth at the end is
+taken up by an iron grating, and behind the grating are again wooden
+bars, and a shutter painted black. You are quite in the dark, and the
+abbess, scarcely in the light, appears to you like a phantom."
+
+"The abbess is, I suppose, the nun, elderly, fragile and very short, to
+whom Dom Etienne committed the novice?"
+
+"Yes. She is a remarkable shepherdess of souls, and what is more, a very
+well educated woman of most distinguished manners."
+
+"Oh," thought Durtal: "I can imagine that these abbesses are charming,
+but also terrible women. Saint Teresa was goodness itself, but when she
+speaks in her 'Way of Perfection' of nuns who band themselves together
+to discuss the will of their mother, she shows herself inexorable, for
+she declares that perpetual imprisonment should be inflicted on them as
+soon as possible and without flinching, and in fact she is right, for
+every disorderly sister infects the flock, and gives the rot to souls."
+
+Thus talking they had reached the end of the Rue de Sèvres, and the abbé
+stopped to rest.
+
+"Ah," he said, as if speaking to himself, "had I not had all my life
+heavy expenses, first a brother, then nephews to maintain, I should many
+years ago have become a member of Saint Benedict's family. I have
+always had an attraction towards that grand Order, which is, in fact,
+the intellectual Order of the Church. Therefore, when I was stronger and
+younger, I always went for my retreats to one of their monasteries,
+sometimes to the black monks of Solesmes, or of Ligugé, who have
+preserved the wise traditions of Saint Maurus, sometimes to the
+Cistercians, or the white monks of La Trappe."
+
+"True," said Durtal, "La Trappe is one of the great branches of the tree
+of Saint Benedict, but how is it that its ordinances do not differ from
+those which the Patriarch left?"
+
+"That is to say that the Trappists interpret the rule of Saint Benedict,
+which is very broad and supple, less in its spirit than in its letter,
+while the Benedictines do the contrary.
+
+"In fact, La Trappe is an offshoot of Citeaux, and is much more the
+daughter of Saint Bernard, who was during forty years the very sap of
+that branch, than the descendant of Saint Benedict."
+
+"But, so far as I remember, the Trappists are themselves divided, and do
+not live under a uniform discipline."
+
+"They do so now, since a pontifical brief dated March 17th, 1893,
+sanctioned the decisions of the general Chapter of the Trappists
+assembled in Rome, and ordered the fusion into one sole order, and under
+the direction of a sole superior, of the three observances of the
+Trappists, who were in fact ruled by discordant constitutions."
+
+And seeing that Durtal was listening attentively, the abbé continued,--
+
+"Among these three observances, one only, that of the Cistercian
+Trappists, to which belonged the abbey of which I was a guest, followed
+in their integrity the rules of the twelfth century, and led the
+monastic life of Saint Bernard's day. This alone recognized the rule of
+Saint Benedict, taken in its strictest application, and completed by the
+Charte de Charité, and the use and customs of Citeaux; the two others
+had adopted the same rule, but revised and modified in the seventeenth
+century by the Abbé de Rancé, and again one of them, the Belgian
+congregation, had changed the statutes imposed by that abbot.
+
+"At the present day, as I have just said, all the Trappists form only
+one and the same institute under the name, Order of Reformed Cistercians
+of the Blessed Virgin Mary of La Trappe, and all resume the rules of
+Citeaux, and live again the life of the cenobites of the Middle Ages."
+
+"But if you have visited these ascetics," said Durtal, "you must know
+Dom Etienne?"
+
+"No, I have never stayed at La Grande Trappe, I prefer the poor and
+small monasteries where one is mixed up with the monks, to those
+imposing convents where they isolate you in a guest-house, and in a word
+keep you separate.
+
+"There is one in which I make my retreats, Notre Dame de l'Atre, a small
+Trappist monastery a few leagues from Paris, which is quite the most
+seductive of shelters. Besides that the Lord really abides there, for it
+has true saints among its children, it is delightful also with its
+ponds, its immemorial trees, its distant solitude, far in the woods."
+
+"Yes, but," observed Durtal, "the life there must be unbending, for La
+Trappe is the most rigid order which has been imposed on men."
+
+For his only answer the abbé let go Durtal's arm, and took both his
+hands.
+
+"Do you know," he said, looking him in the face, "it is there you must
+go for your conversion?"
+
+"Are you serious, Monsieur l'Abbé?"
+
+And as the priest pressed his hands more strongly Durtal cried,--
+
+"Ah, no indeed, first I have not the stoutness of soul, and if that be
+possible I have still less the bodily health needed for such a course, I
+should fall ill on my arrival, and then ... and then...."
+
+"And then, what? I am not proposing to you to shut you up for ever in a
+cloister."
+
+"So I suppose," said Durtal, in a somewhat piqued tone.
+
+"But just to remain a week, just the necessary time for a cure. Now a
+week is soon over, then do you think that if you make such a resolution
+God will not sustain you?"
+
+"That is all very fine, but ..."
+
+"Let us speak on the health question, then;" and the abbé smiled a smile
+of pity that was a little contemptuous.
+
+"I can promise you at once that as a retreatant, you will not be bound
+to lead the life of a Trappist in its austerest sense. You need not get
+up at two in the morning for Matins, but at three, or even at four
+o'clock, according to the day."
+
+And smiling at the face Durtal made, the abbé went on,--
+
+"As to your food it will be better than that of the monks; naturally you
+will have no fish nor meat, but you may certainly have an egg for
+dinner, if vegetables are not enough for you."
+
+"And the vegetables, I suppose, are cooked with salt and water, and no
+seasoning?"
+
+"No, they are dressed with salt and water only on fasting days; at other
+times you will have them cooked in milk and water, or in oil."
+
+"Many thanks," said Durtal.
+
+"But all that is excellent for your health," continued the priest, "you
+complain of pains in the stomach, sick headaches, diarrhoea, well, this
+diet, in the country, in the air, will cure you better than all the
+drugs you take.
+
+"Now let us leave, if you like, your body out of the question, for in
+such a case, it is God's part to act against your weakness. I tell you,
+you will not be ill at La Trappe, that were absurd; it would be to send
+the penitent sinner away, and Jesus would not then be the Christ; but
+let us talk of your soul. Have the courage to take its measure, to look
+it well in the face. Do you see that?" said the abbé after a silence.
+
+Durtal did not answer.
+
+"Admit," said the priest, "that you are horrified at it."
+
+They took a few steps in the street, and the abbé continued,--
+
+"You declare that you are sustained by the crowds of Notre Dame des
+Victoires and the emanations of St. Severin. What will it be then, in
+the humble chapel, when you will be on the ground huddled together with
+the saints? I guarantee you in the name of the Lord an assistance such
+as you have never had;" and he went on with a laugh, "I may add that the
+Church will take pleasure in receiving you, she will bring out her
+ornaments which she has now left off: the authentic liturgies of the
+Middle Ages, true plain chant, without solos or organs."
+
+"Listen, your propositions astound me," said Durtal with an effort. "No:
+I assure you I am not at all disposed to imprison myself in such a
+place. I know well that at Paris I shall never come to any good. I swear
+to you that I am not proud of my life, nor satisfied with my soul, but
+from thence ... to ... where I cannot tell; I want at least a mitigated
+asylum, a quiet convent. There must be, on those conditions, somewhere,
+hospitals for souls."
+
+"I could only send you to the Jesuits, who make a specialty of retreats
+for men: but knowing you as I think I know you, I feel sure you would
+not stay there two days. You would find yourself among amiable and very
+clever priests, but they would overwhelm you with sermons, would wish to
+interfere with your life, mix themselves up with your art, they would
+examine your thoughts with a magnifying glass, and then you would be
+under treatment with good young people, whose unintelligent piety would
+horrify you, and you would flee in exasperation.
+
+"At La Trappe it is the contrary. You would certainly be the sole
+retreatant there, and no one will have the least idea of troubling
+himself about you; you will be free, you can if you choose leave the
+monastery just as you entered it, without having confessed or approached
+the Sacraments, your will will be respected there, and no monk will
+attempt to sound it without your authority. To you only it will
+appertain to decide whether you will be converted or no.
+
+"And you will like me to be frank to the last, will you not? You are, as
+indeed I have already said to you, a sensitive and distrustful man;
+well, the priest as you see him in Paris, even the religious not
+cloistered, seem to you, how shall I express it? second rate souls, not
+to go further...."
+
+Durtal protested vaguely, with a gesture.
+
+"Let me go on. An afterthought will come to you in regard to the
+ecclesiastic to whom will fall the task of cleansing you, you will be
+quite certain that he is not a saint; this is not very theological, for
+were he even the worst of priests his absolution would have just the
+same value, if you merit it, but indeed here is a question of sentiment
+which I respect, you will think of him in a word: he lives as I do, he
+is not more self-denying than I am, nothing shows that his conscience is
+very superior to mine, and thence to losing all confidence, and
+throwing up the whole thing there is but a step. At La Trappe, I will
+defy you to reason in this way, and not to become humble. When you see
+men, who after having abandoned everything to serve God, lead a life of
+privations and penance such as no government would dare to inflict on
+its convicts, you will indeed be obliged to admit that you are no great
+thing by their side."
+
+Durtal was silent. After the astonishment he had felt at the suggestion
+of such an issue, he became dully irritated against this friend, who
+hitherto so discreet, had suddenly rushed upon his soul and opened it by
+force. There came out the disgusting vision of an existence stripped,
+used up, reduced to a state of dust, a condition of rags. And Durtal
+shrank from himself, convinced that the abbé was right, that he must at
+any rate stanch the discharge of his senses, and expiate their
+inappeasable desires, their abominable covetousness, their rotten
+tastes, and he was seized with a terror irrational and intense. He had
+the giddy fear of the cloister, a terror which attracted him to the
+abyss over which Gévresin made him lean.
+
+Enervated by the ceremony of taking the habit, stunned by the blow with
+which the priest had assailed him as they left the church, he now felt
+an anguish almost physical, in which everything ended in confusion. He
+did not know to what reflections he should give himself, and only saw,
+swimming on this whirlpool of troubled ideas, one clear thought, that
+the moment had come so dreaded by him in which he must make a
+resolution.
+
+The abbé looked at him, saw that he was really suffering, and was full
+of pity for a soul so unable to support a struggle.
+
+He took Durtal's arm, and said gently,--
+
+"My son, believe me that the day you go yourself to the house of God,
+the day you knock at its door, it will open wide, and the angels will
+draw aside to let you pass. The Gospel cannot lie, and it declares that
+there is more joy over one sinner that repents than over ninety and nine
+just persons who need no repentance. You will be much better welcomed
+than you expect, and be sufficiently my friend to think that the old
+priest you leave here will not remain inactive, and that he and the
+convents he can influence will pray their best for you."
+
+"I will see," said Durtal, really moved by the affectionate tone of the
+priest, "I will see. I cannot decide thus, unexpectedly; I will think.
+Ah! it is not simple."
+
+"Above all things pray," said the priest, who had reached his door. "I
+have on my side sought the Lord much that He would enlighten me, and I
+declare to you that the solution of La Trappe is the only one He has
+given me. Ask Him humbly, in your turn, and you will be guided. I shall
+soon see you again, shall I not?"
+
+He pressed Durtal's hand, who, left alone, recovered himself at last.
+Then he recalled the strategic smiles, the ambiguous phrases, the dreamy
+silences of the Abbé Gévresin, he understood the kindness of his
+counsels, the patience of his plans; and a little put out at having
+been, without knowing it, led so wisely, he exclaimed in spite of
+himself, "This, then, was the design the priest was ripening, with his
+air of not concerning himself with it at all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+He experienced that painful awakening of a sick man whom a doctor
+deceives for months, who learns some fine morning that he is to be taken
+at once to an hospital to undergo an urgent surgical operation. "But
+that is not the way things should be done," cried Durtal, "people should
+be prepared, little by little, accustomed by words of warning, to the
+idea that they are to be cut up on a table, they are not struck down
+thus unexpectedly!
+
+"Yes, but what does that matter? since I know very well, in the depths
+of my soul, that this priest is right; I must leave Paris if I wish to
+amend; but all the same, the treatment he inflicts is hard indeed to
+follow; I know not what to do."
+
+And from this moment his days were haunted by Trappists. He turned over
+the thought of his departure, and examined it on all sides, chewed the
+cud of for and against, and ended by saying to himself, "That he would
+take stock of his reflections and open an account, and this with a debit
+and credit side, that he might know himself the better.
+
+"The debit is terrible. To gather up his life, and cast it into the
+stove of a cloister; and again, he ought to know if his body were in a
+state to bear such a remedy; mine is frail and soft, accustomed to rise
+late; it becomes weak if not nourished by flesh meat, and is subject to
+neuralgia at any change of the hour of meals. I should never be able to
+hold out down there with vegetables cooked in warm oil or in milk; first
+I detest oily cookery, and I hate milk still more, which I cannot
+digest.
+
+"Then I think I see myself on my knees, on the floor for hours, I who
+suffered so much at La Glacière in remaining in that posture, on a step,
+for scarce a quarter of an hour.
+
+"Again, I am so accustomed to cigarettes that it is absolutely
+impossible to give them up, and it is pretty certain they will not let
+me smoke in a monastery.
+
+"No, indeed, from the bodily point of view, this plan is madness; in my
+state of health there is no doctor who would not dissuade me from
+undertaking such a risk.
+
+"If I place myself in a spiritual point of view I must then again
+recognize that it is terrible to enter La Trappe.
+
+"I am afraid indeed that my dryness of soul, my want of love will
+remain, and then what would become of me in such surroundings? then it
+is equally probable, that in that solitude and absolute silence, I
+should be wearied to death, and if it be so, what a miserable existence
+is it to stalk about a cell and count the hours. No, for that one needs
+to be firmly fixed on God, to be dwelt in wholly by Him.
+
+"Moreover, there are two formidable questions which I have never
+properly weighed, because it has been painful to think of them, but now
+that they come before me, and stop the road, I must face them, the
+questions of Confession and Holy Communion.
+
+"Confession? Yes, I will consent to it, I am so tired of myself, so
+disgusted with my wretched existence that this expiation appears to me
+as deserved, even necessary. I desire to humble myself, I would ask
+pardon with all my heart, but again this penance must be assigned me
+under possible conditions. At La Trappe, if I believe the abbé, no one
+will trouble himself about me, in other words no one will encourage me,
+and aid me to submit to this sorrowful extraction of my shames. I shall
+be somewhat like a sick man operated on in hospital, far from his
+friends and relatives.
+
+"Confession," he went on, "is an admirable discovery, for it is the most
+sensitive touchstone of souls, the most intolerable act which the Church
+has ever imposed on the vanity of men.
+
+"Is this strange? We speak easily of our lapses, of our grosser actions,
+even, indeed, to a priest in conversation, that does not seem to lead to
+any consequences, and perhaps a little bragging enters into our
+admission of easy sins, but to tell the same thing on one's knees,
+accusing oneself, after prayer, is different, that which was only rather
+amusing becomes a very painful humiliation, for the soul is not the dupe
+of this false seeming, it knows so well in its inner tribunal that all
+is changed, it feels so well the terrible power of the Sacrament, that
+he who but now smiled, now trembles at the very thought.
+
+"Now, were I to find myself face to face with an old monk who emerges
+from an eternity of silence to listen to me, a monk who will not aid me,
+perhaps cannot even understand me, this will be terrible. I shall never
+get to the end of my troubles if he does not hold out a staff to me, if
+he lets me stifle and gives no air to my soul, nor brings me help.
+
+"The Eucharist also seems terrible. To dare to come forward, to offer
+Him as a tabernacle the sewer of self scarce purified by repentance, a
+sewer drained by absolution, but still hardly dry, is monstrous. I am
+quite without such courage as to offer Christ this last insult, and so
+there is no good in fleeing to a monastery.
+
+"No; the more I think of it, the more I am obliged to conclude that I
+should be mad if I ventured into a Trappist house.
+
+"Now for the Credit side. The only proper work of my life would be to
+make a parcel of my life, and take it to a cloister to disinfect it, and
+if that cost me nothing, where is the merit?
+
+"Nothing shows me, on the other hand, that my body, however weakened,
+cannot support the regimen of La Trappe. Without believing or pretending
+to believe with the Abbé Gévresin that that kind of food will be even
+helpful to me, I ought to count on Divine consolations, to admit the
+principle that, if I am sent there, it is not that I may take at once to
+my bed, or be obliged to leave again as soon as I arrive--at least,
+unless that is the chastisement prepared me, the expiation demanded, and
+again no, for that would be to ascribe to God pitiless tricks, and would
+be absurd!
+
+"As to the cookery, it matters little that it is uncivilized, if my
+stomach can digest it; to have bad food, and get up in the middle of the
+night is nothing, provided the body can stand it, and no doubt I shall
+find some means of smoking cigarettes by stealth in the woods.
+
+"After all, a week is soon over, and I am not even obliged, if I feel
+poorly, to remain a week.
+
+"From the spiritual point of view, I must again count on the mercy of
+God, believe that it will not abandon me, will dress my wounds, and
+change the very foundation of my soul. I know well that these arguments
+do not rest on any earthly certainty, but yet if I have proofs that
+Providence has already taken part in my affairs, I have no reason to
+suppose that these arguments are weaker than the purely physical motives
+which served to support my other thesis. Now I must recall that
+conversion, so outside my will; I must take account of a fact which
+should encourage me, the weakness of the temptations which I now
+experience.
+
+"It is difficult to have been more rapidly and more completely heard.
+Whether I owe this grace to my own prayers or to those of the convents
+which have shielded me without knowing me, it is the case that for some
+time past my brain has been silent and my flesh calm. That monster
+Florence appears to me still at certain times, but she does not approach
+me, she remains in the shade, and the end of the Lord's Prayer, the 'ne
+nos inducas in tentationem,' puts her to flight.
+
+"That is an unaccustomed fact, and yet a precise one. Why should I
+doubt, then, that I shall be better upheld at La Trappe than I am in
+Paris itself?
+
+"There remain confession and communion.
+
+"Confession? It will be what the Lord chooses it should be. He will
+choose the monk for me; I shall only be able to make use of him; and
+then the more disagreeable it is, the better worth it will be; and if I
+suffer much, I shall think myself less unworthy to communicate.
+
+"That is," he went on, "the most painful point! Communicate! But let us
+consider, it is certain that I shall be base in proposing to Christ that
+He should descend like a scavenger into my ditch; but if I wait till it
+is empty, I shall never be in a state to receive Him, for my bulkheads
+are not closed, and sins would filter through the fissures.
+
+"All this well considered, the abbé spoke truth when he answered me one
+day: 'But I too am not worthy to approach Him; thank God, I have not
+those sewers of which you speak, but in the morning, when I go to say my
+mass, and think of all the dust of the evening, do you not think that I
+am ashamed? It is always necessary, you see, to go back to the Gospels,
+and say to yourself that He came for the weak and the sick, the
+publicans and lepers; and, in fact, you must convince yourself that the
+Eucharist is a lookout post, a help, that it is given, as it is written
+in the ordinary of the Mass "ad tutamentum mentis et corporis et ad
+medelam percipiendam." It is, if I may say so, a spiritual medicine; you
+go to the Saviour just as you go to a doctor, you take your soul to Him
+to care for it, and He does so!'
+
+"I stand before the unknown," pursued Durtal, "I complain that I am
+arid, and have wandered from the right way, but who will declare to me
+that, if I determine to communicate, I shall remain in the same mind;
+for indeed, if I have Faith, I ought to believe in the occult work of
+Christ in the Sacrament. Lastly, I am afraid of being wearied by
+solitude; I am not much amused here as it is, but at La Trappe I shall
+no longer have those vacillations at every minute, those constant fears;
+I shall at least have the advantage of having my time to myself; and
+then ... and then ... how well I know solitude. Have I not lived apart
+since the deaths of des Hermies and Carhaix? Indeed, whom do I see? A
+few publishers, a few literary men, and my relations with these people
+are not interesting. As to silence, it is a blessing. I shall not hear
+any foolish sayings at La Trappe; I shall not listen to pitiable
+homilies and poor sermons; but I ought to rejoice on being at last
+isolated, far from Paris, far from men."
+
+He was silent, and made, as it were, a return in upon himself; and said
+to himself, in a melancholy manner: "These strifes are useless, these
+reflections vain. I need not try to take account of my soul, to make out
+the debit and credit; I know, without knowing how, that I must go; I am
+thrust out of myself by an impulse which rises from the very depths of
+my being, to which I am quite certain I have to yield."
+
+At that moment Durtal had decided, but ten minutes afterwards the
+attempt at resolution vanished. He felt his cowardice gain on him once
+more, he chewed once more the cud of arguments against his moving; came
+to the conclusion that his reasons for remaining in Paris were palpable,
+human, certain, while the others were intangible, extra-natural, and
+consequently subject to illusions, perhaps false.
+
+And he invented for himself the fear of not obtaining the thing he
+feared, said to himself that La Trappe would not receive him, or
+certainly that it would refuse him communion; and then he suggested to
+himself a middle term: to confess at Paris and communicate at La
+Trappe.
+
+But then there passed in him an incomprehensible fact: his whole soul
+revolted at this idea, and the formal order not to deceive himself was
+truly breathed into him, and he said to himself: "No, the bitter draught
+must be drained to the last drop, it is all or nothing; if I confess to
+the abbé it will be in disobedience to absolute and secret directions; I
+should be capable of not going afterwards to Notre Dame de l'Atre.
+
+"What shall I do?" And he accused himself of distrust, called to his aid
+once more the memory of benefits received, how scales had fallen from
+his eyes, his insensible progress towards Faith, his encounter with that
+singular priest, perhaps the only one who could understand him, and
+treat him in a way so benign and so elastic; but he tried in vain to
+reassure himself, then he called up the dream of the monastic life, the
+sovereign beauty of the cloister; he imagined the joy of renunciation,
+the peace of exalted prayers, the interior intoxication of the spirit,
+the delight of not being at home any longer in his own body. Some words
+of the abbé about La Trappe served as a spring-board for his dreams, and
+he perceived an old abbey, grey and warm, immense avenues of trees,
+clouds flying confusedly amid the song of waters, silent strolls in the
+woods at nightfall; he called up the solemn liturgies of Saint
+Benedict's time; he saw the white pith of monastic chants rise under the
+scarcely pruned bark of sound. He succeeded in his decision, and cried:
+"You have dreamed for years of the cloisters, now rejoice that you will
+know them at last," and he wished to go at once and live there; then
+suddenly he fell down into reality, and said to himself: "It is easy to
+wish to live in a monastery, to tell God that you would desire to take
+shelter therein, when life in Paris weighs you down, but when it comes
+to the real point of emigration, it is quite another matter."
+
+He turned over these thoughts everywhere, in the street, at home, in the
+chapels. He hurried like a shuttle from one church to another, hoping to
+solace his fears by changing his place, but they persisted, and rendered
+every place intolerable.
+
+Then in the sacred places came always that dryness of soul, the broken
+spring of impulse, a sudden silence within, when he desired consolation
+in speaking to Him. His best moments, his pauses in the hurly-burly,
+were a few minutes of absolute torpor, which rested like snow on the
+soul and he heard nothing.
+
+But this drowsiness of thought lasted but a while, the whirlwind blew
+once more, and the prayers which were wont to appease it refused to
+leave his lips, he tried religious music, the despairing sequences of
+the psalms, pictures of the Crucifixion by the Early Masters, to excite
+him, but his prayers ran on and became confused on his lips, were
+divested of all sense, mere words, empty shells.
+
+At Notre Dame des Victoires, where he dragged himself that he might thaw
+a little under the warmth of his neighbours' prayers, he did in fact
+feel less chilly, and seemed to break up a little, fell drop by drop
+into sorrows which he could not formulate, and were all summed up in the
+cry of a sick child, in which he said to Our Lady, in low tones: "My
+soul is sorrowful."
+
+Thence he returned to St. Severin, sat down under those arches browned
+by the rust of prayers, and, haunted by his fixed idea, he pleaded for
+himself extenuating circumstances, exaggerated the austerities of La
+Trappe, tried almost to exasperate his fear to excuse his weakness in a
+vague appeal to Our Lady.
+
+"But I must go and see the Abbé Gévresin," he murmured, but his courage
+still failed him to pronounce the "Yes" which the priest would surely
+require from him. He ended by discovering a reason for his visit,
+without thinking himself obliged to promise just yet.
+
+"After all," he thought, "I have no precise information about this
+monastery; I do not even know whether it may not be necessary to take a
+long and expensive journey to get there; the abbé indeed declares that
+it is not far from Paris, but it is impossible to decide on this simple
+declaration; it will be useful also to know the habits of these
+cenobites before going to stay with them."
+
+The abbé smiled when Durtal mentioned these objections.
+
+"The journey is short," he said. "You start from the Gare du Nord at
+eight o'clock in the morning for Saint Landry, where you arrive at a
+quarter to twelve; you lunch at an inn close to the station, and while
+you are drinking your coffee they get you a carriage, and after a drive
+of four hours you arrive at Notre Dame de l'Atre for dinner. There is no
+difficulty there.
+
+"Then the cost is moderate. As far as I remember the railway fare is
+about fifteen francs, add two or three francs for lunch, and six or
+seven for the carriage ..."
+
+And as Durtal was silent, the abbé went on: "Well?"
+
+"Ah yes, yes ... if you knew ... I am in a pitiable state, I will and
+will not, I know well that I ought to take refuge there, but in spite of
+myself, I wish to gain time and put off the hour of departure."
+
+And he continued: "My soul is out of gear, when I would pray, my senses
+go all astray, I cannot recollect myself, and if I succeed in pulling
+myself together, five minutes do not pass but I am all astray again; no,
+I have neither fervour nor true contrition, I do not love God enough, if
+it must be said.
+
+"And, indeed, during the last two days, a frightful certainty has grown
+up in me; I am sure that, in spite of my good intentions, if I found
+myself in the presence of a certain person, whose sight troubles me, I
+should send religion to the devil, I should return eagerly to my vomit;
+I only hold on because I am not tempted, I am no better than when I was
+sinning. You will admit that I am in a wretched state to enter a
+Trappist monastery."
+
+"Your reasons are at least weak," answered the abbé. "You say first that
+your prayers are distracted, that you are unable to concentrate your
+attention; but in fact you are just like everybody else. Even Saint
+Teresa declares that often she was unable to recite the Credo without
+distraction, it is a weakness in which we must just take our portion
+humbly: above all things it is necessary not to lay too much stress on
+these evils, for the fear of seeing them return ensures their assiduity;
+you are distracted in prayer by the very fear of distraction, and by
+regret for it; go forth more boldly, look at things more widely, pray as
+best you can, and do not trouble yourself.
+
+"Again, you declare that if you meet a certain person whose attraction
+is a trouble to you, you will succumb. How do you know that? why should
+you take care about seductions which God does not yet inflict upon you,
+and which He will perhaps spare you? Why doubt His mercy? Why not
+believe, on the contrary, that if He judge the temptation useful, He
+will aid you enough to prevent your sinking under it?
+
+"In any case you ought not, by anticipation, to fear disgust at your
+weakness; the Imitation declares 'There is nothing more foolish and
+vain, than to afflict ourselves about future things which may perhaps
+never happen.' No, it is enough to occupy ourselves with the present,
+for 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,'--'sufficit diei
+malitia sua.'
+
+"Finally you say you do not love God; again I answer, what do you know
+about it? You have this love by the very token that you desire to have
+it, and that you regret you have it not; you love our Lord by the very
+fact that you desire to love Him."
+
+"That is special pleading," murmured Durtal. "But indeed," he went on,
+"suppose at La Trappe, the monk revolted at the long outrage of my sins,
+refused me absolution, and forbade me to communicate."
+
+The abbé burst out laughing.
+
+"You are mad! What is your notion of Christ?"
+
+"Not of Christ, but of His intermediary the human being who replaces
+Him."
+
+"You can only chance upon a man pointed out beforehand from above to
+judge you; moreover, at Notre Dame de l'Atre you have every chance of
+kneeling at the feet of a saint, therefore God will inspire him, will be
+present, you have nothing to fear.
+
+"As to the Communion, the prospect of being rejected terrifies you, but
+is not that one proof the more that, contrary to your opinion, God does
+not leave you insensible?"
+
+"Yes, but the idea of communicating alarms me none the less."
+
+"I say to you again: if Jesus were indifferent to you, it would be just
+the same to you, to consume or not to consume the sacred species."
+
+"All that does not convince me," sighed Durtal. "I do not know where I
+am; I am afraid of a confessor, of others, of myself; it is foolish, but
+it is stronger than I. I cannot gain the upper hand."
+
+"You are afraid of the water; imitate Gribouille, throw yourself in
+boldly; look, suppose I write to La Trappe this very day to say you are
+coming; when?"
+
+"Oh!" cried Durtal, "wait a while."
+
+"To get an answer, we need two days each way; will you go there five
+days hence?"
+
+And, as Durtal was astounded and silent,
+
+"Is that settled?"
+
+Then, at that moment, Durtal had a strange experience, as often at St.
+Severin, a sort of caressing touch and gentle push; he felt a will
+insinuate itself into his own, and he drew back disquieted at seeing he
+had a double self, to find he was no longer alone in the depth of his
+being; then he was inexplicably reassured, and gave himself up, and as
+soon as he had said "Yes" he felt immensely relieved; then passing from
+one extreme to the other, he was troubled at the idea that his departure
+could not take place at once, and was sorry that he had still to pass
+five days in Paris.
+
+The abbé laughed. "But the Trappists must have notice, it is a simple
+formality, for with a word from me, you will be received at once, but
+wait at least until I have sent this word; I will post it this evening,
+so have no anxiety, and sleep in peace."
+
+Durtal in his turn laughed at his own impatience. "You must think me
+very ridiculous," he said.
+
+The priest shrugged his shoulders. "Come, you asked me about my little
+monastery; I must try to satisfy you. It is very small, if compared with
+the grande Trappe at Soligny, or the establishments at Sept Fonds,
+Meilleray or Aiguebelle, for there are only about ten choir fathers, and
+about thirty lay brothers or 'conversi.' There are also a certain number
+of peasants who work with them, and help them to till their land, and
+make their chocolate."
+
+"They make chocolate!"
+
+"That surprises you. How do you think they live? Ah! I warn you, you are
+not going into a sumptuous monastery."
+
+"I like it so. But in regard to the stories of La Trappe, I suppose the
+monks do not greet each other with 'Brother, we must die,' and that they
+do not dig their graves every morning?"
+
+"All that is false. They take no trouble about their graves, and they
+salute each other silently, since they are forbidden to speak."
+
+"Then what am I to do if I need anything?"
+
+"The abbot, the confessor, and the guest-master have the right of
+conversing with the guests, you will have to do with them alone; the
+others will bow when you meet them, but if you speak to them they will
+not answer."
+
+"It is well to know that. What is their dress?"
+
+"Before the foundation of Citeaux, the Benedictines wore, or so it is
+supposed, the black habit of Saint Benedict; the Benedictines properly
+so-called wear it still, but at Citeaux the colour was changed, and the
+Trappists, who are a twig of this branch, have adopted the white robe of
+Saint Bernard."
+
+"Pray pardon all these questions, which must seem childish, but since I
+am about to visit these monks, I ought to be in some measure acquainted
+with the customs of their order."
+
+"I am wholly at your disposition," replied the abbé.
+
+Durtal asked him about the situation of the abbey itself, and he
+replied,
+
+"The present monastery dates from the eighteenth century, but you will
+see in the gardens the ruins of the old cloister, which was built in the
+time of Saint Bernard. In the Middle Ages there was a succession of
+Blessed in this convent; it is a truly sanctified land, fit for
+meditation and regret.
+
+"The abbey is situated at the bottom of a valley, according to the
+orders of Saint Bernard; for you know that if Saint Benedict loved the
+hills, Saint Bernard sought the low and moist plains wherein to found
+his convents. An old Latin line has preserved the different tastes of
+these two saints:
+
+     "'Bernardus valles, colles Benedictus amabat.'"
+
+"Was it on account of his own personal liking, or for a pious end, that
+Saint Bernard built his hermitages in unwholesome and flat places?"
+
+"In order that his monks, whose health was enfeebled by the fogs, might
+have constantly before their eyes the salutary image of death."
+
+"The deuce he did!"
+
+"I may add at once that the valley in which Notre Dame de l'Atre rises
+is now drained, and the air is very pure. You will stroll by delightful
+ponds, and I may recommend you, on the borders of the enclosure, an
+avenue of secular chestnuts, where you may take some refreshing walks
+at daybreak."
+
+And after a silence the Abbé Gévresin continued,--
+
+"Walk there a good deal, traverse the woods in all directions; the
+forests will tell you more about your soul than books: 'Aliquid amplius
+invenies in sylvis quam in libris,' wrote Saint Bernard--'pray and your
+days will seem short.'"
+
+Durtal went away from the priest's house comforted, almost joyful; he
+felt at least the solace of a fixed decision, a resolution taken at
+last. He said to himself that the only thing now to be done was to
+prepare himself as best he could for the retreat, and he prayed and went
+to bed for the first time for months with his mind at rest.
+
+But next day, when he woke, his mood changed, all his preconceived
+ideas, all his fears returned; he asked himself if his conversion were
+ripe enough to allow him to cut it separate, and carry it to La Trappe;
+the fear of a confessor, the dread of the unknown, assailed him afresh.
+"I was wrong to have answered so soon," and he asked himself, "Why did I
+say 'yes'?" The recollection of this word pronounced by his lips,
+conceived by a will which was still his own and yet other than his, came
+back to his mind. "It is not the first time that such a thing happened
+to me," he thought, "I have already experienced when alone in the
+churches unexpected counsels, silent orders, and it must be admitted
+that it is terrifying to feel this infusion into self of an invisible
+being, and to know that he can, if he choose, almost turn you out of the
+domain of your personality.
+
+"But no, it is not that, there is no substitution of an exterior will to
+one's own, for one's free will is absolutely intact; neither is it one
+of those irresistible impulses endured by certain sick persons, for
+nothing is more easy than to resist it; it is still less a suggestion,
+since, in this case, there are no magnetic passes, no somnambulism
+induced, no hypnotism; no, it is the irresistible entrance into oneself
+of a strange will, the sudden intrusion of a precise and discreet
+desire, a pressure on the soul at once firm and gentle. Ah! again I am
+incorrect, and play the fool, but nothing can describe that close
+pressure, which vanishes at the least movement of impatience--it is felt
+but cannot be expressed.
+
+"Its introduction is always attended by surprise, almost with anguish,
+since it does not make use of even an interior voice to make itself
+heard, and is formulated without the aid of words, all is blotted out,
+the breath which has thrilled you disappears. You would wish that this
+incitement should be confirmed, that the phenomenon should be repeated
+in order to be more closely observed, to try to analyze it and
+understand it, when lo! it is gone; you remain alone with yourself, are
+free not to obey, your will is unfettered and you know it, but you know
+also that if you reject these invitations you take on yourself
+unspeakable risks for the future.
+
+"In fact," pursued Durtal, "it is an angelic influx, a divine touch,
+something analogous to the interior voice so well known by the mystics,
+but it is less complete, less precise, and yet it is quite as certain."
+
+He ended his dreams concluding, "I am consumed and collared by myself,
+before being able to answer this priest, whose arguments would scarce
+persuade me, unless I had had this help, this unexpected succour.
+
+"But then, since I am thus led by the hand, what have I to fear?"
+
+He feared all the same, and could not be at peace with himself; then if
+he profited by the comfort of a decision, he was consumed for the moment
+by the expectation of his departure.
+
+He tried to kill time in reading, but he had to admit once more that he
+could not expect consolation from any book. None came even distantly
+into relation with his state of mind. High Mysticism was so little
+human, soared at such heights far from our mire, that no sovereign aid
+could be expected from it. He ended by falling back on the "Imitation,"
+in which Mysticism, placed within the reach of the crowd, was like a
+trembling and plaintive friend who stanched your wounds within the cells
+of its chapters, prayed and wept with you, and in any case
+compassionated the desolate widowhood of souls.
+
+Unfortunately, Durtal had read so much, and was so saturated with the
+Gospels, that he had temporarily exhausted their sedative and soothing
+virtues. Tired of reading, he again began his courses in the churches.
+"And suppose the Trappists will not have me," he thought, "what will
+become of me?"
+
+"But I tell you that they will receive you," said the abbé, whom he went
+to see. He was not easy till the day the priest handed him the answer
+from La Trappe.
+
+He read:--
+
+     "We will receive with pleasure, for a week, in our guest-house the
+     retreatant whom you wish to commend to us, and I do not see at the
+     moment any reason why the retreat should not begin next Tuesday.
+
+     "In the hope, Monsieur l'Abbé, that we shall also have the pleasure
+     of seeing you again in our solitude, I beg to assure you that I am
+     yours most respectfully,
+
+     "F. M. ETIENNE,
+     "_Guestmaster._"
+
+He read and re-read it, at once delighted and terrified. "There is no
+further doubt; it is irrevocable," he said, and he went at once in haste
+to St. Severin, having less need of prayer than of going near to Our
+Lady; of showing himself to her, paying her, as it were, a visit of
+thankfulness, and expressing his gratitude by his very presence.
+
+He was taken by the charms of that church, its silence, the shadow which
+fell on the apse, from the height of its palm trees of stone, and he
+ended by caring for nothing and sinking on a chair, filled with one sole
+desire, not to enter again on the life of the streets, never to leave
+his refuge, never to move.
+
+The next day, which was a Sunday, he went to the Benedictine nuns to
+hear High Mass. A black monk celebrated; he recognized a Benedictine
+when the priest chanted "Dominous vobiscoum," for the Abbé Gévresin had
+told him that the Benedictines pronounced Latin like Italian.
+
+Though he was not inclined to like that pronunciation which took away
+from Latin the sonorous tones of its words, and turned after a fashion
+the phrases of that tongue into a ring of bells with their clappers
+muffled or their vases stuffed with tow, he let himself go, taken hold
+of by the unction, by the humble piety of the monk, who almost trembled
+with reverence and joy when he kissed the altar, and he had a deep
+voice, to which, behind the grating, answered the clear high voices of
+the nuns.
+
+Durtal panted, listening to the fluid pictures of the Early Masters
+sketch and form and paint themselves on the air; he was affected to his
+very marrow, as he had formerly been during High Mass at St. Severin. He
+had lost that emotion now in that church, where the flower of melody had
+faded for him since he knew the Benedictine plain song, and he now found
+it again, or rather he took it with him from St. Severin to this chapel.
+
+And for the first time he had a wild desire, a desire so violent that it
+seemed to melt his heart.
+
+It was at the moment of the Communion. The monk, elevating the Host,
+uttered the "Domine non sum dignus." Pale, with drawn features,
+sorrowful eyes, and serious mouth, he seemed to have escaped from a
+monastery of the Middle Ages, cut out of one of those Flemish pictures
+where the monks are standing in the background, while, before them, nuns
+are praying on their knees with joined hands, near the donors, to the
+child Jesus on whom the Virgin smiles, while lowering her long lashes
+under her arching brow.
+
+And while he descended the steps and communicated two women, Durtal
+trembled, and his desires went forth towards the ciborium.
+
+It seemed to him that if he were nourished on that Bread, there would be
+an end of all his dryness and all his fears; it would seem to him that
+the wall of his sins, higher and higher from year to year, and now
+barring his view, would roll away, and at last he would see. And he was
+in haste to set off for La Trappe, that he too might receive the Sacred
+Body from the hands of a monk.
+
+That mass gave him new strength like a tonic, he came out of the chapel
+joyful and firmer, and when the impression grew somewhat feebler in the
+course of hours, he remained perhaps less affected, but still resolute,
+joking in the evening with a gentle melancholy about his condition:
+"There are many people who go to Barèges or Vichy to cure their bodies,
+and why should not I go and cure my soul in a Trappist monastery?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+"I shall make myself a prisoner in two days," sighed Durtal; "it is time
+to think about packing. What books shall I take to help me to live down
+there?"
+
+He searched his library, and turned over the mystical books, which had,
+by degrees, replaced profane works on the shelves.
+
+"I will not talk of Saint Teresa," he thought; "neither she, nor Saint
+John of the Cross, would be indulgent enough to me in solitude; I have
+need of more pardon and consolation."
+
+"Saint Denys the Areopagite, or the apocryphal book known under that
+name? He is the first of the Mystics, and perhaps has gone the furthest
+in his theological definitions. He lives in the rarefied air of the
+mountain tops, above the gulfs, on the threshold of the other world
+which he sees in part by flashes of grace, and he remains lucid,
+undazzled in the blaze of light around him.
+
+"It seems that in his 'Celestial Hierarchies,' in which he brings out in
+procession the armies of heaven, and shows the meaning of angelic
+attributes and symbols, he has already passed the limits assigned to
+man, and yet in his 'Divine Names' he ventures even a step further, and
+then he raises himself into the super-essence of metaphysics at once
+calm and stern.
+
+"He over-heats the human word to give it greater force, but when after
+all his efforts he endeavours to define the Indescribable, to
+distinguish those never to be confounded Persons of the Trinity who in
+their plurality never lose their unity, words fail on his lips, and his
+tongue is paralyzed under his pen; then tranquilly and without any
+astonishment he makes himself again a child, comes down from those
+heights among us, and in order to try and explain to us what he
+understands, he has recourse to comparisons with domestic life; and that
+he may explain the Trinity in Unity he notices how, if many torches be
+lighted in one hall, lights, though distinct, mingle in one, and are in
+fact no more than one.
+
+"Saint Denys," thought Durtal, "is one of the boldest explorers of the
+eternal regions, but he would be dry reading at La Trappe."
+
+"Ruysbröck?" he thought--"perhaps, and yet I hardly am sure--I might put
+him in my bag as well as for a cordial the little collection distilled
+by Hello; as for the Spiritual Marriages, so well translated by
+Maeterlinck, they are disconnected and obscure, they stifle me, this
+Ruysbröck oppresses me less. This hermit is singular, all the same, for
+he does not enter into us, but rather goes round about us; he
+endeavours, like Saint Denys, to arrive at God, rather in heaven than in
+the soul, but in wishing to take such a flight, he strains his wings,
+and stammers incomprehensibly when he comes down.
+
+"We will leave him behind, then. Now let us see. Saint Catherine of
+Genoa? Her discussions between the soul, the body, and self-love are
+unmeaning and confused, and when in her 'Dialogues,' she treats of the
+operations of the interior life, she is greatly below Saint Teresa and
+Saint Angela. On the other hand her Treatise on Purgatory is clear. It
+declares that she alone has penetrated into the spaces of unknown
+sorrows, and that she has disentangled and taken hold of the joys; she
+has in fact succeeded in reconciling two contraries which seemed
+eternally repugnant; the suffering of the soul in its purification from
+sin, and the joy of the same soul, which at the very moment it is
+enduring frightful torment experiences immense happiness, for little by
+little it draws near to God, and feels His rays attract it more and
+more, and His love inundate it with such excess, that it would seem the
+Saviour desires nought but only it.
+
+"Saint Catherine sets forth also that Jesus forbids heaven to none, that
+it is the soul herself who, deeming herself unworthy to attain it,
+flings herself by her own motion into Purgatory there to cleanse
+herself, for she has only one end, to re-establish herself in her
+primitive purity, only one desire, to attain her last end, by
+destroying herself, annihilating herself, losing herself in God.
+
+"This is a conclusive study," murmured Durtal, "but not that which would
+lead to La Trappe. We must try again."
+
+He touched other volumes in the book-cases.
+
+"Here, for instance, is one which obviously I should use," he went on,
+as he took down the "Seraphic Theology" of Saint Bonaventure, "for he
+condenses the means of self-examination, of meditation for communion, of
+thoughts on death, then in these 'Selections' is a treatise on the
+Contempt of the World, whose terse phrases are admirable; it is the true
+essence of the Holy Spirit, a jelly of unction firm set--we will put
+that on one side.
+
+"I shall hardly find a better help to remedy the probable weariness of
+solitude," murmured Durtal, turning over new ranks of volumes. He looked
+at the titles. "The Life of the Blessed Virgin," by M. Olier.
+
+He hesitated, saying to himself, "Under a style which is like water with
+scarcely the chill off, there are some interesting observations, some
+tasteful comments. M. Olier has in a way traversed the mysterious
+territory of hidden designs, and has there discovered the unimaginable
+truths which the Lord is sometimes pleased to reveal to His saints. He
+has made himself the liege-man of Our Lady, and living near her has made
+himself also the herald of her attributes, the legate of her graces. His
+Life of Mary is certainly the only one which seems really inspired and
+is possible to read. Where the abbess of Agreda wanders, he alone
+remains vigorous and clear. He shows us the Virgin existing from all
+eternity in God, conceiving without ceasing to be immaculate, like the
+crystal which receives and reflects the rays of the sun, yet loses
+nothing of its lustre, and indeed shines with greater brightness,
+bringing forth without pain, but suffering at the death of her Son the
+pangs she would have borne at His birth. Then he gives us learned
+dissertations on Her whom he calls the Treasure-house of all good, the
+Mediatrix of love and impetration. Yes, but to converse with Her nothing
+is so good as the 'Officium parvum beatĉ Virginis,' and that," concluded
+Durtal, "I will put in my bag with my Prayer-book; we will not disturb
+M. Olier's volume."
+
+"My stock begins to give out," he continued. "Angela of Foligno?
+Certainly she is a brasier at which one may warm one's soul. I will take
+her with me. What more--Tauler's Sermons? I am tempted to do so, for
+never has any treated better than this monk the most abstruse subjects
+with a more perfectly lucid mind. By aid of familiar images, humble
+analogies, he has rendered accessible the highest speculations of
+Mysticism. He is homely and deep, then he borrows a little from
+quietism, and, perhaps, it will be no bad thing to absorb, down there, a
+few drops of that mixture. Yet on the whole, no; I have rather need of
+nerve tonics. As to Suso, he is a remedy far inferior to Saint
+Bonaventure, or Saint Angela. I put aside also Saint Bridget of Sweden,
+for in her conversations with heaven she seems aided by a God morose and
+tired, who reveals to her nothing unexpected, nothing new.
+
+"There is also Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, that voluble Carmelite whose
+work is a series of apostrophes. An exclamatory person, clever at
+analogies, expert in coincidences, a saint infatuated with metaphors and
+hyperboles. She talks directly with God the Father, and stammers out in
+ecstasy explanations of the mysteries revealed to her by the Ancient of
+days. Her books contain one sovereign page on the Circumcision, another
+magnificent one, entirely made up of antitheses, on the Holy Spirit,
+others, very strange, on the deification of the human soul, on its union
+with heaven, and on the part assigned in this operation to the wounds of
+the Word.
+
+"These are inhabited nests; the eagle which is the symbol of Faith
+resides in the eyrie of the left foot; in the hole of the right foot
+resides the melancholy sweetness of the turtle-doves; in the wound of
+the left hand the dove ensconces herself, the symbol of surrender, and
+in the cavity of the right hand reposes the pelican, the emblem of love.
+
+"These birds leave their nests and come to seek the soul that they may
+lead it to the nuptial chamber of the wound which bleeds in the side of
+Christ.
+
+"Was it not also that Carmelite nun who, ravished by the power of grace,
+despised so greatly the certitude acquired by the way of the senses, as
+to say to the Lord: 'If I saw Thee with mine eyes, I should have Faith
+no more, because Faith ceases where evidence comes in'?
+
+"All things considered," he said; "Magdalen of Pazzi, with her dialogues
+and contemplations, opens eloquent horizons, but the soul, snared in the
+bird-lime of its sins, cannot follow her. No; this saint cannot reassure
+me in the cloister.
+
+"Ah!" he went on, shaking the dust from a volume in a grey cover; "ah!
+it is true I have The Precious Blood, of Father Faber." And he began to
+dream as he turned over its pages where he stood.
+
+He remembered the impression, till now forgotten, produced on him when
+he read it. The work of this Oratorian was at least strange. The pages
+boiled over, ran forth tumultuously, carrying with them grandiose
+visions, such as Hugo conceived, developing historical perspectives such
+as Michelet loved to paint. In this volume was seen advancing the solemn
+procession of the Precious Blood, starting from the confines of
+humanity, from the origin of the ages, and it broke the bounds of the
+worlds, overwhelmed the nations, submerged history.
+
+Father Faber was less a mystic, properly so-called, than a visionary and
+a poet; in spite of the abuse of rhetoric transferred from the pulpit to
+a book, he tore up souls by roots, carried them away on the rush of the
+stream, but when one regained footing, and sought to remember what had
+been heard and seen, one could recall nothing; on reflection one
+recognized that the theme of the work was very thin, too slender to have
+been executed by so noisy an orchestra, and there remained of that
+reading something distracting and feverish which made you uneasy, and
+made you think that this kind of book had only very distant relation to
+the heavenly fulness of the great mystics.
+
+"No, not that," thought Durtal. "Now what have we selected? I keep the
+little collection of Ruysbröck, the Life of Angela of Foligno, and Saint
+Bonaventure, and the best of all for my state of soul," he said,
+striking his forehead. He went back to his book-case, and seized a
+little book, which lay alone in a corner.
+
+He sat down, and turned it over, saying, "Here is the tonic, the
+stimulant in weakness, the strychnine for failure of Faith, the goad
+which drives you in tears to the feet of Christ, the 'Dolorous Passion'
+of Sister Emmerich."
+
+She was no chemist of the spiritual being, like Saint Teresa; she had
+nothing to do with our interior life; in her book she forgot herself,
+and left us on one side, for she saw only Jesus crucified, and wished
+only to show the stages of His agony, and to leave marked on her pages,
+as on the veil of Veronica, the imprint of the Holy Face.
+
+Though she was of our time, for Catherine Emmerich died in 1824, this
+great work dates from the Middle Ages. It is a picture which seems to
+belong to the early schools of Franconia and Swabia. This woman was the
+sister of the Zeitbloms and the Grünewalds, she had their clear visions,
+their vivid colouring, their wild scent; but she seemed to bring back
+also, by her care for exact detail, by her precise indication of places,
+the old Flemish Masters, Roger Van der Weyden and Bouts; she united in
+herself two currents, springing one from Germany, the other from
+Flanders, and this painting brushed in with blood, and varnished with
+tears, was transposed by her into a prose style which has no relation to
+any known literature, of which we can only find by analogy the ancestry
+in the panels of the fifteenth century.
+
+Moreover, she was quite illiterate, had never read a book, nor seen a
+painting; she told quite plainly what she saw in her ecstasies.
+
+The pictures of the Passion unfolded themselves before her while she was
+bed-ridden, crushed by suffering, bleeding from the wounds of her
+stigmata; she mourned and wept, brought to nothingness by love and pity,
+before the torments of Christ.
+
+According to her words, which a scribe took down, Calvary rose, and the
+whole rascaldom of the soldiers rushed at the Saviour and spat on Him;
+frightful episodes took place where Jesus, chained to a pillar, twisting
+like a worm, under the lashes of the scourgers, then falling, looking
+with His failing eyes, at the fallen women who held Him by the hand, and
+turned away in disgust from His lacerated body, from His face covered
+with threads of blood as with a red net.
+
+Then slowly, patiently, only stopping to sob, and cry for mercy, she
+described the soldiers tearing away the stuff which had stuck to the
+wounds, the Virgin weeping; her face livid and her lips blue, she
+related the agony of His bearing His Cross, how He fell on His knees,
+grew weaker and more worn when death came.
+
+It was a frightful spectacle, told in its every particular, forming a
+sublime and frightful whole. The Redeemer was extended on a cross laid
+on the ground, one of the executioners placed a knee against His side,
+while another spread His fingers abroad, and a third hammered in a
+flat-headed nail as broad as a crown, and so long that the point came
+out behind the wood. And when the right hand was riveted the torturers
+saw that the left would not reach to the place they intended to pierce,
+therefore they attached a rope to the arm, pulled it with all their
+force, dislocated the shoulder, and the cries of the Saviour were heard
+above the blows of the hammer, His breast was seen heaving, while His
+body was anguished and furrowed by terrible shuddering.
+
+The same scene was repeated to fix His feet. They also did not reach the
+place which the executioners had marked. The body had to be tied and the
+arms bound so as not to tear the hands from the wood, and then it was
+necessary to hang on the legs so as to lengthen them as far as the
+bracket on which they were to rest; all at once the entire body yielded,
+the ribs moved under the skin; the shock was so fearful, that the
+executioners believed that the bones would start, and burst the flesh,
+wherefore they made haste to rest the left foot on the right, but their
+difficulties began again, the feet turned over, and it was necessary to
+bore them with an auger to fasten them.
+
+This continued till Jesus died, when Sister Emmerich fainted from
+terror, her stigmata bled afresh, and her wounded head rained blood.
+
+In this book the whole pack of Jewish hounds was seen in full cry, the
+imprecations and shouts of the crowd were heard, the Virgin was shown
+trembling with fever, the Magdalen, beyond herself, was terrible by her
+cries, and towering above this lamentable group, Christ appeared, pale
+and swollen, His legs entangled in His robe, when He mounted to Golgotha
+clenching His broken nails on the cross as it slipped from His grasp.
+
+This extraordinary visionary, Catherine Emmerich, also described the
+surroundings of these scenes, the landscapes of Judĉa, which she had
+never visited, but have since been recognized as exact; without knowing
+it, without willing it, this illiterate woman became an unique and
+powerful artist.
+
+"Wonderful visionary, wonderful painter," cried Durtal, "and also
+wonderful saint," he added, running over the life of this nun, placed as
+a preface to the book.
+
+She was born in 1774, in the diocese of Münster, the child of poor
+peasants. From her infancy she had conversations with the Virgin, and
+possessed the gift which also was given to Saint Sibylline of Pavia, Ida
+of Louvain, and more recently to Louise Lateau, of discerning, when she
+looked at, or touched them, objects which had been blessed from those
+which had not. She entered, as a novice, the Augustinian convent at
+Dulmen, made her profession when she was twenty-nine; her health failed
+and incessant pain tortured her, which she increased, for, like Blessed
+Lidwine, she obtained from Heaven permission to suffer for others, and
+succour the sick by taking their maladies. In 1811, under the government
+of Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, the convent was suppressed and
+the nuns dispersed. Infirm and penniless, she was carried to a room in
+an inn where she had to bear every sort of curiosity and insult. Christ
+added to her martyrdom in giving her the stigmata for which she asked;
+she could neither rise, nor walk, nor sit, could take no food but the
+juice of a cherry, but she was transported by long ecstasies. In these
+she visited Palestine, following the Saviour step by step, dictated with
+groans this fond book, then said with her death-rattle, "Let me die in
+shame with Jesus on the Cross," and died overwhelmed with joy, thanking
+Heaven for the life of suffering she had endured.
+
+"Ah, yes; I will take the 'Dolorous Passion!'" cried Durtal to himself.
+
+"Take the Gospels also," said the abbé, who came in meanwhile; "they are
+the heavenly phials from which you will draw the oil you need to dress
+your wounds."
+
+"It will be equally useful, and truly in accordance with the atmosphere
+of La Trappe, to be able to read in the abbey itself the works of Saint
+Bernard, but they consist of unmanageable folios, and the abridgments
+and extracts in volumes of a more convenient form are so ill-chosen,
+that I have never had the courage to buy them."
+
+"They have Saint Bernard at La Trappe, and will lend you the volumes if
+you ask them; but where are you from the spiritual point of view? How
+are you getting on?"
+
+"I am melancholy, badly prepared and resigned. I cannot tell if
+weariness has come from my turning always on the same round, like a
+circus horse, but at this moment I am not suffering. I am persuaded that
+this change of place is necessary, and that it would be useless to
+hesitate. All the same," he said, after a silence, "it is very odd that
+I am going to imprison myself in a monastery, and in truth, in spite of
+myself, that astonishes me."
+
+"I will admit," said the abbé, laughing, "that when I first met you at
+Tocane's, I never thought I was pointed out to direct you to a
+monastery; ah, you see I must evidently belong to that category of
+people whom I may call mere bridges, involuntary brokers of souls who
+are imposed on you for a certain end which you do not suspect, and of
+which even themselves are ignorant."
+
+"Rather, if any one were a mere bridge in this matter," answered Durtal,
+"it was Tocane, for it was he who brought us together, and we kick him
+away as soon as he has finished his unconscious task; it was evidently
+designed that we should know each other."
+
+"That is true," said the abbé, with a smile; "now I do not suppose I
+shall see you again before you start, for I go to-morrow to Mâcon, where
+I shall stay five days, time to see my nephews and to sign some law
+papers: at any rate keep up your courage, and do not forget to send me
+news of yourself. Write to me without much delay, that I may find your
+letter when I return to Paris."
+
+And as Durtal thanked him for his constant kindness, he took his hand
+and held it in his own.
+
+"Say nothing about that," he said; "you have only to thank Him, whose
+fatherly impatience has broken the obstinate slumber of your Faith; you
+owe thanks to God only.
+
+"Thank Him in getting rid of your nature as soon as possible, and
+leaving the house of your conscience empty for Him. The more you die to
+yourself the better will He live in you. Prayer is the most powerful
+ascetic means by which you can renounce yourself, empty yourself and
+render yourself humble in this matter; pray therefore without ceasing at
+La Trappe. Implore our Lady especially, for like myrrh which consumes
+the proud flesh of wounds, she heals the ulcers of the soul; I on my
+side will pray for you as best I can; you can thus in your weakness
+lean, so as not to fall, on that firm and protecting pillar of prayer of
+which Saint Teresa speaks. Once again, a safe journey to you; we shall
+meet soon again, my son, good-bye."
+
+Durtal remained much disturbed. "It is most tiresome," he thought, "that
+this priest is leaving Paris before me, for indeed if I have need of
+spiritual help or counsel, to whom shall I go? It is clearly written
+that I must end as I have begun, alone, but ... but ... solitude under
+these conditions is alarming. I am no spoilt child, whatever the abbé
+may say."
+
+Next morning Durtal awoke ill; furious neuralgia bored his temples like
+a gimlet; he tried to stop it with antipyrine, but this medicine in a
+large dose put his stomach out of order without abating the strokes of
+the machine which penetrated his skull. He wandered about his rooms,
+changing from one seat to another, coiling himself up in an arm-chair,
+getting up to lie down again, jumping from his bed in fits of sickness,
+upsetting his furniture from time to time.
+
+He could assign no precise cause for this attack; he had slept his fill,
+and had not exceeded in any way the night before.
+
+He thought, with his head in his hands, "There are still two days
+counting to-day before I leave Paris, and very fit I am for it! I shall
+not be in a state to travel by train, and if I travel, the food at La
+Trappe will finish me."
+
+He had a minute's comfort from the idea that through no fault of his own
+he might perhaps avoid his painful duty, and remain at home; but the
+reaction was immediate; he understood that if he did not go, he was
+lost; the vacillation of his soul had become chronic, the crisis of
+disgust of self, the acute regret of an effort consented to with pain,
+and suddenly missed, the certainty that it would only be postponed for a
+time, that he would have to pass again through alternations of revolt
+and terror, and begin again to fight with himself for conviction.
+
+"Admitting that I am not in a state to travel, I have always the
+resource of making my confession to the abbé when he returns, and of
+communicating in Paris," he thought, but he shook his head, saying to
+himself once more that he felt and knew that was not his duty. "But
+then," he said to God: "since Thou dost implant this idea in me so
+violently that I cannot even discuss it, in spite of its entire common
+sense--for after all it is not necessary to immure myself in a Trappist
+monastery in order to reconcile myself to Thee--then let me go!"
+
+And he spoke to God quietly.
+
+"My soul is an evil place, sordid and infamous; till now it has loved
+only perverse ways; it has exacted from my wretched body the tithe of
+illicit pleasures and unholy joys, it is worth little, it is worth
+nothing, and yet down there near Thee, if Thou wilt succour me, I think
+that I shall subdue it, but if my body be sick, I cannot force it to
+obey me; this is worse than all, I am disarmed if Thou do not come to my
+aid.
+
+"Take count of this, O Lord; I know by experience that when I am
+ill-fed, I have neuralgia; humanly, logically speaking, I am certain to
+be horribly ill at Notre Dame de l'Atre; nevertheless, if I can get
+about at all, the day after to-morrow, I will go all the same.
+
+"In default of love, this is the sole proof I can give that I truly
+desire Thee, that truly I hope and believe in Thee, but then, O Lord,
+aid me."
+
+He added sadly, "Ah! indeed I am no Lidwine or Catherine Emmerich, who
+when Thou didst strike them cried out, More, more!--Thou dost scarce
+touch me, and I protest; but what wouldest Thou? Thou dost know better
+than I; physical suffering breaks me down, drives me to despair."
+
+He went to sleep at last to kill the day in bed; slumbering to wake
+again suddenly from frightful nightmares.
+
+The next day his head seemed empty and his heart feeble, but his
+neuralgia was less violent. He rose, saying to himself that he must eat,
+though he was not hungry, for fear his pain should return. He went out
+and wandered in the Luxembourg, saying to himself that he must arrange
+his time, that after breakfast he would visit St. Severin, then he would
+go home and pack, and afterwards finish the day at Notre Dame des
+Victoires.
+
+The walk did him good, his head was lighter, and his heart free. He went
+into a restaurant, where because of the early hour nothing was ready; he
+spent the time before a newspaper, on a bench. How often he had held
+papers thus without reading them, how many evenings he had waited in
+cafés with his nose in an article, thinking of other matters, at those
+times especially when he was striving with his vices; when Florence
+appeared to him, still keeping the clear smile of a little girl on her
+way to school, her eyes cast down, her hands in the pockets of her
+apron.
+
+Suddenly the child changed into a ghoul who whirled round him wildly,
+and made him silently understand the horror of his desires....
+
+All that was now far distant; almost in one day the charm was broken,
+without any real strife or true effort, without inward struggles; he had
+abstained from seeing her, and now when she roused his memory again she
+was no more in fact than a recollection odious and sweet.
+
+"After all," thought Durtal, as he cut up his beefsteak, "I wonder what
+she thinks of me; she must certainly suppose me dead or lost; happily I
+have never met her, and she does not know my address.
+
+"Well," he went on, "there is no use in stirring the mud, it will be
+time to cleanse it when I am at La Trappe," and he shuddered, for the
+idea of the confessor again took root in him, and he was obliged to tell
+himself for the twentieth time that the expected never happens, and to
+declare that he should find some good fellow of a monk who would listen
+to him; then he was afraid again, putting things at their worst, and
+fancying himself turned out, like a mangy dog.
+
+He finished his breakfast, and went to St. Severin; there the crisis
+declared itself, the overcharged soul gave way, struck down by a
+congestion of sadness.
+
+He lay on a chair in such a state of depression that he could think no
+more, he remained inert without the power of suffering, till little by
+little the soul, recovered from its torpor, came to itself in a flood of
+tears.
+
+These tears gave him solace; he wept over his lot, thought himself so
+unhappy, so worthy of pity, that he hoped still more for help, yet he
+dare not address himself to Christ, whom he thought less accessible, but
+he spoke in low tones to the Virgin, murmuring that prayer in which
+Saint Bernard reminds the Mother of Christ that never in human memory
+was it heard that she abandoned any of those who sought her aid.
+
+He left St. Severin, consoled and more resolved, and, when once at home,
+was taken up with preparations for departure. Afraid that he would find
+nothing he wanted down there, he determined to stuff his portmanteau
+full; he crammed into the corners sugar, packets of chocolate, that he
+might try to deceive if needful the anguish of a fasting stomach, took
+towels thinking there would be few at La Trappe, prepared a stock of
+tobacco and matches; then besides books, paper, pencils, ink, packets of
+antipyrine, a phial of laudanum, which he wrapped in handkerchiefs and
+wedged into his slippers.
+
+When he had strapped his portmanteau, he said to himself, looking at the
+clock: "To-morrow at this time I shall be jolting in a cab, and my
+seclusion will be near at hand; never mind, I shall do well, in
+anticipation of bodily ailment, to ask for the confessor as soon as I
+get there, and suppose that turns out badly, I shall have time to make
+arrangements and take the train back at once.
+
+"All the same this will not prevent my having a wretched moment this
+evening when I enter Notre Dame des Victoires," but his anxieties and
+emotions vanished when the hour of Benediction came. He was seized by
+the giddy infection of the church, and he wrapped, steeped, and lost
+himself in the prayer which arose from all those souls, in the chant
+which went up from every mouth, and when the monstrance was brought
+forward to make its sign in the air, he felt a vast peace descend upon
+him.
+
+At evening as he undressed he sighed: "To-morrow I shall lie down in a
+cell, amazing when I think of it! I should have considered anyone mad,
+who, a few years ago, had prophesied that I should take refuge in a
+Trappist monastery; yet now I am going there of my own accord, and yet
+no, I am going driven by an unknown power, I am going as a whipped cur.
+
+"After all, what a symptom of the time it is! Society must indeed be
+unclean, if God has no longer the right to be hard, and is reduced to
+pick up what He finds, and to content Himself with gathering to Himself
+people like me!"
+
+
+
+
+SECOND PART.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Durtal awoke, gay and brisk, astonished at not hearing himself groan,
+when the moment had come in which he should set off for La Trappe; he
+was wonderfully reassured. He tried to recollect himself, and to pray,
+but he felt his thoughts more scattered and wandering than usual; he
+remained indifferent and unmoved. Surprised at this result, he tried to
+examine himself, and touched the void; he was slack that morning, in one
+of those sudden dispositions in which a man becomes a child again,
+incapable of attention, in which the wrong side of things disappears,
+and everything distracts.
+
+He dressed hastily, got into a cab, was too early at the station; and
+there experienced a perfectly childish attack of vanity. Looking at the
+people who hurried through the waiting rooms, thronged the ticket
+offices, or resignedly followed their luggage, he was not far from
+admiring himself. "If these travellers who think only of their pleasures
+or their business, knew where I am going," he thought.
+
+Then he reproached himself for the stupidity of these reflections, and
+as soon as he was settled in his compartment, in which he chanced to be
+alone, he lighted a cigarette, saying to himself, "Let us profit at
+least by the time there is still for smoking," and he began to wander,
+to dream about the position of the monastery, and rove about the
+neighbourhood of La Trappe.
+
+He remembered that a review had recently estimated the number of nuns
+and monks in France at two hundred thousand.
+
+"Two hundred thousand persons, who, in such an epoch, have understood
+the wickedness of the struggle for life, the filth of sexual relations,
+the horror of lyings-in, those are they who save the honour of the
+country," he thought.
+
+Then, passing at a bound from cloistered souls to the treatises he had
+put in his portmanteau, he went on: "It is, all the same, curious how
+completely the temperament of French art rebels against Mysticism!
+
+"All exalted writers are foreigners. Saint Denys the Areopagite was a
+Greek; Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Sister Emmerich, were Germans; Ruysbröck
+came from Flanders; Saint Teresa, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Marie
+d'Agreda, were Spaniards; Father Faber was English; Saint Bonaventure,
+Angela of Foligno, Magdalen of Pazzi, Catherine of Genoa, Jacopo de
+Voragine, were Italians....
+
+"Ah!" he said, struck by the last name he had cited, "I ought to have
+brought his Golden Legend in my bag; how was it I did not remember it,
+for that book is, in fact, the very crowning work of the Middle Ages,
+the stimulant for hours rendered languid by the prolonged uneasiness of
+fasting, the simple aid of pious vigils? For the most incredulous souls
+of our time, the Golden Legend at least still seems like one of those
+pure parchments, on which simple illuminators painted the faces of
+saints with gum water, or white of egg on golden backgrounds. Jacopo de
+Voragine is the Jehan Fouquet, the André Beaunevue, of literary
+miniature, of mystic prose!
+
+"It is quite absurd to have forgotten that book, for it would have made
+me pass precious days, like those of old, in La Trappe.
+
+"Yes, it is strange," he thought, returning on his thoughts, and coming
+back to his first idea; "France can count religious authors, more or
+less celebrated, but very few mystical writers, properly so-called, and
+it is just the same also in painting. The true Early Masters are
+Flemish, German or Italian, none are French, for our Burgundian School
+descended from the Flemish.
+
+"No, it cannot be denied, the genius of our race cannot easily follow
+and explain how God acts when He works in the central depths of the
+soul, which is the ovary of thought, the very source of conception; it
+is refractory at explaining, by the expressive power of words, the crash
+or the silence of grace; bursting forth in the domain which is wasted by
+sin, it is inapt at extracting from that secret world, works of
+psychology like those of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, works
+of art, like those of Voragine or Sister Emmerich.
+
+"Besides that our field is scarcely arable, and our soil harsh, where
+shall we now find the labourer who sows and harrows it, who prepares not
+even a mystical harvest, but even any spiritual fruit, capable of
+assuaging the hunger of the few who stray and are lost, and fall from
+inanition in the icy desert of our time?
+
+"He who should be the cultivator of that land, the farmer of souls, the
+priest, has not strength to clear the ground.
+
+"The seminary has made him arbitrary and puerile, life outside has made
+him lukewarm. Therefore it seems that God has withdrawn Himself from
+him, and the proof of this is that He has taken away all ability from
+the priesthood. There are no priests now who have talent, either in the
+pulpit or in books; the laity have inherited that grace which was so
+common in the Church of the Middle Ages. Another example proves it still
+more, priests make so few conversions. In these days the being who
+pleases Heaven does without them, the Saviour Himself strikes him down,
+handles him, works directly on him.
+
+"The ignorance of the clergy, their want of education, their
+unintelligence of their surroundings, their dislike for Mysticism, their
+incomprehension of art, have taken away all their influence on the
+aristocracy of souls. Their only action is now on the childish brains of
+bigots and pretenders; and this is no doubt providential; it is better
+so, for if the priest became the master, if he succeeded in raising and
+vivifying the wearisome tribe he manages, it would be like a waterspout
+of clerical stupidity beating down on a country, would be the end of all
+literature and all art in France.
+
+"To save the Church there remains the monk, whom the priest detests, for
+the life of the cloister is a constant reproach to his own existence,"
+continued Durtal; "always supposing that my illusions are not again
+destroyed when I see a monastery ... but no, I am lucky; I have
+discovered in Paris one of those few abbés who is neither indifferent
+nor a pedant; why should I not, in an abbey, come into contact with
+authentic monks?"
+
+He lighted a cigarette, and looked at the landscape from the carriage
+window; the train was passing through fields in front of which the
+telegraph wires danced in puffs of steam; the landscape was flat and
+uninteresting. Durtal fell back sulkily in his corner.
+
+"The arrival at the convent disturbs me," he murmured; "since there are
+no useless words to proffer, I shall confine myself to giving his letter
+to the Father Guestmaster; ah! and then all will arrange itself."
+
+He felt, in fact, a perfect calm, and was astonished at not finding in
+himself any disgust or fear, at being almost in high spirits: "Well, my
+good priest was right in declaring that I was creating monsters in
+advance;" and he thought of the Abbé Gévresin, was surprised that long
+as he had visited him, he knew nothing whatever of his antecedents, that
+he was no more intimate with him than on the very first day; "In fact,
+it only rested with me to question him discreetly, but the idea never
+entered my head: it is true that our intercourse has been strictly
+limited to matters of religion and art; this perpetual reserve does not
+create very thrilling friendships, but it institutes a sort of Jansenism
+of the affections which is not without charm.
+
+"In any case that ecclesiastic is a holy man; he has not even that
+manner at once caressing and reserved of other priests. Apart from
+certain gestures, his habit of rolling his arms in his cincture, of
+wrapping his hands in his sleeves, of liking to walk backwards when in
+conversation; apart from his innocent mania of interlarding his phrases
+with Latin, he does not recall either the attitude or the unfashionable
+speech of his brethren. He loves mysticism and plain song; he is
+exceptional, and therefore he must have been also carefully chosen for
+me in heaven.
+
+"Ah well! we must be getting near," he sighed, looking at his watch, "I
+am beginning to feel hungry; come, that is all right, we shall be at
+Saint Landry in a quarter of an hour."
+
+He strummed on the windows of the carriage, saw the fields and woods fly
+past, smoked a cigarette or two, took his bag from the rack, at last
+arrived at the station and got out.
+
+Close to the tiny station he recognized the inn of which the abbé had
+told him. He found a good woman in the kitchen who said, "All right,
+sir, sit down, they will put the horse to while you breakfast."
+
+He fed himself on uneatable things, they brought him a calf's head
+forgotten in a tub, some cutlets that were high, vegetables blackened
+with gravy from the stove.
+
+In his present mood he was amused at this infamous meal, fell back upon
+a thin wine which rasped his throat, and resignedly drank coffee which
+left a sediment of peat at the bottom of the cup.
+
+Then he climbed into a jolting car driven by a young man, and the horse
+went off at a smart pace through the village and into the country.
+
+On the way he asked the driver for some information about La Trappe, but
+the peasant knew nothing. "I often go there," he said, "but never enter,
+the carriage stays at the gate, so you see I can tell you nothing."
+
+They went for an hour rapidly through the lanes, and the peasant saluted
+a roadmaker with his whip, and said to Durtal,
+
+"They say that the eminets eat their bellies."
+
+And as Durtal asked what he meant,
+
+"They are idle dogs, they lie all the summer on their bellies in the
+shade."
+
+And he said no more.
+
+Durtal thought of nothing; he digested and smoked, dizzy with the
+rumbling of the carriage.
+
+At the end of another hour they came into the heart of the forest.
+
+"Are we near?"
+
+"Oh, not yet!"
+
+"Can we see La Trappe from a distance?"
+
+"Oh no, you must have your nose just over it to see it, it is quite in a
+bottom, at the end of a lane, like that," said the peasant, pointing to
+a grassy lane into which they turned.
+
+"There is a fellow coming from the place," he said, pointing out a
+vagabond, who was crossing the copse at a great pace.
+
+And he explained to Durtal that every beggar had a right to food and
+even to lodging at La Trappe; they gave them the ordinary fare of the
+community in a room close to the brother porter's lodge, but did not let
+them into the convent.
+
+When Durtal asked him the opinion which the villagers round about had of
+the monks, the peasant was evidently afraid of compromising himself, for
+he answered,
+
+"Some say nothing about them."
+
+Durtal began to be rather weary, when suddenly as they turned out of a
+lane, he saw an immense building below him.
+
+"There is La Trappe!" said the peasant, gathering his reins for the
+descent.
+
+From the height where he was, Durtal looked over the roofs, and saw a
+large garden, with thickets, and in front of them a formidable crucifix.
+
+Then the vision disappeared, the carriage again went through the wood,
+descending by zig-zag roads where the foliage intercepted the view.
+
+They came at last, by long circuits, to an open place, at the end of
+which rose a wall with a large gate in the middle. The carriage stopped.
+
+"You have only to ring," said the peasant, showing Durtal an iron chain
+along the wall; and he added,
+
+"Shall I come for you again to-morrow?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you remain here?" and the peasant looked at him with astonishment,
+turned about, and drove up the hill.
+
+Durtal remained as one crushed, his portmanteau at his feet, before the
+door; his heart beat violently; all his assurance, all his enthusiasm,
+had vanished, and he stammered: "What will happen to me within?"
+
+And with a swift feeling of dread, there passed before him the terrible
+life of the Trappists; the body ill-nourished, exhausted from want of
+sleep, prostrate for hours on the pavement; the soul trembling, squeezed
+like a sponge in the hand, drilled, examined, ransacked even to its
+smallest folds; and at the end of its failure of an existence, thrown
+like a wreck against this rude rock, into the silence of a prison, and
+the dreadful stillness of the tomb!
+
+"My God, my God, have pity upon me!" said he, as he wiped his brow.
+
+Mechanically he looked around, as if he expected some help; the roads
+were deserted and the woods were empty; no sound was heard in the
+country, or in the monastery.
+
+"At any rate I must make up my mind to ring;" and, his limbs sinking
+under him, he pulled the chain.
+
+The sound of the bell, hard, rusty, grumbling, sounded on the other side
+of the wall.
+
+"Get up and don't be a fool," he said to himself, as he heard the
+clatter of a pair of sabots behind the door.
+
+This opened, and a very old monk, clad in the brown cloth of the
+Capuchins, looked at him inquiringly.
+
+"I come to make a retreat, and I wish to see Father Etienne."
+
+The monk bowed, took up the portmanteau, and made a sign to Durtal to
+follow him. He went with bent head and short steps across an orchard.
+They reached a grating, passed on the right of the vast building a sort
+of dilapidated chateau, flanked by two wings advancing on a court.
+
+The brother entered the wing close to the grating. Durtal followed him
+along a corridor into which several grey doors opened; on one of these
+he read the word "Auditorium." The Trappist stopped before it, lifted
+the wooden latch, ushered Durtal into the room, and after some minutes
+he heard repeated calls on the bell.
+
+Durtal sat down and looked at this gloomy chamber, for the window was
+half closed by shutters. There was little furniture; the most important
+a dining-table with an old cover; in the corner, a "prie-Dieu" above
+which was nailed a figure of Saint Antony of Padua rocking the infant
+Jesus in his arms; a large crucifix on the other wall, and here and
+there were placed two high-backed chairs and four ordinary chairs.
+
+Durtal took from his pocket-book the letter of introduction to the
+father. "What sort of reception will he give me?" he asked himself; "he
+at any rate can speak; well, we shall soon see," he said, as he heard
+steps.
+
+A monk in white with a black scapular whose two ends fell, one on his
+shoulders, the other on his breast, appeared; he was young and smiling.
+
+He read the letter, then he took Durtal's hand, and led him in silent
+astonishment across the court to the other wing of the building, opened
+a door, dipped his finger in a holy-water stoup, and offered it to him.
+
+They were in a chapel. The monk invited Durtal by a sign to kneel on a
+step before the altar, and he prayed in a low voice; he then rose,
+returned slowly to the threshold, offered Durtal holy water again, still
+without opening his lips, and leading him by the hand they went the way
+they came to the Auditorium.
+
+There, he inquired after the health of the Abbé Gévresin, seized the
+portmanteau, and mounted an immense staircase falling into ruin. At the
+top of this staircase, which had only one story, there extended a vast
+landing bounded at each of its extremities by a door.
+
+Father Etienne entered that on the right, crossed a broad vestibule, and
+led Durtal into a room, which a ticket printed in large letters placed
+under the invocation of St. Benedict, and said, "I am sorry, sir, to be
+only able to put at your disposal this room, which is not very
+comfortable."
+
+"But it will do very well," said Durtal, "and the view is charming," he
+continued, approaching the window.
+
+"At least you will be in good air," said the monk, opening the casement.
+
+Below stretched the orchard through which Durtal had passed under the
+conduct of the brother porter. An enclosure full of apple trees stunted
+and clipped, silvered by lichens, and gilt by moss; then beyond the
+monastery, and above the walls, rose fields of clover intersected by a
+great white road, extending to the horizon, which was notched by the
+foliage of trees.
+
+"You will see, sir," Father Etienne went on, "if you need anything in
+this cell, and tell me quite simply, will you not? for otherwise we
+should heap up regret for both of us, for you who have only to ask for
+what might be useful to you, for me who should only discover it later
+and be sorry for my forgetfulness."
+
+Durtal looked at him reassured by this frank greeting; he was a young
+priest, about thirty years old. His face bright, and finely cut, was
+streaked with red fibres on the cheeks; this monk wore a beard, and
+round his shaven head was a crown of brown hair. He spoke somewhat
+rapidly, and smiled, with his hands pushed into the large leathern belt
+round his waist. "I will come back directly, for I have some important
+work to finish," he said; "try to make yourself at home as much as
+possible, and if you have time glance over the rule which you have to
+follow in this monastery--it is written on one of these cards on the
+table; we will talk about it after you have mastered it, if you like."
+
+And he left Durtal alone.
+
+He soon made an inventory of the room; it was very high and extremely
+narrow like a gun-barrel, the door was at one end, the window at the
+other.
+
+At the bottom, in a corner, near the casement, was a little iron bed,
+and a small round table in chestnut wood. At the foot of the bed which
+stood along the wall was a prie-Dieu in faded rep, upon which was a
+crucifix, and a branch of dried fir below it; on the same side was a
+table of white wood covered with a towel, on which were placed an ewer,
+a basin, and a glass. On the opposite wall was a wardrobe, and by the
+fireplace, on the mantelpiece of which a crucifix was placed, was a
+table opposite the bed near the window; three straw chairs completed the
+furniture of this room. "I shall never have water enough to wash in,"
+thought Durtal, gauging the miniature jug, which held about a pint;
+"since Father Etienne shows himself so obliging, I must ask him for a
+larger ration." He unpacked his portmanteau, undressed, put on flannel
+instead of his starched shirt, arranged his toilet things on the
+washing-stand, folded his linen in the wardrobe; then sat down, looked
+around the cell, and thought it sufficiently comfortable, and above all
+very clean. He then went towards the table on which were laid a ream of
+ruled paper, an inkstand, and some pens; he was grateful for this
+attention of the monk, who knew no doubt by the Abbé Gévresin's letter
+that his business was writing, opened two volumes bound in leather and
+shut them again. The one was "The Introduction to the Devout Life," by
+Saint Francis de Sales, the other was "Manresa," or "The Spiritual
+Exercises" of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and he arranged his own books on
+the table.
+
+Then he took up, just as it came, one of the cards spread on the table
+and read:--
+
+     "Exercises of the Community for ordinary days--from Easter to the
+     Invention of the Cross in September.
+
+          Rise. 2.
+          Prime and Mass.  5.15.
+          Work after the Chapter.
+          End of work and leisure time.  9.
+          Sext.  11.
+          Angelus and Dinner.  11.30.
+          Siesta after Dinner.
+          End of Siesta.  1.30.
+          None and work, five minutes after waking.
+          End of work and leisure.  4.30.
+          Vespers followed by prayer.  5.15.
+          Supper and leisure.  6.
+          Compline.  7.25.
+          Retire to rest.  8."
+
+He turned the card, and on the other side was a new horary, entitled:--
+
+     "Winter Exercises, from the Invention of the Cross in September to
+     Easter."
+
+The hour of rising was the same, but bed-time was an hour earlier;
+dinner was changed from 11.30 to 2; siesta and supper at 6 o'clock were
+suppressed; the canonical hours were the same, except vespers and
+compline, which were changed from 5.15 and 7.25 to 4.30 and 6.15.
+
+"It is not pleasant to drag oneself from bed in the middle of the
+night," sighed Durtal, "but I am inclined to think that the Retreatants
+are not subject to this rule of wakefulness," and he took up another
+card. "This must be the one intended for me," he said, reading the head
+of the card:--
+
+Rules of Retreat from Easter to the Invention of the Cross in September.
+
+Let us look at these rules rather more closely.
+
+He examined the two tables, brought together, one for the morning, and
+one for the evening.
+
+          MORNING.
+
+          4.     Rise at the Angelus bell.
+          4.30.  Prayer and Meditation.
+          5.15.   Prime and Mass.
+          6-7.    Examination of Conscience.
+          7.      Breakfast.
+          7.30.   Way of the Cross.
+          8.      Sext and None.
+          8.30.   Second Meditation.
+          9.      Spiritual Reading.
+          11.     Adoration and Examination. Tierce.
+          11.30.  Angelus. Dinner. Recreation.
+          12.15.  Siesta. Absolute Silence.
+
+
+          EVENING.
+
+          1.30.   End of Siesta. Rosary.
+          2.      Vespers and Compline.
+          3.      Third Meditation.
+          3.15.   Spiritual Reading.
+          4.15.   Matins and Lauds.
+          5.15.   Reflections. Choir Vespers.
+          5.30.   Examination and Prayer.
+          6.      Supper and Recreation.
+          7.      Litanies. Absolute Silence.
+          7.15.   Assist at Compline.
+          7.30.   Salve Regina. Angelus.
+          7.45.   Private Examination. Retire to rest.
+
+"This at any rate is more practical--four o'clock in the morning is an
+almost possible hour, but I do not understand it, the canonical hours on
+this tablet do not agree with those of the monks, and then why these
+double Vespers and Compline? Lastly, these little points in which you
+are invited to meditate so many minutes, to read so many more, scarcely
+suit me. My mind is scarcely malleable enough to run in those
+channels--it is true that after all I am free to do as I please, for no
+one can verify what tricks I may play, can know, for instance, if I
+meditate....
+
+"Ah, here is again a regulation at the back," he went on, as he turned
+the card, "the regulation for September, I need not trouble myself about
+it, it differs, moreover, little from the other; but here is a
+postscript which concerns both horaries."
+
+     NOTE.
+
+     1. Those who are not bound to say the Breviary will say the Little
+     Office of the Blessed Virgin.
+
+     2. The Retreatants are requested to make their Confessions at an
+     early date, in order to have their mind more free for meditation.
+
+     3. After each meditation an analogous chapter of the Imitation must
+     be read.
+
+     4. The best time for confessions and the Way of the Cross is from
+     6-9 in the morning, 2-5 in the afternoon, and in summer from 9 in
+     the morning till 5 in the afternoon.
+
+     5. To read the table of notices.
+
+     6. It is well to be punctual at meals to keep no one waiting.
+
+     7. The Father Guestmaster alone is charged with providing for the
+     wants of guests.
+
+     8. Guests may ask for books for the retreat, if they have none
+     themselves.
+
+Confession! He saw this word only in the whole series of rules. He must
+at once have recourse to it. He felt a cold shiver down his back; and
+knew that he must speak to Father Etienne about it as soon as he
+returned.
+
+He had not long to wrestle with himself, for the monk entered almost at
+once and said,
+
+"Have you noticed anything you need, and the presence of which may be
+useful to you?"
+
+"No, Father; yet if you could let me have a little more water."
+
+"Nothing is easier; I will send you up a large pitcher every morning."
+
+"Thank you ... see, I have been studying the rules."
+
+"I will at once put you at ease," said the monk. "You are compelled to
+nothing but the strictest punctuality. You must follow the canonical
+offices to the letter. As to the exercises marked on the card, they are
+not of obligation; they may be useful, as they are laid down, for people
+who are very young and devoid of all initiative, but, as I think at
+least, they somewhat hamper others, and as a general rule we do not
+trouble the retreatants here, we let solitude act on them; it belongs to
+yourself to discriminate and distinguish the best mode of occupying your
+time holily. Therefore I will not impose on you any of the reading laid
+down on this card, and only take leave to get you to say the Little
+Office of the Blessed Virgin. Have you it?"
+
+"Here it is," said Durtal, holding out a bound book.
+
+"Your volume is charming," said Father Etienne, as he turned over the
+pages exquisitely printed in red and black. He paused at one of them,
+and read aloud the third lesson of Matins.
+
+"Is it not fine?" he cried. A sudden joy sprang up in his face; his eyes
+grew bright, his hands trembled on the cover. "Yes," he said, closing
+it, "read this office, here especially, for you know our true patroness,
+the true Abbot of the Trappists, is the Blessed Virgin!"
+
+After a silence he continued: "I have fixed a week as the duration of
+your retreat, in the letter I sent to the Abbé Gévresin, but I need not
+say that if you are not too weary here, you can stay as long as seems
+good to you."
+
+"I hope to be able to prolong my stay among you, but this must depend
+upon the way in which my body stands the struggle; my stomach is
+somewhat weak, and I am not without some fear; I shall, therefore, be
+much obliged to you if you will let me see the confessor as soon as
+possible."
+
+"Good; you shall see him to-morrow. I will tell you the time this
+evening, after compline. As for the food, if you think it insufficient,
+I will see that you have an extra egg, but there ceases the discretion I
+can exercise, for the rule is precise, no fish, no flesh--vegetables,
+and I am bound to admit they are not first rate.
+
+"But you shall judge, and, indeed, as it is just upon supper-time, I
+will show you the room where you will dine in company with M. Bruno."
+
+And as they descended the staircase, the monk went on: "M. Bruno is a
+person who has renounced the world, and, without having taken the vows,
+lives enclosed. He is what our rule calls an oblate, he is a holy and
+learned man, whom you will certainly like; you can talk with him during
+the meal."
+
+"Ah!" said Durtal, "and before and after I must keep silence?"
+
+"Yes, unless you have anything to ask, in which case I shall be always
+at your service, ready to answer you. As for that question of silence,
+as for those of the hours of rising and going to bed, and the offices,
+the rule allows no modification, it must be observed to the letter."
+
+"Good," said Durtal, a little taken aback by the decided tone of the
+Father, "but I saw on my card a note directing me to consult a table of
+regulations, and I have not that table."
+
+"It hangs on the wall of the staircase, near your room; you can read it
+when your head is rested to-morrow. Will you go in?" he said, opening a
+door in the lower corridor, just opposite that of the auditorium.
+
+Durtal bowed to an old gentleman who came to meet him; the monk
+introduced them and vanished.
+
+The dishes were on the table, two poached eggs, a bowl of rice, another
+of French beans, and a pot of honey.
+
+M. Bruno said grace, and proceeded to help Durtal.
+
+He gave him an egg.
+
+"This is a poor supper for a Parisian," he said, with a smile.
+
+"Ah, as long as there is an egg and wine it is bearable. I was afraid, I
+confess, that my only drink would be cold water."
+
+They talked as friends.
+
+The man was pleasant, and distinguished, with ascetic features, but with
+a bright smile, lighting up a grave face, yellow and wrinkled.
+
+He lent himself with perfect good grace to Durtal's inquiries, and told
+him, that after a tempestuous life, he felt that Grace had touched him,
+and he had retired from the world to expiate by years of austerities and
+silence his own sins and those of others.
+
+"And you have never grown tired of being here?"
+
+"Never, during the five years that I have spent in this cloister, time,
+cut up as it is at La Trappe, seems short."
+
+"You are present at all the exercises of the Community?"
+
+"Yes; I only replace manual labour by meditation in my cell; my position
+as oblate, however, dispenses me, if I so wish, from getting up at two
+o'clock to follow the night office, but it is a great joy to me to
+recite the magnificent Benedictine Psalter before daybreak--but you are
+listening to me, and eat nothing. Let me give you a little more rice."
+
+"No, thank you, but I will take, if you will allow me, a spoonful of
+honey.
+
+"The food is not bad," he said, "but I do not quite understand the same
+strange and identical taste in all the dishes; it smells, how shall I
+express it? like burnt fat or suet."
+
+"That is the warm oil with which the vegetables are dressed, you will
+soon grow accustomed to it, in a couple of days you will cease to notice
+it."
+
+"But in what consists, precisely, the part of an oblate?"
+
+"His life is less austere, and more contemplative than that of a monk;
+he may travel if he will, and though he is not bound by vows, he shares
+in all the spiritual advantages of the order.
+
+"In old times the rule admitted those whom it styled 'familiars.'
+
+"Those were oblates who received the tonsure, wore a distinct costume,
+and pronounced the three greater vows; they led in fact a mitigated
+life, half layman, half monk. This rule, which still exists among the
+true Benedictines, has disappeared among the Trappists since the year
+1293, the date at which it was suppressed by the Chapter General.
+
+"At the present time, in the Cistercian abbeys are only the fathers, the
+lay brothers, the oblates, when there are any, and the peasants employed
+in field labour."
+
+"The lay brothers, I suppose, are those whose heads are completely
+shaven, and who are clothed in a brown habit, like the monk who opened
+the door to me?"
+
+"Yes; they do not sing office, and have only manual tasks."
+
+"By the way, the rule for retreat which I read in my room does not seem
+clear. As far as I recall it, it doubles certain offices, places Matins
+at four in the afternoon, and Vespers at two; in any case the horary is
+not the same as that of the Trappists; how am I to understand and
+reconcile them?"
+
+"You have only to take into consideration the exercises set out on your
+card; Father Etienne must, I think, have said so; that mould was only
+made for people who cannot occupy and guide themselves. That explains to
+you how, to prevent them from becoming idle, the priests' breviary has
+been in some degree taken to pieces, and their time has been
+distributed in small slices, so that, for instance, they may be obliged
+to recite the psalms for Matins at hours when there is no psalm."
+
+Dinner was over; M. Bruno said grace, and said to Durtal,
+
+"You have twenty minutes free from now to Compline; you can make
+acquaintance with the garden and woods." He bowed politely and went out.
+
+"I can smoke a cigarette," thought Durtal, when he was alone. He took
+his hat and left the room. Night was coming on. He passed through the
+great court, skirted a small building surmounted by a long
+chimney-stack, discovered by the smell that it was a chocolate factory,
+and entered an avenue of trees.
+
+The sky was so obscure that he could scarcely see the group of trees he
+entered, and not seeing anyone he rolled his cigarettes, and smoked them
+slowly, with enjoyment, consulting his watch from time to time by his
+cigar lights.
+
+He was astonished at the silence of the monastery; not a sound, however
+hushed, however distant, save now and then a gentle rustle of boughs; he
+went to the side whence the noise came, and saw a piece of water, on
+which a swan was sailing, which came towards him.
+
+He saw its white plumage oscillate against the darkness which it
+displaced with a splash, when a bell sounded with slow strokes; "Ah,"
+said he, looking again at his watch, "that is the hour of Compline."
+
+He went to the chapel, which was still empty; and he took occasion of
+the solitude to examine it at his ease.
+
+It was in the form of a truncated cross, a cross without a foot, rounded
+at the summit, holding out two square arms, with a door at either end.
+
+The upper part of the cross, below a cupola painted blue, formed a
+little circular apse, round which was a circle of stalls placed back
+against the wall; in the middle rose a great altar of white marble,
+surmounted by wooden chandeliers, flanked on the left and right by
+candelabra also of wood, placed on marble shafts.
+
+The lower part of the altar was hollow, and closed in front by a glass,
+behind which appeared a shrine in Gothic style, which reflected in its
+copper gilt mirror the light of the lamps.
+
+The apse opened into a large porch, with three steps in front, on the
+arms of the cross, which were prolonged into a kind of vestibule serving
+at once as nave and side aisles to this stumpy church.
+
+The hollowed arms, at their extremities near the doors, held two very
+small chapels set back in niches painted blue, like the cupola,
+containing above two stone altars without ornament, two mediocre
+statues, one of Saint Joseph, the other of Christ.
+
+Lastly, a fourth altar, dedicated to the Virgin, was situated in this
+vestibule opposite the steps leading to the apse, opposite therefore to
+the high altar. It was relieved against a window whose lights
+represented Saint Bernard in white on one hand, and Saint Benedict in
+black on the other, and it appeared to recede into the church, because
+of the two ranges of seats which stood on the left and right before the
+two other little chapels, leaving only room necessary to pass along the
+vestibule, or to go in a straight line from this altar of the Virgin in
+the apse, to the high altar.
+
+"This sanctuary is alarmingly ugly," said Durtal, who had sat down on a
+bench in front of the statue of Saint Joseph. "To judge by the few
+subjects carved along the walls, this edifice dates from the time of
+Louis XVI., an abominable date for a church."
+
+He was disturbed in these thoughts by the sound of bells, and at the
+same time all the doors were opened; one situated in the apse itself, on
+the left of the altar, gave passage to about half a score monks, wrapped
+in great white cowls, who spread out into the choir, and occupied the
+stalls on either side.
+
+Then, by the two doors of the vestibule, came a crowd of brown monks,
+who knelt at the benches on the two sides of Our Lady's altar.
+
+Durtal had some of them near him; but they bowed their heads, and joined
+their hands, he dared not observe them; moreover, the vestibule had
+become almost dark, the light was concentrated in the choir, where the
+lamps were kindled.
+
+He could make out the faces of the white monks in their stalls in the
+part of the apse he could see, and among them he recognized Father
+Etienne on his knees near a short monk; but another at the end of the
+stalls near the porch, almost opposite the altar, and in full light,
+attracted him.
+
+He was tall and strong, and looked like an Arab in his white burnous.
+Durtal could only see him in profile, and he distinguished a long grey
+beard, a shaven skull, surrounded by the monastic crown, a high
+forehead, and a nose like an eagle's beak. He had a grand appearance,
+with his imperious features, and his fine figure as it swayed under the
+cowl.
+
+"That is probably the abbot of La Trappe," thought Durtal, and he felt
+certain when this monk struck a little bell hidden under the desk before
+him, and directed the office.
+
+All the monks bowed to the altar; the abbot recited the opening prayers,
+then there was a pause, and, from the other side of the apse, which
+Durtal could not see, rose the frail voice of an old man, a voice which
+had returned to the clear tones of childhood, but was just a little
+cracked, growing higher as it declaimed the antiphon,
+
+"Deus in adjutorium meum intende."
+
+And the other side of the choir, that on which were Father Etienne and
+the abbot, answered, scanning the syllables very slowly, with voices of
+bass pitch,--
+
+"Domine ad adjuvandum me festina."
+
+And all bowed their heads over the folios placed before them, and took
+up the words,--
+
+"Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto."
+
+And they lifted their heads while the other part of the Fathers
+pronounced the response, "Sicut erat in principio, etc."
+
+The office began.
+
+It was not chanted but declaimed, now rapid and now slow. The side of
+the choir which Durtal saw made all the vowels sharp and short letters;
+the other, on the contrary, altered them all into long letters and
+seemed to cap all the Os with a circumflex accent. It might be said that
+one side had the pronunciation of the South, the other that of the
+North; thus chanted, the office became strange, and ended by rocking
+like an incantation, and soothing the soul which fell asleep in the
+rolling of the verses, interrupted by the recurrent doxology like a
+refrain after the last verse of each of the psalms.
+
+"Ah well, I cannot understand it," thought Durtal, who had his Compline
+at his fingers' ends, "they are not singing the Roman office at all."
+
+The fact is that one of the psalms was wanting. He caught indeed, at one
+moment, the hymn of Saint Ambrose, the "Te lucis ante terminum," sung to
+a simple and rugged tune of the old plain chant, and yet the last stanza
+was not the same; but he lost himself afresh, and waited for the "Short
+Lessons" and the "Nunc Dimittis" which never came.
+
+"Yet Compline does not vary like Vespers," he thought, "I must ask
+Father Etienne the meaning of this to-morrow."
+
+Then his reflections were disturbed by a young white monk, who passed
+him, genuflected to the altar, and lighted two tapers.
+
+Suddenly all rose, and with a great shout, the "Salve Regina" shook the
+arches.
+
+Durtal was affected as he listened to this admirable chant, which had
+nothing in common with that which is bellowed at Paris in the churches.
+This was at once flexible and ardent, sustained by such suppliant
+adoration, that it seemed to concentrate in itself alone, the immemorial
+hope of humanity, and its eternal lamentation.
+
+Chanted without accompaniment, unsustained by the organ, by voices
+indifferent to themselves and blending in one only, masculine and deep,
+it rose with quiet boldness, sprang up with irresistible flight towards
+Our Lady, then made, as it were, a return upon itself, and its
+confidence was lessened; it advanced more tremblingly, but so different,
+so humble, that it felt itself forgiven, and dared then in passionate
+appeals to demand the undeserved pleasures of heaven.
+
+It was the absolute triumph of the neumes, those repetitions of notes on
+the same syllable, the same word, which the Church invented to paint the
+excess of that interior joy or sorrow which words cannot render; it was
+a rush, a going forth of the soul, escaping in the passionate voices,
+breathed forth by the bodies of the monks as they stood and trembled.
+
+Durtal followed in his prayer-book this work with so short a text, so
+long a chant; and as he listened to, and read it with recollection, this
+magnificent prayer seemed to decompose as a whole, and to represent
+three different states of the soul, to exhibit the triple phase of
+humanity, during its youth, its maturity, and its decline; it was, in a
+word, an essential summary of prayer for all ages.
+
+First, there was the canticle of exultation, the joyous welcome of a
+being yet little, stammering forth respectful caresses, petting with
+gentle words, and fondness of a child who seeks to coax his mother--this
+is the "Salve Regina, Mater misericordiĉ, vita, dulcedo et spes nostra,
+salve." Then the soul so candid, so simply happy, has grown, and knowing
+the wilful failings of thought, the repeated loss through sin, joins her
+hands, and asks, sobbing, for help. She adores no longer with a smile,
+but with tears; it is "Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Hevae; ad te
+suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lachrymarum valle." At last old
+age comes; the soul lies, tormented by the memory of counsels neglected,
+by regret for lost graces; and having become weaker, and more full of
+fears, is alarmed before her deliverance, before the destruction of that
+prison of the flesh which she feels at hand, and then she thinks of the
+eternal death of those whom the Judge condemns. On her knees she
+implores the Advocatress of earth, the Consultrix of heaven; it is the
+"Eia ergo Advocata nostra; illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos
+converte; et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc
+exilium ostende."
+
+And to that essence of prayer composed by Peter of Compostella or
+Hermann Contract, Saint Bernard, in an excess of hyperdulia, added the
+three invocations at the end, "O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria,"
+sealing the inimitable prose with a triple seal, by those three cries of
+love which recall the hymn to the affectionate adoration of its
+beginning.
+
+"This is unprecedented," thought Durtal, as the Trappists chanted these
+sweet and eager appeals; the neumes were prolonged on the Os, which
+passed through all the colours of the soul, through the whole register
+of sound; and these interjections summed up again, in the series of
+notes which clothed them, the inventory of the human soul, which now
+recapitulated the whole body of the hymn.
+
+And suddenly at the word "Maria," at the glorious cry of that name, the
+chant fell, the tapers were extinguished, the monks fell on their knees,
+a silence like death came upon the chapel. The bells rang slowly, and
+the Angelus unfolded under the arches the separated petals of its clear
+sounds.
+
+All, now prostrate, their faces buried in their hands, were praying, and
+this lasted long; then the sound of the little hand-bell was heard,
+everyone rose, genuflected to the altar, and in silent file the monks
+disappeared through the door in the apse.
+
+"Ah! the true creator of plain music, the unknown author who cast into
+the brain of man the seed of plain chant, was the Holy Ghost," said
+Durtal, sick and dazzled, with tears in his eyes.
+
+M. Bruno, whom he had not noticed in the chapel, came and joined him.
+They crossed the court without speaking, and when they had entered the
+guest-house, M. Bruno lighted two candles, gave one to Durtal, and said
+gravely, "I wish you a good night, sir."
+
+Durtal went up the staircase behind him. They bowed again on the
+landing, and Durtal entered his cell.
+
+The wind blew under the door, and the room, scarcely lighted by the low
+flame of the candle, seemed to him gloomy, the high ceiling vanished in
+shadow, and rained down darkness.
+
+Durtal sat down by his bed, discouraged.
+
+And yet he was thrust forward by one of those impulses it is impossible
+to translate into words, in which it seems that the heart swells almost
+to bursting, and before his inability to get away and fly from self,
+Durtal ended by becoming a child again, by weeping without definite
+cause, simply from the need of relieving himself by tears.
+
+He sank down at the prie-Dieu, expecting he knew not what, which never
+came; then before the crucifix which stretched its arms above him, he
+began to speak to Him, and to say to Him in low tones:
+
+"Father, I have driven the swine from my being, but they have trampled
+on me, and covered me with mire, and the very stye is in ruins. Have
+pity on me, for I return from a distant land. Have mercy, O Lord, on the
+swine-herd without a house. I have entered into Thy house; do not send
+me away, be to me a kindly host, wash me."
+
+"Ah," he said suddenly, "that reminds me that I have not seen Father
+Etienne, who was to tell me the hour at which the confessor would
+receive me to-morrow; he has no doubt forgotten to ask him; so much the
+better. At any rate it will put it off for a day; my soul is so cramped
+that I have indeed need of rest."
+
+He undressed, sighing: "I must be up at half-past three to be in the
+chapel at four: I have no time to lose if I wish to sleep. If only I
+have no neuralgia to-morrow, and can wake before dawn!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+He passed a most terrible night; it was so special, so dreadful, that he
+did not remember, in the whole of his existence, to have endured such
+anguish, undergone the like fears.
+
+It was an uninterrupted succession of sudden wakings and of nightmares.
+
+And these nightmares overpassed the limits of abomination that the most
+dangerous madness dreams. They developed themselves in the realm of
+lust; and they were so special, so new to him, that when he woke Durtal
+remained trembling, almost crying out.
+
+It was not at all that involuntary and well known act, that vision which
+ceases just at the moment when the sleeper clasps an amorous form; it
+was as and more complete than in nature, long and accomplished,
+accompanied by all the preludes, all the details, all the sensations,
+and the orgasm took place with a singularly painful acuteness, an
+incredible spasm.
+
+A strange fact, which seemed to point the difference between this state,
+and the unconscious uncleanness of night, was, beyond certain episodes
+and caresses which could only follow each other in reality, but were
+united at the same moment in the dream, the sensation clear and precise
+of a being, of a fluid form disappearing, with the sharp sound of a
+percussion cap, or the crack of a whip close by, on waking. This being
+was felt near him so distinctly, that the sheet, disarranged by the wind
+of the flight, was still in motion, and he looked at the empty place in
+terror.
+
+"Ah," thought Durtal, when he had lighted his candle, "this carries me
+back to the time when I used to visit Madame Chantelouve, and reminds
+me of the stories of the Succubus."
+
+He remained sitting up in bed, astonished, and looked with real
+uneasiness round the cell steeped in shadow. He looked at his watch, it
+was only eleven o'clock at night. "God," he said, "if the nights are
+always like this in monasteries!"
+
+He had recourse to bathing with cold water in order to recover himself,
+opened his window to change the air, and lay down again, thoroughly
+chilled.
+
+He hesitated to blow out his candle, uneasy at the darkness which seemed
+to him inhabited, full of ambushes and threats. He decided at last to
+extinguish it, and repeated the stanza he had already heard sung that
+evening in chapel:
+
+    Procul recedant somnia
+    Et noctium phantasmata,
+    Hostemque nostrum comprime,
+    Ne polluantur corpora.
+
+He ended by falling asleep and dreamt again of impurity, but he came to
+himself in time to break the charm, experiencing again the impression of
+a shadow evaporating before he could seize it in the sheets. He looked
+at his watch; it was two o'clock.
+
+"If this goes on, I shall be broken down to-morrow," he thought, but he
+succeeded somehow or other in dozing, and waking every ten minutes to
+wait for three o'clock.
+
+"If I fall asleep again, I shall not be able to wake at the moment I
+wish," he thought, "suppose I get up."
+
+He sprang out of bed, dressed, prayed, reduced his thoughts to order.
+
+Real excesses would have exhausted him less than these sham freaks, but
+what seemed to him especially odious was the want of satisfaction left
+by the completed rape of these ghosts. Compared with their greedy
+tricks, the caresses of a woman only diffused a temperate pleasure, and
+ended in a feeble shock, but with this Succuba one remained in a fury at
+having clasped only the void, at having been the dupe of a lie, the
+plaything of an appearance, of which one could not remember the form or
+the features. It necessarily brought with it the desire of the flesh,
+the wish to clasp a real body, and Durtal began to think of Florence;
+she at least quenched his desires, and did not leave him thus, panting
+and feverish, in quest of he knew not what, in an atmosphere where he
+was surrounded, spied upon by an unknown whom he could not discern, by a
+phantom he could not escape.
+
+Then Durtal shook himself, and would repulse the assault of these
+memories. "At any rate I will go and breathe the fresh air, and smoke a
+cigarette; we will see afterwards."
+
+He descended the staircase, whose walls seemed not to keep their place,
+and danced in the light of his candle, threaded the corridors, blew out
+his light, placed the candlestick near the auditorium, and rushed out.
+
+It was pitch dark; at the height of the first story a round window in
+the wall of the chapel cut a hole through the darkness like a red moon.
+
+Durtal took a few whiffs of a cigarette, and then made his way to the
+chapel. He turned the latch of the door gently; the vestibule into which
+he entered was dark, but the apse, though it was empty, was lighted by
+numerous lamps.
+
+He made a step, crossed himself, and fell back, for he had stumbled over
+a body; and he looked down at his feet.
+
+He had come upon a battle-field.
+
+On the ground human forms were lying, in the attitudes of combatants
+mowed down by grape shot, some flat on their faces, others on their
+knees, some leaning their hands on the ground as if stricken from
+behind, others extended with their fingers clenched on their breast,
+others again holding their heads or stretching out their arms.
+
+And from this group in their agony rose no groan, no complaint.
+
+Durtal was stupefied as he looked at this massacre of monks, and
+suddenly stopped with open mouth. A shaft of light fell from a lamp
+which the Father Sacristan had just placed in the apse, and crossing the
+porch, it showed a monk on his knees before the altar dedicated to the
+Virgin.
+
+He was an old man of more than four-score years; motionless as a statue,
+his eyes fixed, leaning forward in such an access of adoration, that the
+faces in ecstasy in the Early Masters seemed, compared with his, forced
+and cold.
+
+Yet his features were vulgar, his shaven skull, without a crown, tanned
+by many suns and rains, was brick-coloured, his eye was dim, covered
+with a film by age, his face was wrinkled, shrivelled, stained like an
+old log, hidden in a thicket of white hair, while his somewhat snub nose
+made the general effect of the face singularly common.
+
+But there went out, not from his eyes, nor his mouth, but from
+everywhere and nowhere, a kind of angelic look which was diffused over
+his head, and enveloped all his poor body, bowed in its heap of rags.
+
+In this old man the soul did not even give herself the trouble to reform
+and ennoble his features, she contented herself in annihilating them
+with her rays; it was, as it were, the nimbus of the old saints not now
+remaining round the head, but extending over all the features, pale and
+almost invisible, bathing his whole being.
+
+He saw nothing and heard nothing; monks dragged themselves on their
+knees, came to warm themselves, and to take shelter near him, and he
+never moved, dumb and deaf, so rigid that you might have believed him
+dead, had not his lower lip stirred now and then, lifting in this
+movement his long beard.
+
+The dawn whitened the windows, and as the darkness was gradually
+dissipated, the other brethren were visible in turn to Durtal; all these
+men, wounded by divine love, prayed ardently, flashed out beyond
+themselves noiselessly before the altar. Some were quite young, on their
+knees, with their bodies upright; others, their eyeballs in ecstasy,
+were leaning back, and seated on their heels; others again were making
+the way of the cross, and were often placed each opposite another face
+to face, and they looked without seeing, as with the eyes of the blind.
+
+And among these lay brethren, some fathers buried in their great white
+cowls lay prostrate and kissed the ground.
+
+"Oh to pray, pray like these monks!" cried Durtal within himself.
+
+He felt his unhappy soul grow slack within him; in this atmosphere of
+sanctity he unbent himself, and sank down on the pavement, humbly asking
+pardon from Christ, for having soiled by his presence the purity of this
+place.
+
+He prayed long, unsealing himself for the first time, recognizing his
+unworthiness and vileness so that he could not imagine how, in spite of
+His mercy, the Lord could tolerate him in the little circle of His
+elect; he examined himself, saw clearly, and avowed that he was inferior
+to the least of these lay brothers who perhaps could not even spell out
+a book, understood that the culture of the mind was naught and the
+culture of the soul was all, and little by little, without perceiving
+it, thinking only of stammering forth acts of gratitude, he disappeared
+from the chapel, his soul borne up by the souls of others, away, away
+from the world, far from his charnel-house, far from his body.
+
+In this chapel, the impulse had come at last, the going forth from self,
+till now refused, was at last permitted; he no longer strove with self
+as in the time when he escaped with so great difficulty from his
+prison-house, as at St. Severin or Notre Dame des Victoires.
+
+Then he again realized this chapel, where his animal part had alone
+remained, and he looked round him with astonishment; the greater part of
+the brethren had gone, one father remained prostrate before Our Lady's
+altar; he quitted it in his turn, and went back to the apse, as the
+other fathers entered it.
+
+Durtal looked at them; they were of all sizes and all kinds; one fat and
+bald, with a long black beard and spectacles, some little fair and puffy
+men, some very old, bristling with skin like a wild boar, others very
+young, with a vague air of German dreaminess, with their eyes under
+their glasses; and almost all except the very young had this feature in
+common: a large belly, and cheeks with little red streaks.
+
+Suddenly through the open door in the apse itself appeared the tall monk
+who had conducted the office the evening before. He threw back on his
+chasuble the woollen hood which covered his head, and assisted by two
+white monks went up to the high altar to say mass.
+
+And it was not one of those masses served as so many are cooked in
+Paris, but a mass slow, meditated, and profound, a mass where the priest
+takes long to consecrate, overwhelmed before the altar, and when he
+elevated the Host no little bell tinkled, but the bells of the monastery
+spread abroad their slow peal, brief dull strokes, almost plaintive,
+while the Trappists disappeared; crouched on all-fours, their heads
+hidden below their desks.
+
+When the mass ended it was nearly six o'clock. Durtal took the same way
+as the evening before, passed before the little chocolate factory, and
+saw through the windows the fathers wrapping up the tablets in lead
+paper, and in another room a tiny steam engine which a lay brother was
+directing.
+
+He reached the walk where he had smoked the cigarettes in the shade. So
+gloomy at night, it was now charming with its two rows of aged limes
+which rustled gently while the wind wafted to him their enervating
+scent.
+
+Seated on a bench, he could see at a glance the whole front of the
+abbey.
+
+Before it was a long kitchen garden, with here and there some rose trees
+spread over the blueish basins and large balls of cabbages, and the old
+house, built in the monumental style of the seventeenth century,
+extended, solemn and immense, with eighteen windows in a row, and a
+pediment, in the span of which was placed a mighty clock.
+
+It was roofed with slate, and surmounted by a ring of small bells, and
+was reached by a flight of several steps. It reached a height of at
+least five stories, though it had in reality only a ground and a first
+floor, but to judge by the unexpected height of the windows, the rooms
+had to accommodate their ceilings to the vast altitude of the church; on
+the whole the building was striking and cold, more apt, since it had
+been converted into a convent, to shelter the disciples of Jansen, than
+the sons of Saint Bernard.
+
+The weather was warm that morning; the sun was filtered through the
+moving sieve of foliage, and the daylight, thus screened, was changed to
+rose colour as it touched the white. Durtal, who was about to read his
+prayer-book, saw the pages growing red, and by the law of complementary
+colours all the letters printed in black ink grew green.
+
+He was amused by these details, and with his back to the warmth, he
+brightened up in this aromatic breeze, rested in this bath of sunshine
+from his fatigues of the night, when at the end of the walk he saw some
+of the brothers. They walked in silence, some carrying under their arms
+great round loaves, others holding milk cans, or baskets full of hay and
+eggs; they passed before him, and bowed respectfully.
+
+All had a joyous and serious aspect. "Ah, good fellows," he thought,
+"for they helped me this morning, it is to them I owe it that I could
+keep silence no longer, and was able to pray, to have at last known the
+joy of supplication which at Paris was only a snare for me! to them, and
+above all to Our Lady de l'Atre, who had pity on my poor soul."
+
+He sprang from his bench in an access of joy, went into the lateral
+walks, reached the piece of water he had partially seen the evening
+before; in front of it rose the huge cross he had seen at a distance
+from the carriage, in the wood, before he reached La Trappe.
+
+It was placed opposite the monastery itself, and turned its back upon
+the pond; it bore an eighteenth-century Christ, of natural size, in
+white marble; the pond also took the form of a cross such as is shown on
+the greater part of the plans of churches.
+
+This brown and liquid cross was spotted by duckweed, which the swan
+displaced as he swam.
+
+He came towards Durtal, with extended beak, expecting, no doubt, a piece
+of bread.
+
+Not a sound arose in this deserted spot, save the rustle of dry leaves
+which Durtal brushed as he walked. The clock struck seven.
+
+He remembered that breakfast would be ready, and he walked quickly to
+the abbey. Father Etienne was waiting for him, shook hands, asked if he
+had slept well, then said:
+
+"What would you like? I can only offer you milk and honey; I will send
+to-day to the nearest village and try to get you a little cheese, but
+you will have only a poor meal this morning."
+
+Durtal proposed to exchange the milk for wine, declaring that he should
+then do very well, and said, "In any case I should do ill to complain,
+for you are fasting."
+
+The monk smiled. "Just now," he said, "we are doing penance, on account
+of certain feasts of our order." And he explained that he only took food
+once a day, at two o'clock in the afternoon, after Nones.
+
+"And you have not even wine and eggs to keep up your strength!"
+
+Father Etienne smiled again. "One gets accustomed to it," he said. "What
+is this rule in comparison with that adopted by Saint Bernard and his
+companions, when they went to till the valley of Clairvaux? Their meal
+consisted of oak leaves, salted, cooked in muddy water."
+
+And after a silence the Father continued: "No doubt the Trappist rule is
+hard, but it is mild if we carry our thoughts back to the rule of Saint
+Pacomius in the East. Only think; whoever wished to join that order had
+to remain ten days and nights at the door of the convent, and had to
+endure spitting and insults; if he still desired to enter, he fulfilled
+a three years' novitiate, inhabited a hut where he could not stand up,
+nor lie at full length, ate only olives and cabbage, prayed twelve times
+in the morning, twelve times in the afternoon, twelve times in the
+night; the silence was perpetual, and his mortifications never ceased.
+To prepare himself for this novitiate, and to learn to subdue his
+appetite, Saint Macarius thought of the plan of soaking his bread in a
+vessel with a very narrow neck, and only fed on the crumbs which he
+could take out with his fingers. When he was admitted into the
+monastery, he contented himself with gnawing leaves of raw cabbage on
+Sunday. Ah! they could stand more than we. We, alas! have no longer
+souls nor bodies stout enough to bear such fasts; but do not let that
+stop your meal; make as good an one as you can. Ah, by the way," said
+the monk, "be in the auditorium at ten precisely, where the Father Prior
+will hear your confession."
+
+And he left the room.
+
+If Durtal had received a blow on his head with a mallet, he could not
+have been more overwhelmed. All the scaffolding of his joys, so rapidly
+run up, fell. This strange fact had occurred, in the impulse of joy he
+had felt since daybreak he had wholly forgotten that he had to confess.
+He had a moment of aberration. "But I am forgiven," he thought; "the
+proof is that state of happiness, such as I have never known, that truly
+wonderful expansion of soul which I experienced in the chapel and in the
+wood."
+
+The idea that nothing had begun, that all was still to do, terrified
+him; he had not the courage to swallow his bread, he drank a little
+wine, and rushed out of doors in a wind of panic.
+
+He went, wildly, with great strides. Confession! The prior? Who was the
+prior? He sought in vain among the fathers whose faces he remembered the
+one who would hear him.
+
+"My God!" he said, all at once, "but I do not even know how a confession
+is made."
+
+He sought a deserted corner, where he could recollect himself a little.
+He was striding along without even knowing how he came there, along a
+walnut-tree walk with a wall on one side. There were some enormous
+trees, he hid himself behind the trunk of one of them, and sitting on
+the moss, turned over the leaves of his prayer-book, and read: "On
+arriving at the confessional, place yourself on your knees, make the
+sign of the cross, and ask the priest for his blessing, saying, 'Bless
+me, Father, for I have sinned;' then recite the Confiteor as far as _mea
+culpa_ ... and ..."
+
+He stopped, and without any need of probing it his life sprang out in
+jets of filth.
+
+He shrank from it, there was so much, of every kind, that he was
+overwhelmed with despair.
+
+Then by an effort of his will he pulled himself together, endeavoured to
+control and bank up these torrents, to separate them so as to understand
+them, but one affluent rolled back all the others, ended by overwhelming
+them, and became the river itself.
+
+And this sin appeared at first ape-like and sly, at school where
+everyone tempted and corrupted others; then there was all his greedy
+youth, dragged through tap-rooms, rolled in swine troughs, wallowing in
+the sinks of prostitution, and then an ignoble manhood. To his regular
+tasks had succeeded toll paid to his senses, and shameful memories
+assailed him in a crowd; he recalled to mind how he had sought after
+monstrous iniquities, his pursuit of artifices aggravating the malice of
+the act, and the accomplices and agents of his sins passed in file
+before him.
+
+Among all, at one time, there was a certain Mme. Chantelouve, a
+demoniacal adulteress who had drawn him headlong into frightful
+excesses, who had linked him to nameless crimes, sins against holy
+things, to sacrileges.
+
+"How can I tell all this to the monk?" thought Durtal, terrified by the
+remembrance; "how can I even express myself, so as to make him
+understand without defilement?"
+
+Tears rushed from his eyes. "My God, my God!" he sighed, "this is indeed
+too much."
+
+And in her turn Florence appeared with her little street-arab smile, and
+her childish haunches. "I can never tell the confessor all that was
+brewed in the perfumed shade of her vices," cried Durtal. "I can by no
+means make him face these torrents of pus.
+
+"Yet they say this has to be done;" and he bowed under the weight of the
+foulness of this girl.
+
+"How shameful to have been riveted to her, how disgusting to have
+satisfied the abominable demands of her desires!"
+
+Behind this sewer extended others. He had traversed all the districts of
+sin which the prayer-book patiently enumerated. He had never confessed
+since his first communion, and with the piling up of years had come
+successive deposits of sins. He grew pale at the thought that he was
+about to detail to another man all his dirt, to acknowledge his most
+secret thoughts, to say to him what one dares not repeat to one's own
+self, lest one should despise oneself too much.
+
+He sweated with anguish, then nausea at his being, remorse for his life
+solaced him, and he gave himself up; regret for having lived so long in
+this cesspool was a very crucifixion to him; he wept long, doubting
+pardon, not even daring to ask it, so vile did he feel himself.
+
+At last he sprang up; the hour of expiation must be at hand, in fact his
+watch pointed to a quarter to ten. His agony as he thus wrought with
+himself had lasted more than two hours.
+
+He hurriedly reached the main path which led to the monastery. He walked
+with his head down, forcing back his tears.
+
+He slackened his pace somewhat as he drew near the little pond; he
+lifted his eyes in supplication to the cross, and as he lowered them he
+met a look so moved, so compassionate, so gentle, that he stopped, and
+the look disappeared with the bow of a lay brother, who passed on his
+way.
+
+"He read my thoughts," said Durtal to himself. "Oh, this charitable monk
+has good reason to pity me, for indeed I suffer. Ah, Lord, that I might
+be like that humble brother!" he cried, remembering that he had seen
+that very morning the young tall lad, praying in the chapel with such
+fervour that he seemed to rise from the ground, before Our Lady.
+
+He arrived at the auditorium in a frightful state, and sank on a chair;
+then, like a hunted animal that thinks itself discovered, he sprang up,
+and, disturbed by his fears, moved by a wind of disorder, he thought of
+flight, that he would pack his bag, and make for the train.
+
+He mastered himself, undecided and trembling, his ear on the watch, his
+heart beating with great strokes, and he heard the sound of distant
+steps. "My God," he said, waiting for the steps that drew near, "what
+manner of monk is coming?"
+
+The steps were silent, and the door opened. Durtal in his alarm dared
+not look at the confessor, in whom he recognized the tall Trappist, with
+the imperious profile, whom he believed to be the abbot of the
+monastery.
+
+His breath was taken away, and he drew back without saying a word.
+
+Surprised at this silence, the prior said,--
+
+"You have asked to make your confession, sir?"
+
+And at a sign from Durtal, he pointed out the prie-Dieu placed against
+the wall, and himself knelt down, turning his back.
+
+Durtal braced himself, fell down at the prie-Dieu, and then completely
+lost his head. He had vaguely prepared how to enter on the matter, noted
+the points of his statement, classified his sins in some degree, and now
+remembered nothing.
+
+The monk rose, sat down on a straw chair, leant towards the penitent,
+his hand behind his ear to hear the better.
+
+He waited.
+
+Durtal wished rather to die than speak; he succeeded, however, in
+mastering himself, and bridling his shame; he opened his lips, but no
+word came; he remained overwhelmed, his head in his hands, repressing
+the tears he felt ready to fall.
+
+The monk did not move.
+
+At last he made a desperate effort, stammered the beginning of the
+Confiteor, and said,
+
+"I have not confessed, since my childhood; since then I have led a
+shameful life, I have ..."
+
+The words would not come.
+
+The Trappist remained silent, and did not assist him at all.
+
+"I have committed every kind of debauch, I have done everything ...
+everything ..."
+
+He choked, and the tears he had repressed flowed, he wept, his body was
+shaken, his face hidden in his hands.
+
+And as the prior, still bending over him, did not move,
+
+"But I cannot," he cried; "I cannot."
+
+All that life he could not bring out, stifled him; he sobbed in despair
+at the view of his sins, and crushed also at finding himself thus
+abandoned, without a word of kindness, without help. It seemed to him
+that all was giving way, that he was lost, repulsed even by Him who yet
+had directed him to this abbey.
+
+Then a hand was laid on his shoulder, while a gentle, low voice said,
+
+"Your soul is too tired for me to fatigue you with questions, come back
+at nine o'clock to-morrow, we shall have time before us, we shall not
+then be hurried by any office; from now till then, think of the story of
+Calvary; the cross, which was made for the sins of the whole world, lay
+so heavily on the shoulders of the Saviour, that His knees bent and He
+fell. A man of Cyrene passed by who helped the Lord to bear it. You, in
+detesting, in weeping for your sins, have alleviated and rendered
+lighter, if one may say so, the cross of the burthen of your sins, and
+having made it less heavy, have thus allowed Our Lord to lift it.
+
+"He has recompensed you by the most astonishing of miracles, the miracle
+of having brought you here from so far off. Thank Him, then, with all
+your heart, and be not discomforted. You will say to-day for your
+penance, the Penitential Psalms, and the Litany of the Saints. I will
+give you my blessing."
+
+And the prior blessed him and went out. Durtal raised himself up after
+his tears; what he feared so much had happened; the monk who would take
+him in hand was impassive, almost dumb. "Alas!" he thought, "my
+abscesses are ripe, but it needs the cut of a lancet to open them."
+
+"After all," he went on, as he went upstairs to bathe his eyes in his
+cell, "this Trappist was compassionate at last, not so much in what he
+said, as the tone in which he said it; then, to be just, he was perhaps
+confused by my tears; the Abbé Gévresin certainly did not tell Father
+Etienne that I was taking refuge in La Trappe in order to be converted,
+let us put ourselves in the place of a man living in God, far from the
+world, over whose head a shower bath is suddenly discharged.
+
+"Well, we shall see to-morrow;" and Durtal made haste to sponge his
+face, for it was nearly eleven o'clock and the office of Sext was about
+to begin.
+
+He went to the chapel, which was almost empty, for the brothers were
+working at that time in the chocolate factory, and in the fields.
+
+The fathers were in their places in the apse. The prior struck his bell,
+all signed themselves with a large cross, and on the left, where he
+could not see, for Durtal had taken the same place as in the morning,
+near Saint Joseph's altar, a voice arose:
+
+"Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum."
+
+And the other part of the choir answered:
+
+"Et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus."
+
+There was a moment's pause, and the pure thin voice of the old Trappist
+sang as before the office of Compline the evening before:
+
+"Deus in adjutorium meum intende."
+
+And the liturgy continued its course, with its "Gloria Patri," etc.,
+during which the monks bowed their foreheads on their books, and with
+its series of psalms, accented in short tones on the one side, and long
+on the other.
+
+Durtal, as he knelt, allowed himself to be rocked by the psalmody, too
+tired to be able to pray himself.
+
+Then, when Sext was ended, all the fathers meditated, and Durtal caught
+a look of pity from the prior, who turned a little towards his bench. He
+understood that the monk implored the Saviour for him, and perhaps asked
+God to show him the way in which he might conduct himself on the morrow.
+
+Durtal rejoined M. Bruno in the court; they shook hands, and the oblate
+announced the presence of a new guest.
+
+"A retreatant?"
+
+"No; a curate from the neighbourhood of Lyons, he has come to see the
+abbot, who is ill."
+
+"But I thought the abbot of Notre Dame de l'Atre was the tall monk who
+led the office?"
+
+"Oh no; that was the prior Father Maximin, you have not seen the abbot,
+and I doubt if you will see him, for I do not think he will leave his
+bed before you go."
+
+They reached the guest-house, and found Father Etienne making excuses to
+a short fat priest for the poor fare he could offer.
+
+He was a jovial priest, with strong features moulded in yellow fat.
+
+He joked M. Bruno, whom he seemed to have known some time, on the sin of
+gluttony which must so often be committed at La Trappe, then tasted,
+pretending a chuckle of delight, the scentless bouquet of the poor wine
+he poured out, and lastly, when he divided with a spoon the omelette
+which was the main dish of their dinner, he pretended to cut up a fowl,
+and to be delighted with the fine appearance of the flesh; saying to
+Durtal, "This is a barley-fed fowl, may I offer you a wing?"
+
+This kind of pleasantry exasperated Durtal, who had no wish to laugh
+that day; he therefore was satisfied to make a vague bow, wishing to
+himself that the end of dinner was at hand.
+
+The conversation continued between the priest and M. Bruno.
+
+After it had spread over various commonplaces, it took a more definite
+form, in regard to an invisible otter which plundered the abbey ponds.
+
+"But, no doubt," said the curate, "you have found its lair?"
+
+"Never; it is easy to see in the lain grass the paths it traverses to
+get to the water, but we always lose its traces at the same spot. We
+have watched for days with Father Etienne, but it has never shown
+itself."
+
+The abbé explained various traps which might be set with advantage.
+Durtal thought of the otter-hunt which Balzac tells so pleasantly at the
+beginning of his "Paysans," when the dinner came to an end.
+
+The curate said grace, and said to M. Bruno, "Suppose we take a turn;
+the fresh air will do instead of the coffee, which they forget to give
+us."
+
+Durtal returned to his cell.
+
+He felt himself emptied, injured, cheated, reduced to a state of fibre,
+a state of pulp. His body, crushed by the nightmares of the night,
+enervated by the scene of the morning, needed entire rest, and if his
+soul had not still that infatuation which had broken it in tears at the
+monk's feet, it was sad and restless, and it also asked for silence,
+repose, and sleep.
+
+"Let us see," said Durtal, "I must not give way, let me bestir myself."
+
+He read the Penitential Psalms and the Litanies of the Saints; then he
+hesitated between two volumes of Saint Bonaventure and Saint Angela.
+
+He decided on the Blessed Angela. She had sinned and had been converted,
+and she seemed less far from him, more intelligible, more helpful than
+the Seraphic Doctor, than a Saint who had always remained pure,
+sheltered from falls. For she too had been a carnal sinner; she too had
+reached the Saviour from afar.
+
+A married woman, she lived in adultery and shame; lovers succeeded one
+another, and when she had exhausted them she threw them aside like
+husks. Suddenly grace rose in her and made her soul break forth; she
+went to confession, not daring to avow the more awful of her sins, and
+she communicated, thus grafting sacrilege upon her other faults.
+
+She lived, day and night tortured by remorse, and finally prayed to
+Saint Francis of Assisi to help her; and the next night the saint
+appeared to her. "My sister," he said, "if you had called on me sooner,
+I should have granted your prayer before this." The next day she went to
+church, heard a priest preaching, understood she must address herself to
+him, and laid all before him in a full confession.
+
+Then began the trials of an appalling life of purification. In blow
+after blow she lost her mother, her husband, her children; she went
+through such violent temptations to impurity that she was obliged to
+seize on lighted coals and cauterize the plague of her senses with fire.
+
+During two years the demon sifted her. She parted her goods among the
+poor, assumed the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis, gathered in
+the sick and infirm, and begged for them in the streets.
+
+One day a feeling of sickness came over her before a leper whose sores
+were stinking. To punish herself she drank the water in which she had
+washed the sores; she was overcome with nausea; and punished herself
+yet more by forcing herself to swallow a scab which had not gone down
+with the water and remained dry in her throat.
+
+For years she dressed ulcers and meditated on the Passion of Christ.
+Then her novitiate of sorrows drew to a close and a radiant day of
+visions dawned on her. Jesus treated her as a spoilt child, called her,
+"My sweetest, my well-beloved daughter;" He dispensed her from the
+necessity of eating, and nourished her only with the Sacred Species; He
+called her, drew her, absorbed her in uncreated light, and by
+anticipating her inheritance, enabled her to understand, in life, the
+joys of heaven.
+
+And she was so simple and timid that she feared in spite of all, for the
+memory of her sins alarmed her. She could not believe herself forgiven,
+and said to Christ; "Ah, if I could but put myself in an iron collar and
+drag myself to the market-place to proclaim my shame."
+
+And He consoled her: "Be easy, My daughter, My sufferings have atoned
+for your sins;" and as she reproached herself for having lived in
+opulence and having delighted in clothes and jewels, He addressed her,
+smiling: "To buy you riches, I have wanted for everything; you required
+a great number of clothes, and I had but one garment of which the
+soldiers stripped Me, for which they drew lots; My nakedness was the
+expiation of your vanity in ornaments."
+
+And all her conversations with Christ were in this tone. He passed His
+time in comforting this humble creature whom His benefits overwhelmed;
+and this has made her the most loving of the saints! her work is a
+succession of spiritual outpourings and caresses; her book is such a
+living hearth that beside it the volumes of other mystics seem but dull
+coal.
+
+"Ah," said Durtal to himself, in turning over these pages, "it was
+indeed the Christ of Saint Francis, the God of mercy who spoke to this
+Franciscan!" and he went on: "that ought to give me courage, for Angela
+of Foligno was as great a sinner as I am, but all her sins were
+remitted! Yes, but then what a soul she had, while mine is good for
+nothing; instead of loving, I reason; nevertheless it is right to
+remember that the conditions of the Blessed Angela were more favourable
+than mine. Living in the thirteenth century she had a shorter journey
+to make to approach God, for since the Middle Ages, each century takes
+us further from Him! she lived in a time full of miracles, which
+overflowed with Saints. For me, I live in Paris in an age when miracles
+are rare and Saints scarcely abound. And once away from here, what a
+vista is before me of falling away, of soaking myself in a stew of
+infamy, in a bath of the sins of great cities."
+
+"By the way" ... he looked at his watch and started; it was two
+o'clock--"I have missed the office of Nones," he said; "I must simplify
+my complicated horary, or I shall never know where I am;" and at once he
+traced in a few lines:
+
+"Morning. Rise at 3 o'clock, or rather at 3.30. Breakfast at 7--Sext at
+11, dinner at 11.30--Nones at 1.30--Vespers at 5.15--Supper at 6, and
+Compline at 7.25."
+
+"There, at least that is clear and easy to remember--If only Father
+Etienne have not noticed my absence from chapel!"
+
+He left his room. "Ah, here is the famous rule," he said to himself, on
+seeing a framed table hung on the landing.
+
+He approached and read:--
+
+      "Rule for Visitors."
+
+It was composed of numerous paragraphs, and opened as follows:--
+
+     "Those whom Divine Providence has guided to this monastery are
+     requested to note the following:--
+
+     "They will at all times avoid meeting the religious and lay
+     brothers, and will not go near their places of work.
+
+     "They are forbidden to leave the cloister for the farm or the
+     neighbourhood of the monastery."
+
+Then came a series of instructions which he had already seen on the
+printed horary.
+
+Durtal skipped several paragraphs, and read again:--
+
+     "Visitors are requested not to write anything on the doors, not to
+     strike matches on the wall, and not to spill water on the floor.
+
+     "They are not allowed to visit each other's rooms or to speak to
+     one another.
+
+     "Smoking is not allowed in the house."
+
+"Nor indeed outside," thought Durtal. "But I want a cigarette badly;"
+and he went down.
+
+In the corridor he ran against Father Etienne, who immediately observed
+that he had not seen him in his place during the office. Durtal excused
+himself as well as he could. The monk said no more, but Durtal
+understood that he was observed, and that under his childlike aspect the
+guest-master would, where discipline was concerned, hold him in an iron
+grip. He was confirmed in this impression when at Vespers he noticed
+that the monk's first glance on entering the chapel was at him, but that
+day he felt so sore and broken that he cared but little. This sudden
+change of existence, and of the manner in which he had been accustomed
+to spend his time, astounded him, and since the crisis of the morning he
+had been in a kind of torpor which took from him all power of recovery.
+He drifted to the end of the day, no longer thinking of anything,
+sleeping as he stood, and when the evening came he fell on his bed a
+mere inert mass.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+He woke with a bound at eleven o'clock, with an impression of someone
+looking at him in his sleep. Lighting a match, he ascertained the time,
+and seeing no one, fell back in bed again, and slept at a stretch till
+four o'clock. Then he dressed himself in haste and ran to the church.
+
+The vestibule, which had been dark on the previous evening, was lit up
+that morning, for an old monk was celebrating mass at the altar of St.
+Joseph. He was bald and infirm, with a white beard waving from side to
+side in long threads with every gust of wind.
+
+A lay brother was assisting him, a small man with black hair and a
+shaven head, like a ball painted blue; he looked like a bandit, with his
+beard in disorder and his worn-out robe of felt.
+
+And the eyes of this bandit were gentle and startled like those of a
+little boy. He served the priest with an almost timid respect and a
+suppressed joy which was touching to see.
+
+Others, kneeling on the flagstones, prayed with concentrated attention
+or read their mass. Durtal noticed the old man of eighty, immovable with
+outstretched face and closed eyes; and the youth whose look of pity had
+helped him near the pond, was following the office in his prayer-book
+with attentive meditation. He looked about twenty years old, tall and
+strong; his face, with an air of fatigue, was at once masculine and
+tender, with emaciated features, and a light beard which fell over his
+habit in a point.
+
+Durtal gave way to his emotions in this chapel, where everyone did a
+little to help him, and thinking of the confession he was about to make,
+he implored the Saviour to help him, and prayed that the monk would
+completely explore his soul.
+
+And he felt himself less dismayed, more master of himself, and firmer.
+He collected and pulled himself together, feeling a melancholy
+confusion, but he had no longer the sense of desolation which had
+overcome him the evening before. He set his mind on the idea that he
+would not abandon himself, that he would help himself with all his
+might, and that in any case he could not collect himself better.
+
+These reflections were interrupted by the departure of the old Trappist,
+who had finished offering the sacrifice, and by the entry of the prior,
+who went up in the rotunda between two white fathers to say mass at the
+high altar.
+
+Durtal was absorbed in his prayer-book, but he ceased reading when the
+priest had consumed the Species, for all rose, and he was amazed at a
+sight of which he had never dreamed, a communion of monks.
+
+They advanced in single file, silent and with downcast eyes, and when
+the first arrived before the altar, he turned round to embrace the
+comrade who followed; he in turn took in his arms the religious who
+followed him, and so on to the last. All, before receiving the
+Eucharist, exchanged the kiss of peace, then they knelt, communicated,
+and came back in single file, turning into the rotunda behind the altar.
+
+And the return was unexpected; with the white fathers at the head of the
+line, they made their way very slowly with closed eyes and joined hands.
+The faces seemed to be somewhat altered; they were differently lit from
+within; it seemed that the soul, driven by the power of the Sacrament
+against the sides of the body, filtered through the pores and lit up the
+skin with a special light of joy, with that kind of brightness which
+pours from white souls, and makes way like a rose-coloured vapour along
+the cheeks, and shines, as if concentrated, on the brow.
+
+Watching the mechanical and hesitating gait of these monks, it seemed as
+if their bodies were no more than automata moving from habit, and that
+the souls, being elsewhere, gave no heed to them.
+
+Durtal recognized the old lay brother, bent so much that his face
+disappeared in his beard which pressed against his chest, and his two
+great knotty hands trembled as he clasped them; he also noticed the tall
+young brother, his features seeming drawn on a dissolved surface,
+gliding with short steps, his eyes closed.
+
+By a fatal chance he thought upon himself. He was the only one who did
+not communicate, for he saw M. Bruno coming last from behind the altar
+and returning to his place with folded arms. This exclusion brought home
+to him clearly how different he was, and how far apart, from those
+around him! All were admitted, and he alone remained outside. His
+unworthiness was more apparent, and he grew sad at being put aside,
+looked on, as he deserved to be, as a stranger, separated like the goat
+of the Scriptures, penned, far from the sheep, on the left of Christ.
+
+These reflections were of use to him, for they relieved him of the
+terror of confession which was again coming over him. This act seemed to
+him so natural and just, in his necessary humiliation and unavoidable
+suffering, that a desire came over him to accomplish it at once, so that
+he might appear in this chapel purified and washed, and with at least
+some resemblance to the others.
+
+When the mass was over, he made his way towards his cell to get a tablet
+of chocolate.
+
+At the top of the stairs M. Bruno, with a large apron round him, was
+getting ready to clean the steps.
+
+Durtal looked on him with surprise. The oblate smiled and shook hands
+with him.
+
+"This is an excellent task for the soul," he said, showing his broom;
+"it recalls modest sentiments which one is too inclined to forget after
+living in the world."
+
+And he began sweeping vigorously, and collecting into a pan the dust
+which like pepper filled every crevice in the floor.
+
+Durtal carried his tablet into the garden. "Let us consider," he said to
+himself as he nibbled it; "supposing I took another walk and tried an
+unknown part of the wood?" And he felt no wish to do so. "No, placed as
+I am, I would rather haunt the same spot and not leave the places to
+which I am accustomed; I am already so little under control, and so
+easily disturbed, that I do not wish to risk anything by curiosity to
+see new places." And he went down to the cross pond. He went along the
+banks, and having reached the end, was astonished to find, a few steps
+farther, a stream spotted with green pellicules, hollowing its way
+between two hedges which fenced in the monastery. The fields stretched
+out beyond, and the roofs of a large farmhouse were visible in the
+trees, and all round the horizon on hills were forests which seemed to
+stop the way before the sky.
+
+"I imagined the grounds were larger," he said to himself, retracing his
+steps; and having reached the end of the cross pond, he gazed on the
+huge wooden crucifix reared in the air which was reflected in that black
+mirror. It sank down, seen from behind, trembling in the small waves
+stirred up by the breeze, and seemed to fall whirling round in that
+stretch of ink. And as the body of the marble Christ was hidden by the
+wood, only the two white arms which hung below the tree could be seen,
+twisted in the blackness of the water.
+
+Seated on the grass, Durtal gazed on the hazy image of the recumbent
+cross, and thinking of his soul, which, like the pond, was tanned and
+stained by a bed of dead leaves and a dunghill of sins, he pitied the
+Saviour whom he was about to invite to bathe Himself there, for it would
+no longer be the Martyr of Golgotha to whom at all events death came on
+a hill, His head high, by daylight, in the open air! but it would be by
+an increase of outrages, the abominable plunging of the crucified body,
+the head low, by night, into a depth of mud.
+
+"Ah! it would be time to spare Him, in filtering and clarifying me," he
+cried to himself. And the swan, till then motionless in an arm of the
+pond, swept over the lamentable image in advancing, and whitened the
+moving mourning of the waters with its peaceful reflection.
+
+And Durtal thought of the absolution which he would perhaps obtain, and
+he reopened his prayer-book and numbered his faults; and, slowly, as on
+the day before, he tapped, in his innermost being, a fountain of tears.
+
+"I must control myself," he said, trembling at the idea that he would
+suffocate again and be unable to speak; and he resolved to begin his
+confession at the other end, first going over the minor sins, keeping
+the great ones for the end so as to finish with the avowal of his carnal
+misdeeds: "if I succumb then I can explain myself in two words. My God!
+may the prior only not remain silent as he did yesterday, may he only
+absolve me!"
+
+He shook off his sadness, left the pond, and returning to the lime
+avenue, he interested himself in a closer inspection of the trees. They
+raised huge trunks, covered with reddish-brown stonecrop, silvered grey
+by mosses; and several that morning were wrapped as in a mantle trimmed
+with pearls, gossamer threads studded with drops of dew.
+
+He sat down on a bench, but fearing a shower, for it looked threatening,
+he retired to his cell.
+
+He felt no desire to read; he was eager for, while yet he dreaded, the
+arrival of nine o'clock, to have done with, to get rid of the weight
+upon his soul, and he prayed mechanically, without knowing what he
+mumbled, always thinking on this confession, full of alarm and harassed
+with fears.
+
+He went down a little before the time, and when he entered the
+auditorium his heart failed him.
+
+In spite of himself, his eyes were fixed upon the prie-Dieu, where he
+had suffered so cruelly.
+
+To think that he had to put himself on that hurdle again, to stretch
+himself on that rack of torture! He tried to collect himself, to compose
+himself--and he drew himself up quickly; he heard the footsteps of the
+monk. The door opened, and, for the first time, Durtal dared to look the
+prior in the face; it seemed to be hardly the same man, nor the face, he
+had noticed from a distance; the profile was so haughty, and the full
+face so sweet; the eye dulled the proud energy of the features, an eye
+familiar and deep, when at the same time there was a quiet joy and a sad
+pity.
+
+"Come," he said, "do not be disturbed, you are about to speak to our
+Saviour alone, who knows all your faults." And he knelt down and prayed
+for some time and came, as on the day before, to sit by the prie-Dieu;
+he bent towards Durtal and listened.
+
+Somewhat reassured, the penitent began without too great anguish. He
+accused himself of faults common to all men, want of charity towards his
+neighbour, evil speaking, hate, rash judgment, abuse, lies, vanity,
+anger, etc.
+
+The monk interrupted him for a moment.
+
+"You said, just now, I think, that in your youth you contracted debts;
+have you paid them?"
+
+And on an affirmative sign from Durtal, he said, "Good," and went on,
+
+"Have you belonged to any secret society? have you fought a duel?--I am
+obliged to ask these questions for they are reserved cases."
+
+"No?--Good"--and he was silent.
+
+"Before God, I accuse myself of everything," resumed Durtal; "as I
+confessed to you, yesterday, since my first communion I have given up
+everything; prayers, mass, everything; I have denied God, I have
+blasphemed, I had entirely lost faith."
+
+And Durtal stopped.
+
+He was reaching the sins of the flesh. His voice fell.
+
+"Here I do not know how to explain myself," he said, keeping back his
+tears.
+
+"Let us see," the monk said gently; "you told me yesterday that you had
+committed all those acts which are comprised in the sin of lust."
+
+"Yes, father;" and trembling, he added, "Must I go into the details?"
+
+"No, it is useless. I will confine myself to asking you, for it alters
+the nature of the sin, whether in your case there have been any private
+sins, or any sins committed between persons of the same sex?"
+
+"Not since I left school."
+
+"Have you committed adultery?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Am I to understand that in your relations with women, you have
+committed every possible excess?"
+
+Durtal made an affirmative sign.
+
+"That is sufficient."
+
+And the monk was silent.
+
+Durtal choked with disgust; the avowal of these horrors was a terrible
+effort to him; yet crushed as he was by shame, he was beginning to
+breathe, when suddenly he plunged his head again in his hands.
+
+The remembrance of the sacrilege in which Madame Chantelouve had made
+him share, came back to him.
+
+Hesitatingly he confessed that he had from curiosity assisted at a black
+mass, and that afterwards, without wishing it, he had defiled a Host
+which that woman, saturated with Satanism, concealed about her.
+
+The prior listened without moving.
+
+"Did you continue your visits to that woman?"
+
+"No; that had given me a horror of her."
+
+The Trappist reflected and said,
+
+"That is all?"
+
+"I think I have confessed everything," replied Durtal.
+
+The confessor was silent for some minutes, and then in a pensive voice,
+he murmured,
+
+"I am struck, even more than yesterday, by the astonishing miracle which
+Heaven has worked in you.
+
+"You were sick, so sick that what Martha said of the body of Lazarus
+might truly have been said of your soul, 'Iam foetet!' And Christ has,
+in some manner, raised you. Only do not deceive yourself, the conversion
+of a sinner is not his cure, but only his convalescence; and this
+convalescence sometimes lasts for several years and is often long.
+
+"It is expedient that you should determine from this moment to fortify
+yourself against any falling back, and to do all in your power for
+recovery. The preventive treatment consists of prayer, the sacrament of
+penance, and holy communion.
+
+"Prayer?--you know it, for without much prayer you could not have
+decided to come here after the troubled life you had led."
+
+"Ah! but I prayed so badly!"
+
+"It does not matter, as your wish was to pray well! Confession?--It was
+painful to you; it will be less so now that you no longer have to avow
+the accumulated sins of years. The communion troubles me more; for it is
+to be feared that when you have triumphed over the flesh the Demon
+should await you there, and endeavour to draw you away, for he knows
+well that, without this divine government, no healing is possible. You
+will therefore have to give this matter all your attention."
+
+The monk reflected a minute, and then went on,
+
+"The holy Eucharist ... you will have more need of it than others, for
+you will be more unhappy than less cultured and simpler beings. You will
+be tortured by the imagination. It has made you sin much; and, by a just
+recompense, it will make you suffer much; it will be the badly closed
+door of your soul by which the Demon will enter and spread himself in
+you. Watch over this, and pray fervently that the Saviour may help you.
+Tell me, have you a rosary?"
+
+"No, father."
+
+"I feel," said the monk, "that the tone in which you said 'No' shows a
+certain hostility to the rosary."
+
+"I admit that this mechanical manner of saying prayers wearies me a
+little; I do not know why, but it seems to me that at the end of some
+seconds I can no longer think of what I am saying; I should mock, and
+should certainly end by stammering out something stupid."
+
+"You have known," quietly answered the prior, "some fathers of families.
+Their children stammer forth caresses, and tell them no matter what, and
+yet they are delighted to listen! Why should not our Lord, who is a good
+Father, love to hear His children when they drawl, or even when they
+talk nonsense?"
+
+And after a pause he went on,
+
+"I scent the devil's artifice in what you say, for the highest graces
+are attached to this crown of prayers. The most Blessed Virgin herself
+revealed to the saints this means of prayer; she declared she delighted
+in it; that should be enough to make us love it.
+
+"Do it, then, for her who has powerfully assisted in your conversion,
+who has interceded with her Son to save you. Remember, also, that God
+wished that all graces should come to us through her. St. Bernard
+expressly declares 'Totum nos habere voluit per Mariam.'"
+
+The monk paused anew, and added,
+
+"However, the rosary enrages fools, and that is a sure sign. You will
+for a penance recite ten every day for a month."
+
+He ceased, and then went on again, slowly,
+
+"All of us, alas! retain that scar of original sin which is the
+inclination towards evil; each man encourages it more or less; as for
+you, since you grew up, the scar has been always open, but as you hate
+the wound God will close it.
+
+"So I will say nothing of your past, as your repentance and your firm
+resolve to sin no more efface it. To-morrow, you will receive the pledge
+of reconciliation, you will communicate; after so many years the Lord
+will set out on the way to your soul and will rest there; approach Him
+with great humility, and prepare yourself from this moment, by prayer,
+for this mysterious meeting of hearts which His goodness desires. Now
+say your act of contrition and I will give you holy absolution."
+
+The monk raised his arms, and the sleeves of his white cowl rose above
+him like two wings. With uplifted eyes he uttered the imperious formula
+which breaks the bonds, and the three words, "Ego te absolvo," spoken
+more distinctly and slowly, fell upon Durtal, who trembled from head to
+foot. He almost sank to the ground, incapable of collecting himself or
+understanding himself, only feeling, in the clearest manner, that Christ
+Himself was present, near him in that place, and finding no word of
+thanks, he wept, ravished and bowed down under the great sign of the
+cross with which the monk enveloped him.
+
+He seemed to be waking from a dream as the prior said to him,
+
+"Rejoice, your life is dead; it is buried in a cloister, and in a
+cloister it will be born again; it is a good omen; have confidence in
+our Lord and go in peace."
+
+And the father added, pressing his hand, "Do not be afraid of disturbing
+me, I am entirely at your service, not only for confession, but for
+interviews and for any advice which may be of use to you; you quite
+understand me?"
+
+They left the auditorium together; the monk bowed to him in the corridor
+and disappeared. Durtal hesitated whether to meditate in his cell or in
+the church, when M. Bruno met him. Approaching Durtal he said,
+
+"Well? that is a fine weight the less on your stomach!"
+
+And as Durtal looked at him in astonishment he laughed.
+
+"Do you think that an old sinner like me could not tell from a thousand
+nothings, if only from the way your poor eyes are now shining, that you
+had not been reconciled when you landed here? Now I have just met the
+reverend father returning to the cloister, and I find you coming out of
+the auditorium; there is no need to be particularly sly to guess that
+the great wash has just taken place."
+
+"But," said Durtal, "you could not have seen the prior with me, for he
+had left before you came in, and he might have been performing some
+other duty."
+
+"No, for he was not in his scapular; he had his cowl on. And as he
+never puts on that robe except to go to church or at confessions, I was
+quite certain that he came from the auditorium, as there is no office at
+this hour. I may also point out that as the Trappists do not come to
+confession in this room, two persons only could have been with him, you
+or I."
+
+"You may say as much," replied Durtal, laughing.
+
+Father Etienne met them in the midst of all this, and Durtal asked him
+for a rosary.
+
+"But I have not one," exclaimed the monk.
+
+"I have several," said M. Bruno, "and shall be most happy to offer you
+one. You will allow me, father?..."
+
+The monk acquiesced by a sign.
+
+"Then if you will come with me," replied the oblate, addressing Durtal,
+"I will hand it you without delay."
+
+They went upstairs together, and Durtal then learnt that M. Bruno lived
+in a room at the bottom of a small corridor, not far from his own.
+
+His cell was very simply furnished with old middle-class furniture, a
+bed, a mahogany bureau, a large book-case full of ascetic books, an
+earthenware stove and some arm-chairs. These articles were evidently the
+property of the oblate, for they were nothing like the furniture of La
+Trappe.
+
+"Pray be seated," said M. Bruno, indicating an arm-chair; and they
+conversed.
+
+Having first discussed the Sacrament of Penance, the talk came round to
+the subject of Father Maximin, and Durtal admitted the high bearing of
+the prior had terrified him at first.
+
+M. Bruno laughed. "Yes," he said, "he produces that effect on those who
+never come near him, but when one associates with him, one finds that he
+is only strict for himself, for no one is more indulgent to others. In
+every acceptation of the term he is a true and holy monk; besides, he
+has great judgment...."
+
+And as Durtal spoke to him of the other cenobites, and wondered that
+there were some quite young men among them, M. Bruno replied,
+
+"It is a mistake to suppose that most Trappists have lived in the world.
+The idea, so widespread, that people take refuge in La Trappe after long
+sorrows or disorderly lives, is absolutely false; besides, to be able to
+stand the weakening rule of the cloister it is necessary to begin
+young, and not to come in worn out with every kind of abuse.
+
+"It is also necessary to avoid confounding misanthropy with the monastic
+vocation; it is not hypochondria, but the divine call, which leads to La
+Trappe. There is a special grace, which makes all young men who have
+never lived in the world long to bury themselves in silence and therein
+suffer the hardest privations; and they are happy as I hope you will be;
+and yet their life is still more rigorous than you would think; take the
+lay brothers, for example.
+
+"Think of their giving themselves up to the most painful labour, and
+that they have not, like the fathers, the consolation of singing and
+assisting at all the offices; remember that even their reward, the
+communion, is not very often conceded to them.
+
+"Now think of the winter here. The cold is frightful; in these decayed
+buildings nothing shuts properly, and the wind sweeps the house from top
+to bottom; they freeze without fires, they sleep upon pallets, and they
+cannot help or encourage each other, for they hardly know each other, as
+all conversation is forbidden.
+
+"Think, also, that these poor people never hear a kindly word, a word
+which would soothe and comfort them. They work from dawn till night, and
+the master never thanks them for their zeal, never tells the good
+workman that he is pleased.
+
+"Consider, also, that in summer when men are hired from the neighbouring
+villages to reap the harvest, these rest when the sun scorches the
+fields; they sit in their shirt sleeves under the shade of the ricks,
+and drink, if they are thirsty, and eat; and the lay brother in his
+heavy clothes looks at them and goes on with his work, and neither eats
+nor drinks. Ah! men must have well-tempered souls to stand such a life."
+
+"But surely there must be some off days," said Durtal, "when the rule is
+relaxed?"
+
+"Never; there is not even, as in some very strict orders--the
+Carmelites, to take one instance--an hour of recreation, when the
+religious may talk and laugh. Here, the silence is eternal."
+
+"Even when they are together in the refectory?"
+
+"Then they read the Conferences of Cassien, the 'Holy Ladder' of
+Climacus, the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, or some other pious
+book."
+
+"And on Sunday?"
+
+"On Sunday they rise an hour earlier; but on the whole it is their best
+day, for they can follow all the offices and pass their whole time in
+church."
+
+"Humility and self-denial carried to such an extent are superhuman!"
+cried Durtal. "But they are surely given a sufficient quantity of strong
+nourishment to enable them to give themselves up from morning till
+evening to exhausting work in the fields?"
+
+M. Bruno smiled.
+
+"They simply get vegetables which are not even as good as those which
+are served to us, and, by way of wine, they quench their thirst with a
+sour and insipid liquid, which leaves half a glass full of sediment.
+They get a pint each, and if they are thirsty they can add water."
+
+"And how often do they eat?"
+
+"That depends. From the 14th September to Lent they only eat once a day,
+at half-past two--and during Lent this meal is put off till four
+o'clock. From Easter to the 14th September, when the Cistercian fast is
+less strict, dinner is at about half-past eleven, and to this may be
+added a light meal in the evening."
+
+"It is frightful! to work for months on one meal a day, two hours after
+noon, after being up since two o'clock in the morning; having had no
+dinner the evening before."
+
+"It is sometimes necessary to relax the rule a little, and when a monk
+fails from weakness he is not refused a morsel of bread.
+
+"It would be well," continued M. Bruno, pensively, "to relax still
+further the grasp of these observances, for this question of food is
+becoming a veritable stumbling-block in recruiting for La Trappe; souls
+which delight in these cloisters are forced to fly them, because their
+bodies cannot stand the rule."[1]
+
+     [1] The opinion of M. Bruno has been lately adopted by all the
+     abbeys of the order. In a General Chapter of La Trappe, held from
+     the 12th to the 18th September, 1894, in Holland, at Tilburg, it
+     was decided that except in seasons of fasting, the monks might eat
+     a little in the morning, dine at eleven, and sup in the evening.
+
+     Article CXVI. of the new constitutions, voted by this assembly of
+     the Chapter and approved by the Holy See, is in effect thus
+     conceived:--
+
+     "Diebus quibus non jejunatur a Sancto Pascha usque ad Idus
+     Septembris, Dominicis per totum annum et omnibus festis Sermonis
+     aut feriatis extra Quadrigesimam, omnes monachi mane accipiant
+     mixtum, hora undecima prandeant et ad seram coenent."
+
+"And the fathers lead the same life as the lay brothers?"
+
+"Absolutely--they set the example; they all swallow the same pittance,
+and sleep in the same dormitory on similar beds; there is complete
+equality. Only, the fathers have the advantage of singing the office and
+obtaining more frequent communions."
+
+"Among the lay brothers there are two who have interested me
+particularly, one quite young, a tall fair man with a pointed beard, the
+other a very old man, quite bent?"
+
+"The young one is Brother Anacletus; this young man is a veritable
+column of prayer, and one of the most precious recruits whom Heaven has
+bestowed upon our abbey. As for old Simeon, he is a child of La Trappe,
+for he was brought up in an orphanage of the order. There you have an
+extraordinary soul, a true saint, who already lives absorbed in God. We
+will talk of him at greater length another day, for it is time we went
+down; the hour of Sext is near.
+
+"Wait, here is the rosary which I am pleased to offer you. Allow me to
+add to it a medal of Saint Benedict." And he made over to Durtal a small
+wooden rosary, and the strange circle engraved with cabalistic letters,
+the amulet of Saint Benedict.
+
+"Do you know the meaning of these signs?"
+
+"Yes; I read it once in a pamphlet of Dom Guéranger."
+
+"Good. And, by-the-bye, when do you communicate?"
+
+"To-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow; it is impossible!"
+
+"Why impossible?"
+
+"Because there will be only a single mass to-morrow, that of five
+o'clock, and at that the rule prevents your communicating alone. Father
+Benedict, who usually says an earlier mass, went away this morning and
+will not return for two days. There is some mistake."
+
+"But the prior positively declared to me that I should communicate
+to-morrow!" exclaimed Durtal. "Not all the fathers here, then, are
+priests?"
+
+"No, in fact, as to priests, there is the abbot who is ill, the prior
+who will offer the sacrifice to-morrow at five o'clock, Father Benedict
+of whom I spoke to you, and another whom you have not seen and who is
+travelling. And then, if it had been possible, I also should have
+approached the Holy Table."
+
+"Then, if the fathers are not all ordained, what difference is there
+between those who have obtained the priesthood and the simple lay
+brothers?"
+
+"Education--to be a father a man must have studied, must know Latin, and
+in a word must not be what the lay brothers are, peasants or workmen. In
+any case I shall see the prior, and as to the communion to-morrow, I
+will let you know, after the office. But it is tiresome; it is a pity
+you could not have come up this morning, with us."
+
+Durtal made a gesture of regret. He went into the chapel, dwelling on
+this misfortune and praying God not to delay his re-entry into grace any
+longer.
+
+After Sext, the oblate came to rejoin him. "It is just as I thought," he
+said, "but nevertheless you will be admitted to take the Sacrament. The
+father prior has arranged with the curate who dines with us. He will say
+a mass to-morrow morning before leaving, and you will then communicate."
+
+"Oh!" groaned Durtal.
+
+This news broke his heart. That he should have come to La Trappe to
+receive the Eucharist from the hands of a priest of passage, from a
+jovial priest such as this man! "Ah, no, I have confessed to a monk, and
+I wished to receive the communion from a monk!" he exclaimed. "It would
+have been better to wait till Father Benedict returned--but what can I
+do? I can hardly explain to the prior how repugnant this unknown priest
+is to me, and how terribly painful it would be to me, after having gone
+through so much, to end by being thus reconciled in a cloister."
+
+And he complained to God, telling Him that all the joy he might have
+felt in being purified and clean at last, was now spoilt by this
+disappointment.
+
+He arrived at the refectory hanging his head.
+
+The curate was there already. Seeing Durtal's sad demeanour, he
+charitably tried to cheer him, but the jokes he attempted produced the
+opposite effect. Durtal smiled in order to be polite, but his air was so
+wearied that M. Bruno, who saw it, turned the conversation and
+monopolized the priest.
+
+Durtal was in a hurry for his dinner to be over. He had eaten his egg
+and was painfully swallowing a warm potato soup made with hot oil, which
+from its appearance might have been mistaken for vaseline; but he now
+cared little about his food.
+
+He said to himself, "It is dreadful to carry away an irritating and
+painful recollection of a first communion--and I know it will haunt me
+for ever. I know well enough that from a theological point of view it
+does not matter whether I am dealing with a priest or a Trappist; both
+are but interpreters between God and me, but yet, I feel very well that
+it is not at all the same thing. For once at least I need a guarantee of
+certain holiness, and how can I have it with an ecclesiastic who hawks
+about jokes like a bagman?" He stopped, remembering that the Abbé
+Gévresin, fearing this mistrust, had specially sent him to a Trappist
+monastery. "What a run of ill-luck!" he said to himself.
+
+He did not even hear the conversation which was going on beside him
+between the curate and the oblate.
+
+He struggled with himself all alone, as he chewed, with his nose in his
+plate.
+
+"I do not wish to communicate to-morrow," he went on, and he was
+shocked. He was cowardly, and becoming foolish at the last. Would not
+the Saviour give Himself to him all the same?
+
+He rose from the table, stirred by a dull anguish, and he wandered in
+the park and went down the paths as chance led him.
+
+Another idea was now growing in him, an idea that Heaven was inflicting
+a trial upon him. "I want humility," he repeated. "Well, it is to punish
+me that I am refused the joy of being sanctified by a monk. Christ has
+forgiven me, that is much. Why should He do more by taking note of my
+preferences and granting my wishes?"
+
+This thought appeased him for a few minutes, and reproaching himself
+for rebelling, he accused himself of being unjust towards a priest who,
+after all, might be a saint.
+
+"Ah, enough of that," he said; "I must accept the fact, and try for once
+to be a little humble! but I have to recite my rosary." He seated
+himself on the grass and began.
+
+He had not reached the second bead, when misunderstanding again pursued
+him. He began again on the Pater and Ave, and went on thinking no more
+of the sense of his prayers, reflecting: "What ill-luck that the one
+monk who says mass every day should be away, so that I have to go
+through such a disappointment to-morrow!"
+
+He was silent and had a moment of calm, when suddenly a new element of
+trouble burst upon him.
+
+He looked at the rosary, of which he had told ten beads.
+
+"Let me see, the prior told me to recite ten every day--ten beads or ten
+rosaries?"
+
+"Beads," he said, and almost at the same moment answered, "Rosaries."
+
+He remained perplexed.
+
+"But that is idiotic, he could not have told me to go through the rosary
+ten times a day; that would amount to something like five hundred
+prayers on end; no one could do such a task without losing his wits.
+There is no doubt, it is clear he meant ten beads!
+
+"But no! for if a confessor gives a penance, it must be admitted that he
+would proportion it to the greatness of the sins. And as I have such
+repugnance for these drops of devotion taken in globules, it is natural
+that he should gorge me with a large dose of the rosary!
+
+"Still ... still ... it cannot be! I should not have even time for it
+all in Paris; it is absurd!"
+
+And the idea that he was deceiving himself came intermittently charging
+back.
+
+"Still, there must be no haggling; in ecclesiastical language 'ten'
+means ten beads; no doubt ... but I remember very well that after he
+pronounced the word rosary, the father expressed himself thus: 'you will
+say ten,' that means ten rosaries, for otherwise he would have specified
+ten ... of a rosary."
+
+And so he thrust and parried with himself--"The father had no need to
+put the dots on all the i's, if he were using an ordinary phrase, known
+to everyone. This cavilling about the value of a word is ridiculous."
+
+He tried to get rid of this torment by appealing to his reason; and
+suddenly there came out some argument which unsettled him.
+
+He found out that it was through cowardice, idleness, desire for
+contradiction and the necessity of rebelling, that he did not wish to
+wind his ten reels. "Of the two interpretations I have chosen the one
+which would relieve me of all effort and trouble, it is really too
+easy!--that alone proves that I deceive myself when I try to persuade
+myself that the prior only ordered me to pick out ten beads!"
+
+"Then a Pater, ten Aves, and a Gloria are nothing; it is not heavy as a
+penance!"
+
+And then he answered himself, "But it is much for you, for you cannot
+even attempt so much without wandering."
+
+He was turning on himself without advancing a step.
+
+"I have never felt such hesitation," he said, trying to pull himself
+together; "I am not stupid and yet I am fighting against my good sense,
+for it is not a matter of doubt, I know it, I ought to say ten Aves and
+not one more!"
+
+He remained nonplussed, almost frightened at his condition which was new
+to him.
+
+And, to get out of the difficulty, to silence himself, he thought of a
+new idea to conciliate both parties, which seemed most concise and which
+presented at least a provisional solution.
+
+"In any case," he reflected, "I cannot communicate to-morrow if I do not
+complete my penance to-day; in the doubt, the wisest course is to yoke
+myself to the ten rosaries; later I shall see; if necessary I shall be
+able to consult the prior. It is true that he will think me an idiot if
+I speak to him of these rosaries! so I shall not be able to ask him
+that!"
+
+"But then, you see, you admit yourself, it can only be ten beads!"
+
+He was furious with himself, and for silence' sake rushed upon the
+rosary.
+
+He might well shut his eyes, and try to collect himself, it was
+impossible for him at the end of the second ten to follow his prayers;
+he hesitated, forgetting the large beads of the Paters, losing his way
+in the small beads of the Aves, stamping on the ground.
+
+To check himself, he thought of transporting himself in imagination at
+each dose, into one of the chapels of the Virgin which he loved to
+attend in Paris, at Notre Dame des Victoires, at St. Sulpice, at St.
+Severin; but these Virgins were not numerous enough for him to dedicate
+each set of ten to them, so he evoked the Madonnas of the early masters,
+and, absorbed before their images, he turned the windlass of his
+prayers, not understanding what he mumbled, but praying the Mother of
+the Saviour to accept his paternosters, as she would receive the lost
+smoke of a censer forgotten before the altar.
+
+"I cannot force myself any more," he said. He left this toil worried and
+crushed and wanting to take breath; there were still three rosaries to
+exhaust.
+
+And as soon as he had stopped, the question of the Eucharist, which had
+been dropped, came up again.
+
+"Better not to communicate than to communicate badly;" and it was
+impossible that after such debates and with such prejudices he could
+properly approach the Holy Table.
+
+"Yes, but then what shall I do?--in reality, was it not monstrous of me
+to dispute the monk's orders, to wish to carry them out in my own way,
+to take them up at my convenience! If this goes on, I shall sin so much
+to-day that I shall have to confess again," he said.
+
+To break through this feeling, he threw himself again upon his wheel,
+but then stupefied himself completely; the device he had tried to keep
+himself before the Virgin at least was used up. When he wished to
+abstract himself and to bring up a recollection of Memling, he could not
+succeed, and his lip-prayers, wearying him, distressed him.
+
+"My soul is worn out," he thought, "I should do well to let it rest,
+while I stay quiet."
+
+He wandered round the pond, not knowing what to do next.
+
+"Suppose I go to my cell!" He went there, tried to become absorbed in
+the Little Office of the Virgin, and did not grasp a single word of the
+phrases he was reading. He went down and began to prowl about the park
+again.
+
+"This is enough to drive me mad," he cried--and mournfully he exclaimed,
+"I ought to be happy, to pray in peace and prepare myself for
+to-morrow's act, yet never have I been so restless, so upset, so far
+from God!
+
+"But I must finish this penance!" Despair seized him, and he was on the
+point of letting all go; he mortified himself again, and compelled
+himself to tell the beads.
+
+He finished by despatching them; he was at the end of his powers. And he
+immediately found a new means of torture.
+
+He reproached himself with having moaned the prayers negligently,
+without having even seriously tried to follow their meaning. And he was
+on the point of beginning the rosary over again, but in the face of the
+evident folly of this suggestion he pulled himself up, refused to
+listen, and then he worried himself again.
+
+"It is none the less true that you have not literally fulfilled the task
+assigned you by the confessor, for your conscience reproaches you for
+your want of reflection and your wandering."
+
+"But I am half dead!" he exclaimed. "I cannot go through the exercises
+again in this condition!"--and once again he ended, by giving a casting
+vote, and finding a new weakness.
+
+By saying over another ten, thoughtfully pronouncing the prayers with
+care, he might make up for all the beads of the rosary which he had
+mumbled without understanding them.
+
+And he tried to turn the crank, but as soon as he had got out the Pater,
+he wandered; he was obstinate in wishing to grind out the Aves, but then
+his mind gave way and became thoroughly distracted.
+
+He stopped, thinking, "What is the use of it? besides, would one set of
+ten, however well said, be equal to five hundred prayers that have
+missed fire? and then why one set of ten and not two, why not three? it
+is absurd!"
+
+He grew angry; "After all," he concluded, "these repetitions are absurd;
+Christ positively declared that we should not use vain repetitions in
+our prayers. Then what is the object of this wheel of Aves?"
+
+"If I dwell upon such ideas, if I cavil at the injunctions of the monk,
+I am lost," said he suddenly; and by an effort of will, he stifled the
+revolt which was rumbling in him.
+
+He took refuge in his cell; the hours lengthened interminably; he killed
+the time by recapitulating all the same objections with all the same
+answers. It was a repetition of which he was himself ashamed.
+
+"So much is certain, that I am the victim of an aberration," he said. "I
+do not speak of the Eucharist; there my thoughts may not be exact, but
+at least they are not maddening, while as for this question of
+paternosters!"
+
+He confused himself so much that he felt hammered like an anvil between
+these two opposing ideas, and finally sank drowsily on a chair.
+
+Thus he passed the time till the hour of vespers and supper. After this
+meal he returned to the park.
+
+And then the slumbering dispute revived and all came back. A furious
+battle was raging within him. He remained there, immovable, astounded,
+listening to himself, when a rapid footstep approached and M. Bruno said
+to him,
+
+"Take care, you are possessed by the devil!"
+
+And as Durtal, stupefied, did not answer,
+
+"Yes," he said, "God sometimes allows me intuitions, and I am certain at
+this moment that the devil is working in you. Let us see, what is wrong
+with you?"
+
+"I ... I do not know myself;" and Durtal told him of the extraordinary
+conflict about the rosary which had been raging in him since the
+morning.
+
+"But this is madness," exclaimed the oblate; "it is ten beads the prior
+ordered you to tell; ten rosaries would be impossible."
+
+"I know it ... and yet I doubt still."
+
+"Always the same tactics," said M. Bruno; "contriving to render
+disgusting the thing you ought to do. Yes, the devil wished to make the
+rosary odious to you by crushing you with it. And what is there besides?
+You do not wish to communicate to-morrow?"
+
+"True," replied Durtal.
+
+"I thought as much, when I was watching you at supper. Ah! well, after
+conversions the Evil One is at work; and it is nothing, believe me; he
+was harder on me than that."
+
+He slipped his arm under Durtal's, and leading him to the auditorium,
+begged him to wait, and disappeared.
+
+Some minutes afterwards, the prior entered.
+
+"Well," said he, "M. Bruno tells me that you are suffering. What is it,
+exactly?"
+
+"It is so stupid that I am ashamed to explain myself."
+
+"You will never astonish a monk," said the prior, smiling.
+
+"Well, I know precisely, I am certain that you gave me ten beads of the
+rosary to recite every day for a month, and, since this morning, I have
+been arguing with myself against all common sense, to convince myself
+that my daily penance is to be the rosary ten times."
+
+"Hand me your rosary," said the monk, "and look at these ten beads;
+well, that is all I prescribed for you, and all you have to recite. So
+you have told all the beads ten times to-day?"
+
+Durtal signified assent.
+
+"And naturally you were perplexed, you lost all patience, and ended up
+by rambling."
+
+And seeing Durtal's pitiful smile,
+
+"Well, listen to me," declared the father, in an energetic tone, "I
+absolutely forbid you for the future to begin a prayer again; it has
+been badly said; so much the worse, go on, do not repeat it.
+
+"I need not ask you if the idea of abstaining from communion occurred to
+you, for that comes of itself; it is there that the enemy directs all
+his efforts. Do not listen to the devil's voice which would keep you
+away; whatever happens you will communicate to-morrow. You should have
+no scruple, for I command you to receive the Sacrament; I take it all
+upon myself.
+
+"And now another question; what sort of nights have you?"
+
+Durtal told him of the awful night of his arrival at La Trappe, and of
+the feeling of being spied upon which had awakened him the day before.
+
+"We have long known these manifestations, they are without imminent
+danger; do not therefore let them trouble you. At the same time, if they
+continue you will let me know, and we will not neglect attending to
+them."
+
+And the Trappist left quietly, while Durtal remained thinking.
+
+"I never doubted that those phenomena were satanic," he thought, "but I
+did not understand these attacks upon the soul, this charge at full
+speed against my reason which remains untouched, and yet is overcome;
+that is remarkable; if only this lesson may be useful to me so that I
+may not be unhorsed on the first alarm!"
+
+He went up to his cell again and a great peace fell upon him. All had
+died down at the voice of the monk; he now only felt surprise at having
+been off the rails for hours; he understood now that he had been
+assailed unawares and that the struggle had not been with himself.
+
+He said his prayers and lay down. And, suddenly, the assault began again
+by new tactics he had not guessed at.
+
+"No doubt I shall communicate to-morrow," he said to himself; "but ...
+but ... am I prepared for such an act? I ought to have collected my
+thoughts in the day-time, I ought to have thanked the Lord for having
+absolved me, and I have lost my time in nonsense."
+
+"Why did I not say that just now to Father Maximin? how is it I did not
+think of it? Then I ought to have confessed again. And this priest who
+will give me the communion, this priest!"
+
+The horror which he felt for this man increased suddenly and became so
+vehement that he was astonished. "Ah, but there I am again knocked about
+by the enemy," he said, and he went on:
+
+"All that shall not prevent me from receiving the Heavenly Bread
+to-morrow, for I have quite decided; only how frightful it is that the
+Spirit of Malice should be allowed to oppress and harass me without
+respite while I have no sign from Heaven which does not interfere, and I
+know nothing.
+
+"Ah! Lord, if I were only certain this communion would please Thee! Give
+me a sign, show me that I may ally myself with Thee without remorse; let
+the impossible take place so that, to-morrow, it may be a monk and not
+this priest...."
+
+And he stopped himself, astonished at his boldness, asking himself how
+he dared ask for, and indicate a sign.
+
+"It is idiotic!" he exclaimed; "in the first place, no one has a right
+to claim such favours from God; and then, as He will not grant my
+prayer, what shall I have gained? I shall infer from the refusal that my
+communion will be worth nothing!"
+
+And he prayed the Lord to forget his wish, excused himself for having
+formed it, and wished to convince himself that He should not take it
+into account, and, helped by the agitations of the day, he ended by
+falling asleep as he prayed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+When he left his cell he said to himself, "This morning I shall
+communicate," and these words, which should have thrilled him through
+and through, woke no zeal in him. He remained dull, tired and caring for
+nothing, feeling cold in the depth of his being.
+
+Nevertheless a fear stimulated him when he was outside. "I do not know,"
+he said to himself, "when I must leave my seat and go to kneel before
+the priest; I know that the congregation should communicate after the
+celebrant; but at what moment exactly ought I to move? It is indeed
+another misfortune that I should have to go up, alone, towards this
+Table which so disturbs me; otherwise I shall only have to follow the
+others and at least be sure of not doing anything improperly."
+
+He scrutinized the chapel as he went in, looking round for M. Bruno who,
+had he been by his side, might have kept off his scruples, but the
+oblate could not be found. Durtal sat down, disabled, dreaming of the
+sign he had asked for the evening before, endeavouring to throw off the
+recollection, thinking of it all the same.
+
+He wished to examine himself and collect himself, and he was praying
+Heaven to forgive him his mental vacillations when M. Bruno came in, and
+went to kneel before the statue of the Virgin.
+
+Almost at the same minute a brother, who had a beard like seaweed
+growing from a face like a pear, took up to the altar of St. Joseph a
+small rustic table on which he placed a basin, a towel, two vases and a
+napkin.
+
+Before these preparations, which recalled the imminence of the
+Sacrifice, Durtal stiffened himself and succeeded by an effort in
+keeping back his anxieties and overthrowing his troubles, and escaping
+from himself he ardently implored Our Lady to intervene so that he
+might, for this hour at least, without wandering, pray in peace.
+
+And when he had finished his prayer he lifted his eyes and looked with a
+start at the priest who was advancing, preceded by a lay brother, to
+celebrate mass.
+
+This was not the curate whom he knew, but another, younger, very tall,
+with a majestic air, with cheeks pale and shaven, and a bald head.
+
+Durtal was watching him solemnly marching towards the altar with his
+eyes cast down when he suddenly noticed a violet flame light up his
+fingers.
+
+"He wears an episcopal ring, he is a bishop," thought Durtal, who leant
+forward to see the colour of the vestment underneath the chasuble and
+alb. It was white.
+
+"Then it is a monk," he said, astounded; and, mechanically, he turned
+towards the statue of the Virgin, summoning the oblate by a hasty
+glance, who came to sit beside him.
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"Dom Anselm, the abbot of the monastery."
+
+"He who was ill?"
+
+"Yes, he will give us communion."
+
+Durtal fell upon his knees, suffocated, almost trembling: he was not
+dreaming! Heaven was answering him by the sign on which he had fixed.
+
+He ought to abase himself before God, to be overwhelmed at His feet, to
+spread himself in a passion of gratitude; he knew and wished it! And
+without knowing how, he was exercising himself in seeking natural causes
+which might account for the substitution of a monk for the priest.
+
+No doubt it was very simple; for on the whole, before admitting a kind
+of miracle.... "anyhow, I will keep an open mind, for after the ceremony
+I wish to clear the matter up."
+
+And he repelled the insinuations which crept into him. Well! what
+interest could there be in the motive of this change? there clearly must
+be a motive, but it was only a consequence, an accessory; the important
+point was the supernatural will which had produced it. "In any case you
+have obtained more than you asked; you have even a better than the
+simple monk you wished for, you have the abbot of La Trappe himself!"
+And he cried: "Oh, to believe, to believe like these poor lay brothers,
+not to be endowed with a soul which is blown about by every wind; to
+have the faith of a child, an immovable faith, a faith which cannot be
+rooted up! Ah, Father, Father, bury it, rivet it in me!"
+
+And such was his enthusiasm that he came out of himself; all around him
+seemed to disappear and he cried, stammering, to Christ: "Lord, go not
+far from me. Let Thy pity curb Thy justice; be unjust, forgive me;
+receive Thy poor bedesman for communion, the poor in spirit!"
+
+M. Bruno touched his arm, and with a glance invited him to accompany
+him. They went up to the altar and knelt upon the flagstones, then, when
+the priest had blessed them, they knelt closer on the single step, and
+the lay brother handed them a napkin, for there was no bar or cloth.
+
+And the abbot of La Trappe gave them the communion.
+
+They returned to their places. Durtal was in a state of absolute torpor;
+the Sacrament had, in a manner, anĉsthetized his mind; he fell on his
+knees at his bench, incapable even of unravelling what might be moving
+within him, unable to rally and pull himself together.
+
+And all of a sudden the impression came over him that he was suffocating
+and wanted air; the mass was finished; he rushed out and ran to his
+walk; there he wished to take an account of himself and he found
+nothing.
+
+And in front of the cross pond, in whose waters the Christ was drowning,
+there came over him an infinite melancholy, a vast sadness.
+
+It was a true syncope of the soul; it lost consciousness; and when it
+came to itself, he was astonished that he had not felt an unknown
+transport of joy; then he dwelt on a troublesome recollection, on the
+all too human side of the deglutition of a God; the Host had stuck
+against his palate, and he had had to seek it with his tongue and roll
+it about like a pancake in order to swallow it.
+
+Ah! it was still too material! he only wanted a fluid, a perfume, a
+fire, a breath!
+
+And he tried to explain to himself the treatment that the Saviour made
+him follow.
+
+All his anticipations had returned; it was the absolution and not the
+communion which had worked. When with the confessor he had very clearly
+perceived the presence of the Redeemer; all his being had, in a manner,
+been injected with divine effluvia, and the Eucharist had only brought
+him suffocation and trouble.
+
+It seemed that the effects of the two Sacraments had changed places the
+one with the other; they had worked the wrong way with him; Christ had
+been perceptible to his soul before and not afterwards.
+
+"But it is easy enough to see," he reflected, "that the great question
+for me is to have an absolute certainty of my forgiveness! By a special
+favour, Jesus has ratified my faith in the healing power of Penance. Why
+should He have done more?"
+
+"And then, what bounties would He reserve for His saints? After all I am
+astonishing. It is too much that I should wish to be treated as He
+certainly treats Brother Anacletus and Brother Simeon."
+
+"I have obtained more than I deserve. And what an answer I had, this
+very morning? Yes, indeed, but why should such advances end suddenly in
+this recoil?"
+
+And making his way towards the abbey to eat his bread and cheese, he
+said to himself: "My error towards God is to be always arguing, when I
+ought to adore stupidly as these monks here do. Ah! to be able to keep
+silence, silence to one's self, that is indeed a grace!"
+
+He reached the refectory, which, as a rule, he had to himself, M. Bruno
+never coming to the meal at seven o'clock in the morning. He was
+beginning to cut himself a piece of bread, when the father guest-master
+appeared.
+
+He had a whetstone and some knives in his hand, and smiling at Durtal,
+he said: "I am going to polish the knives of the monastery, for they
+want it badly." And he placed them on a table in a small room attached
+to the refectory.
+
+"Well, are you satisfied?" he said, on coming back.
+
+"Certainly--but, what happened this morning, how is it I was
+communicated by the abbot of La Trappe, when I should have been by the
+curate who dines with me?"
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the monk, "I was as much surprised as you. On waking,
+the Father Abbot suddenly declared that he must say mass this morning.
+He got up in spite of the observations of the prior, who as a doctor,
+forbade him to leave his bed. Neither I, nor any one else, knows what
+took him. Then they told him that a retreatant would communicate and he
+answered 'Just so, I shall communicate him.' And then M. Bruno took the
+opportunity of also approaching the Sacrament, for he loves to receive
+our Saviour from the hands of Dom Anselm."
+
+"And this arrangement also satisfied the curate," the monk went on,
+smiling; "for he left La Trappe at an earlier hour this morning and has
+been able to say his mass in a parish where he was expected.... By the
+way, he told me to make his excuses to you for not having been able to
+bid you good-bye."
+
+Durtal bowed. "There is no doubt about it," he thought, "God wished to
+give me an unmistakable answer."
+
+"And your health?"
+
+"It is good, father; I am astounded; my digestion has never been so good
+as it is here; to say nothing of the fact that the neuralgia, which I
+feared so much, has spared me."
+
+"That shows that Heaven protects you."
+
+"Yes, indeed. But now that I remember it, I have long wished to ask you
+this--how are your offices arranged? They do not correspond with those
+printed in my prayer-book."
+
+"No, they differ from yours, which belong to the Roman ritual. At the
+same time, the Vespers are almost similar, except sometimes the lessons,
+and then what may put you out is that ours are often preceded by the
+Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. As a general rule we have a psalm less in
+the office, and the lessons are nearly always short.
+
+"Except," Father Etienne went on, smiling, "in Compline, the very one
+you recite. Thus you may have noticed we know nothing of 'In manus tuas,
+Domine,' which is one of the few short lessons sung in parish churches.
+
+"We have also a special Proper of Saints; we celebrate the commemoration
+of the Blessed of our order which you will not find in your books. In
+fact we follow the letter of the monastic breviary of Saint Benedict."
+
+Durtal had finished his breakfast. He rose, fearing to trouble the
+father by his questions.
+
+One word of the monk, however, was troubling his brain, that relating to
+the prior as a doctor; and before going out he spoke of this again to
+Father Etienne.
+
+"No--the Reverend Father Maximin is not a doctor, but he understands
+simples very well, and he has a small pharmacy which is enough as long
+as no one is seriously ill."
+
+"And in that case?"
+
+"In that case the practitioner can be called in from one of the nearest
+towns, but no one is ever so ill as that; or else the end is approaching
+and the doctor's visit would be useless...."
+
+"So on the whole the prior looks after soul and body at La Trappe."
+
+The monk signified assent.
+
+Durtal went out. He hoped to get rid of his suffocation by a long walk.
+
+He took a road which he had not been along before, and came out on a
+glade where stood the ruins of an ancient convent, some bits of wall,
+truncated columns and capitals in the Roman style; unhappily these
+remains were in a deplorable condition, rough, covered with moss and
+riddled with holes like pumice stones.
+
+He went on and came to the end of a long walk, at the top of which was a
+pond five or six times as large as the small one in the form of a cross,
+which he frequented.
+
+The walk was planted with old oaks on each side, and in the middle, near
+a wooden bench, stood a cast-iron statue of the Virgin.
+
+He groaned as he looked at it. The crime of the church followed him once
+more; even in this little chapel so full of divine compassion, all the
+statues came from the religious bazaars of Paris or Lyons.
+
+He took his position below, near the pond whose banks were bordered by
+reeds surrounded by tufts of osiers; and he amused himself by examining
+the colours of these shrubs, with their smooth green leaves and stalks
+of citron yellow, or blood red, noticing the curling water which began
+to foam with a gust of wind. And the martins skimmed it, touching it
+with the tips of their wings from which drops of water fell like pearls
+of quicksilver. And the birds rose whirling above and giving out their
+cries of weet, weet, weet, while the dragon-flies shone brightly in the
+air which they slashed with blue flames.
+
+"Peaceful refuge!" thought Durtal; "I ought to have come to rest here
+before." He sat down on a bed of moss and interested himself in the
+noiseless and active life of the waters. Now the splash and flash of the
+turn of a leaping carp; now great spiders skating on the surface, making
+little circles and driving one against another, stopping, going back and
+making new rounds; then, near him on the ground, Durtal noticed jumping,
+green grasshoppers with vermilion bellies, or, scaling the oaks,
+colonies of queer insects on whose backs a devil's head was painted in
+red lead on a black ground.
+
+And above all that, if he raised his eyes, there was the silent upturned
+sea of heaven, a blue sea crested with surging white clouds like waves;
+and at the same time this firmament moved in the water where it billowed
+under a blueish gray glass.
+
+Durtal felt himself expand as he smoked cigarettes; the melancholy which
+had oppressed him since the dawn began to melt away, and joy crept into
+him as he felt his soul was washed in the pool of the Sacraments and
+dried in the air of a cloister. And he was at once happy and uneasy;
+happy, for the meeting he had had with the father guest-master, had
+removed all the doubts he had entertained as to the supernatural side to
+the sudden change of a priest for a monk to communicate him; happy,
+also, to know that not only had Christ not repulsed him in spite of all
+the disorders of his life, but that He was encouraging him and giving
+him pledges, ratifying the signs of His favours by perceptible acts. And
+nevertheless he was uneasy, for he knew himself to be barren, and felt
+that it was necessary for him to be grateful for this goodness by a
+struggle with himself and an entirely new existence differing completely
+from that he had hitherto led.
+
+"Well, we shall see!" and he went off to the office of Sext almost
+calmed, and thence to dinner, where he found M. Bruno.
+
+"We will go for a walk to-day," said the oblate, rubbing his hands.
+
+Durtal looked at him with astonishment.
+
+"Yes, indeed, I thought that after a communion a little air outside the
+walls would do you good, and I proposed to the Reverend Father Abbot to
+free you from the rule for to-day, if the offer is not disagreeable to
+you."
+
+"I gladly accept, and thank you sincerely for your kind attention," said
+Durtal.
+
+They dined off a soup made with oil in which a stick of cabbage and some
+peas were swimming; it was not bad; but the bread made at La Trappe
+reminded him, when stale, of the bread in the siege of Paris, and made
+the soup turn sour.
+
+Then they tasted an egg with sorrel and some rice steeped in milk.
+
+"If it suits you," said the oblate, "we will begin by paying a visit to
+Dom Anselm, who has expressed a wish to know you."
+
+And M. Bruno led Durtal through a labyrinth of passages and staircases
+to a small cell where the abbot was. He was dressed like the fathers in
+a white robe and a black scapular; only at the end of a violet cord he
+bore on his breast an abbot's cross of ivory, in the centre of which,
+under a round glass, some relics were inserted.
+
+He gave his hand to Durtal and begged him to sit down.
+
+Then he asked if the food seemed to be enough for him. And on receiving
+a reply in the affirmative from Durtal he inquired if the long silence
+did not weigh upon him too much.
+
+"Not at all, this solitude suits me perfectly."
+
+"Well," said the abbot, laughing, "you are one of the few laymen who
+have borne our rule so easily. Generally those who have tried to make a
+retreat here have been devoured by home sickness and spleen, and have
+had but one idea, to get away."
+
+"Let us see," he said after a pause; "it is not possible, all the same,
+that such a sudden change of habits should not bring with it some
+painful privations; there must be at least one which you feel above all
+the others?"
+
+"True, I feel the want of being able to light a cigarette whenever I
+like."
+
+The abbot answered smiling, "But I suppose you have not been entirely
+without smoking, since you came here?"
+
+"I should tell a lie if I said I had not smoked in secret."
+
+"Why, bless me, tobacco was not foreseen by St. Benedict; there is no
+mention of it in his rule, and I am therefore free to allow its use; so
+smoke as many cigarettes as you like without being uneasy."
+
+And Dom Anselm added:
+
+"I hope shortly to have a little more time to myself, unless, indeed, I
+am obliged to keep my room, in that case I shall be happy to have a
+longer talk with you."
+
+And the monk, who seemed exhausted, shook them by the hand.
+
+Going down into the court with the oblate Durtal exclaimed,
+
+"The Father Abbot is charming, and quite young."
+
+"He is hardly forty."
+
+"He appears to be really ill."
+
+"Yes, he is not well, and he required no common energy to say his mass
+this morning; but let us see, we will first of all visit the grounds of
+La Trappe which you can hardly have been over completely, then we will
+leave the enclosure and push on to the farm."
+
+They started, skirting the remains of the ancient abbey, and as they
+walked, turning by the piece of water near which Durtal had been seated
+in the morning, M. Bruno entered into explanations about the ruins.
+
+"This monastery was founded in 1127 by St. Bernard, who installed the
+Blessed Humbert as abbot, an epileptic Cistercian, whom he had cured by
+a miracle. At that time there were apparitions in the convent; a legend
+relates that two angels came and cut one of the lilies planted in the
+cemetery every time one of the monks died.
+
+"The second abbot was the Blessed Guerric, who was famous for his
+knowledge, his humility and his patience in enduring evils. We possess
+his relics and they are enclosed in the shrine under the high altar.
+
+"But the most remarkable of the superiors, who succeeded each other here
+in the middle ages, was Peter Monoculus, whose story was written by his
+friend, the member of the synod, Thomas de Reuil.
+
+"Pierre, called Monoculus, or the one-eyed, was a saint thirsting for
+austerities and sufferings. He was assailed by horrible temptations at
+which he laughed. Exasperated, the Devil attacked his body and, by fits
+of neuralgia, broke his skull, but Heaven came to his aid and cured it.
+By shedding tears from a spirit of penitence, Peter lost an eye, and he
+thanked our Lord for this blessing, 'I had' he said, 'two enemies; I
+have escaped the first, but the one I retain troubles me more than the
+one I have lost.'
+
+"He worked miracles of healing. The king of France, Louis VII.,
+venerated him so much that, on seeing the empty eyelid, he wished to
+kiss it. Monoculus died in 1186; they soaked linen cloths in his blood,
+and washed his entrails in wine which was distributed, for the mixture
+was a powerful remedy.
+
+"The property of the abbey was then immense; it comprised all the
+country which surrounds us, kept up several lazar houses in the
+neighbourhood, and was the home of more than three hundred monks.
+Unfortunately what happened to others happened to Notre-Dame de l'Atre.
+Under the rule of abbots in commendam it declined, and it was dying with
+only six religious to look after it when the Revolution suppressed it.
+The church was then pulled down and afterwards replaced by the rotunda
+chapel.
+
+"Only in 1875 the present house, which I think dates from 1733, was
+reconciled and became a monastery again. Trappists were brought here
+from Sainte Marie de la Mer, in the diocese of Toulouse, and this small
+colony has made Notre-Dame de l'Atre the Cistercian nursery you see.
+
+"Such, in few words, is the history of the convent," said the oblate.
+"As for the ruins they are buried underground, and no doubt precious
+fragments might be discovered, but for want of money and men no
+excavations have been made.
+
+"In addition to the broken columns and the capitals we passed, there
+remains from the old church a large statue of the Virgin which has been
+erected in one of the corridors of the abbey; besides this there are two
+angels fairly well preserved and which you may see down there at the end
+of the cloister in a small chapel, hidden behind a curtain of trees."
+
+"A virgin, before which St. Bernard may possibly have knelt, ought
+surely to have been put in the church on the altar dedicated to Mary,
+for the coloured statue, which surmounts it, is of crying
+ugliness--like that one also," said Durtal, pointing out in the distance
+the cast-iron Madonna which towered above the pond.
+
+The oblate bowed his head and did not reply.
+
+"Do you know," exclaimed Durtal, who in the face of this silence did not
+persist and changed the conversation, "do you know that I envy you
+living here?"
+
+"It is certain that I do not deserve this favour, for, on the whole, the
+cloister is less an expiation than a reward; it is the only place where,
+far from the world and near heaven, the only place where a man may give
+himself up to this mystic life which only develops in solitude and
+silence."
+
+"Yes, and if possible, I envy you yet more that you should have had the
+courage to venture into regions which, I confess, frightened me. And I
+know so well that, in spite of the spring-board of prayers and fasts, in
+spite of the green house, or orchid house atmosphere, wherein mysticism
+is grown, I should wither away in these regions without ever expanding
+again."
+
+The oblate smiled. "What do you know about it?" he replied, "the thing
+is not done in an hour; the orchid you speak of does not flower in a
+day; the advance is so slow, that mortifications space themselves out,
+fatigues are distributed over years, and, on the whole, are easily
+borne.
+
+"As a general rule it is necessary, to cross the distance which
+separates us from the Creator, to go through three grades to attain that
+science of Christian perfection which is called mysticism; we must live
+in turn the life of Purification, of Illumination and of Unity--to join
+the uncreated Good and be poured out in Him.
+
+"It matters little that these three grand phases of ascetic existence
+subdivide themselves into an infinity of stages; which are degrees
+according to Saint Bonaventure, dwelling places according to Saint
+Teresa, steps according to Saint Angela; they may vary in length and
+number, according to the will of the Lord and the temperament of those
+who go through them. It is not disputed that the journey of the soul
+towards God includes, first, perpendicular and breakneck roads--these
+are the roads of the life of Purification--next, narrower paths still,
+but well marked out and accessible--these are the paths of the life of
+Illumination--at length, a wide road almost smooth, the road of the
+life of unity, at the end of which the soul throws itself into the
+furnace of Love, and falls into the abyss of the most adorable Infinity!
+
+"On the whole, these three ways are successively reserved to those who
+start in Christian asceticism, to those who practise it, and finally to
+those who attain to the supreme end, the death of self and the life in
+God.
+
+"Long," pursued the oblate, "I have placed my desires beyond the
+horizon, yet I progress little; I am scarcely disengaged from the life
+of Purification, scarcely...."
+
+"And you do not fear--how shall I say--material infirmities, for if at
+last you succeed in attaining the limits of contemplation, you risk the
+ruin of your body for ever. Experience seems to show, in effect, that
+the deified soul acts on the constitution and brings incurable
+troubles."
+
+The oblate smiled. "In the first place I should, no doubt, fail to
+attain to the last degree of initiation, the extreme point of mysticism;
+then, supposing I attain it, what would corporal accidents be in the
+face of such results?
+
+"Let me also assure you that these accidents are neither so frequent nor
+so certain as you seem to think.
+
+"A man may be a great mystic, or an admirable saint, and not be the
+subject of visible phenomena for those who surround him. Would you not
+think, for example, that levitation, or the flight of bodies in the air,
+which seems to constitute the highest state of rapture, is one of the
+rarest? Whom can you quote to me? Saint Teresa, Saint Christina the
+Admirable, Saint Peter of Alcantara, Dominic of Mary Jesus, Agnes of
+Bohemia, Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament, the Blessed Gorardesca of
+Pisa, and above all Saint Joseph of Cupertino, who raised himself at
+will from the ground. But they are ten or twenty out of thousands of the
+elect!
+
+"And note well that these gifts do not prove their superiority over
+other Saints. Saint Teresa declares expressly: it must not be imagined
+that anyone, blessed as he may be in this respect, is better than those
+who are not so blessed, for our Lord directs each one according to his
+particular need.
+
+"And then the doctrine of the Church is seen in the untiring prudence
+shown in the canonization of the dead. Qualities and not extraordinary
+acts decide this; for the Church, miracles themselves are only secondary
+proofs, for she knows that the Spirit of Evil imitates them.
+
+"In the lives of the Blessed you will find, too, the most unusual deeds,
+and more amazing phenomena than in the biographies of the Saints. These
+phenomena have rather hindered than helped them. After having beatified
+them for their virtues, the Church has put off--and no doubt for a long
+time--their promotion to the sovereign dignity of Saints.
+
+"It is difficult, on the whole, to formulate an exact theory on this
+subject, for if the cause, if the mental action is the same in all
+mystics, it differs a little, as I have said, according to God's will
+and the character of the subjects; the difference of sex often changes
+the form of the mystic flow, though in essence it never varies; the rush
+of the Spirit from on High may produce different effects, but is none
+the less identical.
+
+"The only observation we dare make in these matters is that women, as a
+rule, are more passive and less reserved, while men resist more
+violently the wishes of Heaven."
+
+"That makes me think," said Durtal, "that even in religion there are
+souls which seem to have mistaken their sex. Saint Francis of Assisi,
+who was all love, had rather the feminine soul of a nun, and Saint
+Teresa, who was the most attentive of psychologists, had the virile soul
+of a monk. We might correctly speak of Saint Francis as a woman and
+Saint Teresa as a man."
+
+The oblate smiled. "To return to your question," he resumed, "I do not
+at all believe that illness can be the necessary consequence of
+phenomena aroused by the impetuous force of mysticism."
+
+"But look at Saint Colette, Lidwine, Saint Aldegonde, Jane-Mary of the
+Cross, Sister Emmerich and how many more who passed their existence,
+half paralyzed, upon a bed! They are a small minority. Besides, the
+Saints or Blessed ones whose names you quote were victims of
+substitution, expiating the sins of others, a part God had reserved to
+them; it is not, therefore, surprising that they were bed-ridden and
+cripples, and were constantly half dead.
+
+"No, the truth is that mysticism can modify the needs of the body,
+without, for all that, having much effect on, or destroying the health.
+I know well, you would answer me with that terrible phrase of Saint
+Hildegarde, a phrase at once just and sinister: 'the Lord dwells not in
+the bodies of the healthy and vigorous,' and you might add, with Saint
+Teresa, that evils are more frequent in the last of the castles of the
+soul. Yes, but these saints hoist themselves on the summit of life and
+retain God in a permanent manner in their carnal shell. Having reached
+this point, nature, too feeble to support a perfect state, gives way,
+but, I assert again, these cases are an exception and not a rule. And,
+alas, such maladies are not contagious.
+
+"I am quite aware," resumed the oblate, after a pause, "that the very
+existence of mysticism is resolutely denied by some who in consequence
+can never admit the possibility of any influence over the bodily organs,
+but the experience of this supernatural reality is from all time, and
+proofs abound.
+
+"Let us take the stomach for example. Well, under the heavenly
+influence, it becomes transformed, omits all earthly nourishment and
+consumes the Holy Species only.
+
+"Saint Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno lived for years
+exclusively on the Sacrament; and this gift devolved equally upon Saint
+Colette, Saint Lidwine, Dominic of Paradise, Saint Columba of Rieti,
+Mary Bagnesi, Rose of Lima, Saint Peter of Alcantara, Mother Agnes of
+Langeac and on many others.
+
+"Under the divine impress the senses of smell and taste presented no
+less strange metamorphoses. Saint Philip Nevi, Saint Angela, Saint
+Margaret of Cortona recognized a special taste in unleavened bread, when
+after the consecration there was no longer any wheat, but the very flesh
+of Christ. Saint Pacomius knew heretics by their foul smell; Saint
+Catherine of Siena, Saint Joseph of Cupertino and Mother Agnes of Jesus
+discovered sins by their evil odours; Saint Hilarion, Saint Lutgarde,
+Gentilla of Ravenna, could tell merely by the scent of those whom they
+met what faults they had committed.
+
+"And the Saints themselves, whether living or dead, exhaled powerful
+perfumes.
+
+"When Saint Francis de Paul and Venturini of Bergamo offered the
+Sacrifice they smelt sweet. Saint Joseph of Cupertino secreted such
+fragrant odours that his track could be followed; and sometimes it was
+during illness that these aromas were diffused.
+
+"The pus of Saint John of the Cross and of the Blessed Didée gave forth
+strong and distinct scent of lilies; Barthole, the tertiary, gnawed to
+the bones by leprosy, gave out pleasant emanations, and the same was the
+case with Lidwine, Ida of Louvain, Saint Colette, Saint Humiliana,
+Maria-Victoria of Genoa, Dominic of Paradise, whose wounds were boxes of
+perfume, whence fresh scents escaped.
+
+"And thus we can enumerate organs and senses one after another, and
+declare marvellous effects. Without speaking of those faithful stigmata
+which open or shut according to the Proper of the liturgical year, what
+is more astounding than the gift of bilocation, the power of doubling
+oneself, of being in two places at the same time, at the same moment?
+And yet what numerous examples exist of this incredible fact: many are
+celebrated, amongst others those of Saint Antony of Padua, Saint Francis
+Xavier, Marie of Agreda, who was at the same time in her monastery in
+Spain and in Mexico when she was preaching to infidels, Mother Agnes of
+Jesus, who came to visit M. Olier at Paris without leaving her convent
+at Langeac. And, again, the action from on High seems singularly
+energetic when it takes hold of the central organ of circulation, the
+motor which drives the blood into all parts of the body.
+
+"Numbers of the elect had such a burning heart that the linen they wore
+was singed; the fire which consumed Ursula Benincasa, the foundress of
+the Theatines, was so strong that this saint breathed columns of smoke
+as soon as she opened her mouth; Saint Catherine of Genoa dipped her
+feet or her hands in iced water and the water boiled; snow melted round
+Saint Peter of Alcantara, and, one day when the blessed Gerlach was
+crossing a forest in the depth of winter he advised his companion, who
+walked behind him, and who could not go on, as his legs were numb, to
+put his feet into his footsteps, and immediately he ceased to feel cold.
+
+"I will add that certain of these phenomena, which make freethinkers
+smile, have been renewed and have been verified quite recently.
+
+"Linen scorched by the fire of the heart has been observed by Dr.
+Imbert-Gourbeyre on the stigmatized Palma d'Oria, and phenomena of high
+mysticism, which no science can explain, were watched in the case of
+Louise Lateau, minute by minute, and noted and controlled by Professor
+Rohling, Dr. Lafebvre, Dr. Imbert Gourbeyre, Dr. de Noüe, by medical
+delegates from all countries....
+
+"But here we are," said the oblate; "excuse me, I will go first to show
+you the way."
+
+They had left the enclosure as he spoke, and cutting across the fields,
+reached an immense farm. Trappists bowed respectfully as they entered
+the court yard. M. Bruno, addressing himself to one of them, asked him
+to be good enough to take them over the property.
+
+The lay brother took them to the cattle sheds, then to the stables, then
+to the poultry yard; Durtal, who was not interested in such sights,
+confined himself to admiring the grace of these good people. No one
+spoke, but they replied to questions by signs and winks.
+
+"But how do they communicate with each other?" asked Durtal, when they
+were outside the farm.
+
+"You have just seen; they correspond by signs; they have a simpler
+alphabet than that of the deaf and dumb, for each idea that they may
+require to express for their common work is foreseen.
+
+"Thus the word 'wash' is translated by one hand tapping on the other;
+the word 'vegetable' by scratching the left forefinger; sleep is feigned
+by leaning the head upon the fist; drink by raising a closed hand to the
+lips. And for more spiritual expressions they employ a like method.
+Confession is translated by a finger kissed and laid upon the heart;
+holy water by five fingers of the left hand clasped on which a cross is
+made with the thumb of the right hand; fasting by fingers which close
+the mouth; the word 'yesterday' by turning the arm back towards the
+shoulder; shame by covering the eyes with the hand."
+
+"But supposing they wished to indicate me, who am not one of themselves,
+how would they set about it?"
+
+"They would use the sign of 'guest,' which they make by stretching out
+the hand and bringing it near the body."
+
+"That means that I come to them from far, an open and even transparent
+fact if you like."
+
+They went silently along a walk which led down into the labour fields.
+
+"I have not noticed Brother Anacletus or old Simeon among these monks,"
+exclaimed Durtal, suddenly.
+
+"They are not occupied on the farm; Brother Anacletus is employed in the
+chocolate factory, and Brother Simeon looks after the pigs; both are
+working in the immediate neighbourhood of the monastery. If you like, we
+will go and wish Simeon good-morning."
+
+And the oblate added, "You can tell them, when you go back to Paris,
+that you have seen a real saint, such as existed in the eleventh
+century; he carries us back to the time of St. Francis of Assisi; he is
+in some sense the reincarnation of that astonishing Juniper whose
+innocent exploits the Fioretti celebrate for us. You know that work?"
+
+"Yes; after the Golden Legend it is the book on which the soul of the
+Middle Ages is most clearly impressed."
+
+"But to return to Simeon; this old man is a saint of uncommon
+simplicity. Here is one proof out of a thousand. Several months ago I
+was in the prior's cell when Brother Simeon appeared. He made use of the
+ordinary formula in asking permission to speak, 'Benedicite.' Father
+Maximin replied 'Dominus,' and on this word, which permitted him to
+speak, the brother showed his glasses and said he could no longer see
+clearly.
+
+"'That is not very surprising,' said the prior, 'you have been using the
+same glasses for nearly ten years, and since then your eyes may well
+have become weaker; never mind, we will find the number which suits your
+sight now.'
+
+"As he spoke, Father Maximin mechanically moved the glass of the
+spectacles between his hands, and suddenly he laughed, showing me his
+fingers, which were black. He turned round, took a cloth, cleaned the
+spectacles, and replacing them on the brother's nose, said to him, 'Do
+you see, Brother Simeon?'
+
+"And the old man, astonished, cried 'Yes ... I see!'
+
+"But this is only one side of this good man. Another is the love of his
+beasts. When a sow is going to bring forth, he asks permission to pass
+the night by her, and delivers her, looking after her like his child,
+weeps when they sell his little pigs or when the big ones are sent to
+the slaughter-house! And how all the animals adore him!"
+
+"Truly," the oblate went on, after a silence, "God loves simple souls
+above all, for he loads Brother Simeon with graces. Alone, here, he can
+reabsorb and even prevent the demoniacal accidents which arise in
+cloisters. Then we assist at strange performances: one fine morning all
+the pigs fall on their sides; they are ill and at the point of death.
+
+"Simeon, who knows the origin of these evils, cries to the Devil: 'Wait,
+wait, and you will see!' He runs for holy water, and sprinkles them with
+it, praying the while, and all the beasts who were dying jump up,
+frisking about and wagging their tails.
+
+"As for diabolic incursions into the convent itself, they are but too
+real, and sometimes are only driven back after persistent prayers and
+energetic fastings; at certain times in most convents the Demon sows a
+harvest of hobgoblins of whom no one knows how to get rid. Here, the
+father abbot, the prior, and all those who are priests have failed; it
+was necessary, to give efficacy to the exorcisms, that the humble lay
+brother should intervene; so, to forestall new attacks, he has obtained
+the right to wash the monastery with holy water and to use prayers
+whenever he thinks well to do so.
+
+"He has the power of feeling where the Evil One is hidden, and he
+follows him, tracks him, and finally casts him out."
+
+"Here is the piggery," continued M. Bruno, showing a tumble-down old
+place in front of the left wing of the cloister, surrounded by
+palisades; and he added,
+
+"I warn you, the old man grunts like a pig, but he will not answer your
+questions except by signs."
+
+"But he can speak to his animals?"
+
+"Yes, to them only."
+
+The oblate opened a small door, and the lay brother, all bent, lifted
+his head with difficulty.
+
+"Good-day, brother," said M. Bruno; "here is a gentleman who would like
+to see your pupils."
+
+There was a grunt of joy on the lips of the old man. He smiled and
+invited them by a sign to follow him.
+
+He introduced them into a shed, and Durtal recoiled, deafened by
+horrible cries, suffocated by the pestilential heat of the liquid
+manure. All the pigs jumped up behind their barrier, and howled with
+joy at the sight of the brother.
+
+"Peace, peace," said the old man, in a gentle voice; and lifting an arm
+over the paling, he caressed the snouts which, on smelling him, were
+almost suffocated by grunting.
+
+He drew Durtal aside by the arm, and making him lean over the trellis
+work, showed him an enormous sow with a snub nose, of English breed, a
+monstrous animal surrounded by a company of sucking pigs which rushed,
+as if mad, at her teats.
+
+"Yes, my beauty; go, my beauty," murmured the old man, stroking her
+bristles with his hand.
+
+And the sow looked at him with little languishing eyes, and licked his
+fingers; she ended by screaming abominably when he went away.
+
+And Brother Simeon showed off other pupils, pigs with ears like the
+mouth of a trumpet and corkscrew tails, sows whose stomachs trailed and
+whose feet seemed hardly outside their bodies, new-born pigs which
+sucked ravenously at the teats, larger ones, who delighted in chasing
+each other about and rolled in the mud, snorting.
+
+Durtal complimented him on the beasts, and the old man was jubilant,
+wiping his face with his great hand; then, on the oblate inquiring about
+the litter of some sow, he felt his fingers in a row; replying to the
+observation that the animals were very greedy, by stretching his arms to
+heaven, showing the empty troughs, lifting ends of wood, tearing up
+tufts of grass which he carried to his lips, grunting as if he had his
+muzzle full.
+
+Then he took them into the courtyard, placed them against the wall,
+opened a door beyond, and hid himself. A formidable boar passed like a
+waterspout, upset a wheelbarrow, scattering everything round him with a
+noise like a shell bursting; then he broke into a gallop all round the
+courtyard, and ended by taking a header into a sea of liquid manure. He
+wallowed, turned head over heels, kicked about with his four feet in the
+air, and got up black and disgusting as the inside of a chimney.
+
+After this he halted, grunted a cheerful note, and wished to fawn on the
+monk, who checked him with a gesture.
+
+"Your boar is splendid!" said Durtal.
+
+And the lay brother looked on Durtal with moist eyes as he rubbed his
+neck with his hand, sighing.
+
+"That means they are going to kill him soon," said the oblate.
+
+And the old man acquiesced with a melancholy shake of his head.
+
+They left him, thanking him for his kindness.
+
+"When I think of how this being, who is devoted to the lowest duties,
+prays in church, I long to kneel before him and, like his pigs, kiss his
+hands!" exclaimed Durtal after a silence.
+
+"Brother Simeon is an angelic being," replied the oblate. "He lives the
+Unitive life, his soul plunged, drowned in the divine essence. Under a
+rough exterior an absolutely white soul, a soul without sin, lives in
+this poor body; it is right that God should spoil him! As I have told
+you, He has given him all power over the Demon; and in certain cases He
+allows him also the power of healing by the imposition of hands. He has
+renewed here the wonderful cures of the ancient saints."
+
+They ceased speaking, and, warned by the bells which were ringing for
+Vespers, they moved towards the church.
+
+And, coming to himself again, trying to recover, Durtal remained
+astounded. Monastic life retarded time. How many weeks had he been at La
+Trappe, and how many days since had he approached the Sacraments? that
+was lost in the distance. Ah, life was double in these cloisters! And
+yet he was not tired of it; he had bent himself easily to the hard rule,
+and, in spite of the scanty meals, he felt no sick headaches or failing;
+he had never felt so well!--but what remained was a feeling of stifling,
+of restrained sighs, this burning melancholy for hours, and, more than
+all, this vague anxiety at listening again within himself, and hearing
+united in his person the voices of this Trinity, God, the Devil, and
+Man.
+
+"This is not the peace of the soul I dreamed of--and it is even worse
+than at Paris," he said to himself, recalling the maddening trial of the
+rosary--"and yet--how can I explain it? I am happy here all the same."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Rising, somewhat earlier than his wont, Durtal went down to the chapel.
+The office of Matins was over, but some lay brothers, amongst whom was
+Brother Simeon, were praying on their knees on the ground.
+
+The sight of this holy swine-herd threw Durtal into a long train of
+thought. He tried in vain to penetrate into the sanctuary of that soul,
+hidden like an invisible chapel behind the dunghill rampart of a body;
+he did not even succeed in representing to himself the docile and
+clinging soul of this man, who had attained the highest state to which
+the human creature can reach here below.
+
+"What a power of prayer he has," thought he, as he looked at the old
+man.
+
+He remembered the details of his interview the evening before. "It is
+true," he thought, "that in this monk I find something of the charm of
+that brother Juniper, whose surprising simplicity has come down through
+the ages."
+
+And he brought to mind the adventures of that Franciscan whom his
+companions left one day by himself in the convent, telling him to
+prepare dinner against their return.
+
+Juniper reflected, "What an amount of time is spent in preparing food!
+The brothers who take turns in that work have not even time to
+pray"--and desiring to lighten the work of those who should succeed him
+in the kitchen, he determined to cook such plentiful dishes that the
+community might dine on them for a fortnight.
+
+He lighted all the stoves, procured, we are not told how, enormous
+boilers, filled them with water, threw into them, pell-mell, eggs with
+their shells, chickens with their feathers, vegetables he had neglected
+to trim, and before a fire which would roast an ox, he exerted himself
+to pile up and stir the ridiculous jumble of his stock-pots.
+
+When the brothers came home, and sat down in the refectory, he ran, his
+face browned and his hands burnt, and joyously served up his stew. The
+superior asked him if he were not mad, while he remained stupefied that
+no one gobbled up this astonishing mess. He declared in all humility
+that he thought he was doing a service to his brethren, and only when he
+observed that so much food would be wasted, did he weep hot tears, and
+declare himself a wretch; he cried that he was good for nothing but to
+spoil the property of Almighty God, while the monks smiled, admiring
+this debauch of charity, and the excess of Juniper's simplicity.
+
+"Brother Simeon would be humble enough and simple enough to renew again
+such splendid jokes," thought Durtal, "but better still than the good
+Franciscan, he recalls the memory of that astonishing Saint Joseph of
+Cupertino, of whom the oblate spoke yesterday."
+
+He, who called himself brother Ass, was a charming and poor creature, so
+modest, and so ignorant, that he was turned away wherever he went. He
+passed through life, with open mouth, thrusting himself eagerly against
+all the cloisters that repulsed him. He wandered about unable to perform
+even the lowest tasks. He was, to use a popular expression, a regular
+butter-fingers, and broke whatever he touched. They ordered him to go
+and fetch water, and he wandered without understanding, absorbed in God,
+and at the end, when no one thought about it any more, brought some
+after a month.
+
+A monastery of Capucins which had received him, got rid of him. He went
+his way, vaguely, out of his orbit among the towns, stumbled into
+another convent where he employed himself in taking care of the animals,
+whom he adored, and he rose into a perpetual ecstasy, revealing himself
+as the most singular of wonder workers, putting the demons to flight,
+and healing the sick. He was at once idiotic and sublime; in the
+hagiography he stands alone, and seems to figure there to furnish a
+proof that the soul is identified with Eternal Wisdom, rather by
+ignorance than by science.
+
+"He also loves animals," said Durtal to himself, as he looked at old
+Simeon; "and he too puts to flight the Evil One, and works cures by his
+sanctity.
+
+"In a time when all men are exclusively haunted by the thoughts of
+luxury and lucre, the soul appears extraordinary when divested of its
+bark, as the candid and naked soul of this good monk. He is eighty years
+old and more, and he has led from his youth up the restricted life of
+the Trappists; he probably does not know in what time he lives, nor what
+latitudes he inhabits, whether he is in America or in France, for he has
+never read a newspaper, and outside rumours do not reach him.
+
+"He does not even know the taste of flesh meat or wine; he has no notion
+of money, of which he does not suspect the value nor the appearance; he
+does not imagine how a woman is made; and save for the breeding of his
+pigs, he perhaps cannot even guess the meaning and the consequences of
+the sin of the flesh.
+
+"He lives alone ringed round by silence, and buried in the shade; he
+meditates on the mortifications of the Fathers in the Desert, which are
+read to him as he eats, and the frenzy of their fasts makes him ashamed
+of his miserable repast, and he accuses himself that he is so well to
+do.
+
+"Ah! this Father Simeon is innocent; he knows nothing that we know, and
+knows that of which all others are ignorant; his education has been
+taken in hand by the Lord Himself, who teaches him truths which we
+cannot comprehend, models his soul after heaven, infuses Himself into
+him, possesses him, and deifies him in the union of Blessedness.
+
+"This puts us somewhat at a distance from hypocrites and devout persons;
+as far indeed as modern Catholicism is from Mysticism, for certainly
+that religion is as grovelling on the ground as Mysticism is high!
+
+"And that is true. Instead of directing all our forces to that unknown
+end, of taking our soul to fashion it in that form of a dove which the
+Middle Ages gave to the pyxes; instead of making it the shrine where the
+Host reposes in the very image of the Holy Spirit, the Catholic confines
+himself to trying to conceal his conscience, to deceive his Judge by the
+fear of a salutary hell; he acts not by choice, but by fear: he with the
+aid of his clergy, and the help of his imbecile literature, and his
+feeble press, has made of religion a mere fetishism, a ridiculous
+worship composed of statuettes and alms boxes; candles and
+chromo-lithographs; he has materialized the ideal of Love, in inventing
+an entirely physical devotion to the Sacred Heart.
+
+"What baseness of conception!" continued Durtal, who had come out of the
+chapel, and was strolling along the bank of the great pond. He looked at
+the reeds, which bent like an harvest still green, under a puff of wind;
+then he half saw as he leant forward, an old boat, which bore almost
+effaced on its blueish hull the name "Alleluia." This bark disappeared
+under the tufts of leaves round which were twined the bells of the
+convolvulus, a symbolic flower, since it widens out like a chalice, and
+has the dead white of a wafer.
+
+The scent of the water, at once enticing and bitter, intoxicated him.
+"Ah!" he thought, "happiness certainly consists in being restricted to a
+place closely locked, a prison very confined, or a chapel always open,"
+and he caught himself up: "Ah! there is Brother Anacletus;" the lay
+brother was coming towards him, bending under a hamper.
+
+He passed before Durtal, smiling at him with his eyes: and while he went
+his way, Durtal thought, "This man is a true friend of mine; when I was
+suffering so much before my confession, he expressed all to me in a
+look. To-day when he believes me serener, and more joyous, he is
+content, and shows it to me by a smile; and I shall never speak to him,
+I shall never thank him, I shall never even know who he is, I shall
+perhaps never even see him again.
+
+"In leaving this place, I shall keep a friend, for whom I too feel
+affection; yet neither of us has even exchanged a gesture with the
+other.
+
+"After all," he thought, "does not this absolute reserve make our
+friendship more perfect? it is stamped in the eternal distance, it
+remains mysterious and incomplete, and more certain."
+
+While thinking over these reflections, Durtal went towards the chapel,
+where the Office called him, and thence to the refectory.
+
+He was surprised to find the table laid only for one. "What has happened
+to M. Bruno? Yet I may as well wait a while," and to kill time, he
+occupied himself by reading a printed card, hung upon the wall.
+
+It was a sort of advertisement which began thus:
+
+     "ETERNITY.
+
+     "Fellow sinners, you will die. Be ye always ready.
+
+     "Watch then, pray without ceasing, never forget the Four Last
+     Things which you see here traced
+
+    "Death, the gate of Eternity,
+    Judgment, which decides Eternity,
+    Hell, the abode of unhappy Eternity,
+    Paradise, the abode of blessed Eternity."
+
+Father Etienne interrupted Durtal, telling him that M. Bruno had gone to
+Saint Landry to make some purchases, and would only return at bed-time
+at eight o'clock. "Dine then without waiting, and make haste, or all
+your dishes will be cold."
+
+"And how is the father abbot?"
+
+"Better, he keeps his room still, but he hopes to be able to come down a
+while, the day after to-morrow, and assist at least at some of the
+offices."
+
+And the monk bowed and disappeared.
+
+Durtal seated himself at table, ate some bean broth, swallowed a
+soft-boiled egg and a spoonful of warm beans, then once outside, he
+passed along the chapel, entered it, and knelt before the altar of the
+Virgin; but at once the spirit of blasphemy filled him; he wished,
+whatever it cost him, to insult the Virgin; it seemed to him that he
+would experience a sharp joy, an acute pleasure in soiling her; but he
+restrained himself, he wrinkled his face not to allow the coal-heaver's
+abuse, which was on his lips, to escape.
+
+And he detested these abominations; he revolted against them, strove
+against them with horror; and the impulse became so irresistible, that
+in order to keep silence he was obliged to bite his lips till they bled.
+
+"This is somewhat strong," he said, "to hear grumbling in oneself, the
+contrary of what one is thinking;" but he had need to call to his help
+all his will, he felt that he should yield, and spit out all these
+impurities; wherefore he fled, thinking, that should he find no means of
+resistance, it were better to vomit this filth in the court rather than
+in the church.
+
+And so soon as he quitted the chapel this madness of blasphemy ceased;
+he walked along the pond astonished by the strange violence of the
+attack.
+
+Little by little there came to him the unexplained intuition of a danger
+that menaced him. As a beast that scents a hidden enemy, he looked with
+precaution within himself, and ended by seeing a black point on the
+horizon of his soul, and suddenly, before he had time to reconnoitre,
+and take account of the danger he saw arising, this point extended, and
+covered him with its shadow; there was no more light in him.
+
+He had that minute of unrest which precedes the storm, and in the
+anxious silence of his being, arguments fell like drops of rain.
+
+The painful effects of the Sacrament justified themselves, had he not
+proceeded in such a way that his communion could not but be unfaithful?
+Evidently; instead of collecting and straining himself, he had passed an
+afternoon of revolt and anger; the very evening before he had unworthily
+judged an ecclesiastic whose only wrong was that he took pleasure in the
+vanity of easy jokes. Had he confessed this injustice, and these
+revolts? Not the least in the world; and after the communion still less;
+had he, as he should have done, shut himself up alone with his Guest? He
+had abandoned Him, without thinking more of Him; had quitted his
+innermost cell, had taken a walk in the wood, had not even been present
+at the Offices.
+
+"But come, come, this blame is foolish. I communicated, just as I was,
+on the formal order of the confessor; as for the walk, I did not ask for
+it nor wish for it. M. Bruno, in agreement with the abbot of La Trappe,
+decided it would do me good; I have then nothing to reproach myself
+with; I am blameless.
+
+"This does not prove that you would not have done better to spend the
+day in prayer, in the church.
+
+"But," he cried, "with such a system one could not move, one could not
+eat, nor sleep, for one should never leave the church. There must be
+time for everything, or the devil take it all!
+
+"No doubt, but a more diligent soul would have refused that excursion,
+just because it was pleasant; would have avoided it, out of
+mortification, in a spirit of penance."
+
+"Evidently, but" ... these scruples tortured him; "the fact is," he
+said, "I might have employed my afternoon more wholesomely than that;"
+to believe that he had spent it ill was but a step, and he made it. He
+pelted himself for an hour, sweating with agony, heaping on himself
+imaginary sins, and entering so far on that road that he ended by
+suddenly realizing his position and understanding he was out of the
+right track.
+
+The story of the rosary returned to his memory, and then he blamed
+himself for allowing himself to be again driven into a corner by the
+demon. He began to breathe again, to regain his footing, when other
+attacks equally formidable presented themselves.
+
+It was no longer an insinuation of arguments which ran drop by drop, but
+a furious rain, which threw itself like an avalanche on his soul. The
+storm, of which the wave of scruples was only the prelude, burst in its
+fulness; and in the panic of the first moment, in the violence of the
+tempest, the enemy unmasked his batteries, and struck him to the heart.
+
+He had got no good from that communion, but he was also too young at it.
+Ah! indeed, was he to believe that because a priest uttered five Latin
+words over a bit of unleavened bread, that bread was transubstantiated
+into the flesh of Christ? That a child should accept such nonsense,
+might be possible, but that a man past forty should listen to such
+formidable shams, was excessive; almost disquieting.
+
+And these insinuations lashed him like hail showers: how could bread
+made of wheat before, have only the appearance of wheat afterwards; what
+is flesh that is neither seen nor felt; what is a body, which has such
+ubiquity as to be at the same time on the altars of divers countries;
+what is that power which is annihilated when the Host is not made of
+pure wheat?
+
+And this became a regular deluge which overwhelmed him, and yet like an
+impenetrable pile, that Faith he had acquired without ever having known
+how, remained immovable, disappeared under torrents of interrogation,
+but never stirred.
+
+He revolted, and said to himself: "This only proves that the sacramental
+darkness of the Eucharist cannot be sounded. Moreover, if it were
+intelligible, it would not be divine. If the God whom we serve could be
+comprehended by reason, He could not be worth the trouble of serving,
+said Tauler; and the 'Imitation' declares plainly also at the end of the
+IVth book that if the works of God were such as man's intelligence could
+easily grasp, they would cease to be marvellous, and could not be
+qualified as ineffable."
+
+And a mocking voice replied,
+
+"That is what you call answering, avowing that there is nothing to
+answer."
+
+"In fact," said Durtal, who reflected, "I have been present at
+spiritualistic experiences, where no trickery was possible. It was quite
+evident that there was no fluid from the spectators, no suggestion of
+persons surrounding the table who dictated the responses; then in giving
+its raps, the table expressed itself suddenly in English, though no one
+spoke that language, then a few minutes later, addressing itself to me,
+who was at a distance from it, and consequently was not touching it, it
+told me this time in French, facts which I had forgotten, and I alone
+could know. I am then certainly obliged to suppose an element of the
+supernatural, using a table in guise of an interpreter, to accept if not
+the evocation of the dead, but at least the proved existence of ghosts.
+
+"Then it is not more impossible, more surprising that Christ should
+substitute Himself for a piece of bread, than that a ghost should hide
+and brag in the foot of a table. These phenomena equally put our senses
+to rout; but if one of them be undeniable, and spiritualistic
+manifestation certainly is so, what motives can we invoke to deny the
+other, which is moreover attested by thousands of saints?
+
+"After all," he went on with a smile, "we have already demonstration by
+the absurd, but this may be called demonstration by the abject, for if
+the Eucharistic mystery is sublime, it is not the same with
+spiritualism, which is after all only the latrine of the supernatural!"
+
+"If this were the only enigma," began the voice again, "but all the
+Catholic doctrines are on the same model; examine religion from its
+birth, and see if it do not always issue by an absurd dogma.
+
+"Here is a God, infinitely perfect, infinitely good, a God who is not
+ignorant of past, present, or future. He knew then that Eve would sin;
+therefore of two things, one; either He is not good, in that He
+submitted her to that proof knowing that she had not power to stand it;
+or again, He was not certain of her defeat; in that case He is not
+omniscient, He is not perfect."
+
+Durtal gave no answer to this dilemma; which is in fact difficult to
+resolve.
+
+"Yet," he thought, "we may at once exclude one of these two
+propositions, the latter; for it is childish to concern ourselves about
+the future, when we have to do with God; we judge Him by our miserable
+understanding, and there is for Him neither present nor past, nor
+future; He sees them all at the same moment in light uncreate. For Him
+distance has no figure, and space is nought. It is consequently
+impossible to doubt that the Serpent will conquer. This amputated
+dilemma is then out of order."
+
+"Be it so, but the other alternative remains; what do you make of His
+goodness?"
+
+"His goodness?" And Durtal had need to repeat again the arguments drawn
+from free will, and the promised coming of the Saviour; and he was
+obliged to admit that these answers were weak.
+
+And the voice became more pressing,
+
+"Then you admit original sin?"
+
+"I am obliged to admit it, because it exists. What are heredity and
+atavism, save, under another name, the terrible sin of the beginning?"
+
+"And does it appear to you just that innocent generations should make
+amends now and always for the sin of the first man?"
+
+And as Durtal did not reply, the voice insinuated gently,
+
+"This law is so iniquitous that it seems as if the Creator were ashamed
+of it, and that in order to punish Himself for His ferocity, and not to
+make Himself for ever execrated by His creature, He wished to suffer on
+the Cross, and expiate His crime in the person of His own Son."
+
+"But," cried Durtal, exasperated, "God could not commit a crime and
+punish Himself: were that so, Jesus would be the Redeemer of His Father,
+and not ours; it is madness!"
+
+Little by little he recovered his balance; he recited slowly the
+Apostles' Creed, while the objections which demolished it, pressed one
+after the other within him.
+
+"There is one fact certain," he said to himself, for in all this
+tumult, he was perfectly lucid, "that for the moment we are two persons
+in one. I can follow my reasonings, and I hear on the other side, the
+sophisms my double breathes in me. This duality has never appeared so
+clear to me."
+
+And the attack grew feebler, on this reflection; it might have been
+believed that the enemy now discovered was beating a retreat.
+
+But nothing of the kind; after a short truce, the assault began again on
+another point.
+
+"Are you very sure that you have not suggested and shown the blow to
+yourself? By having wished, you have ended by begetting belief, and by
+implanting in yourself a fixed idea, disguised under the name of grace,
+round which everything now clings. You complain that you did not
+experience sensible joys after your communion; this simply proves that
+you were not careful enough, or that, tired by the excess of the evening
+before, your imagination showed itself unready to play the infatuating
+fairy story you expected from yourself after the mass.
+
+"Moreover, you ought to know that in these questions all depends on the
+more or less feverish activity of the brain and the senses; see what
+takes place in the case of women, who deceive themselves more easily
+than men; for that again declares the difference of conformations, the
+variety between the sexes; Christ gives Himself carnally under the
+appearances of bread; that is mystical marriage, the divine union
+consummated by the way of the lips; He is indeed the spouse of women,
+while we men, without willing it, by the very lodestone of our nature,
+are more attracted by the Virgin. But she does not give herself, like
+her Son, to us; she does not reside in the Sacrament; possession is in
+her case impossible; she is our Mother, but she is not our Spouse, as he
+is the Spouse of virgins.
+
+"We conceive, therefore, that women are more violently duped, that they
+adore better, and imagine more easily the more they are petted.
+Moreover, M. Bruno said to you yesterday, 'Woman is more passive, less
+rebellious to the action of Heaven ...'
+
+"Well, what has that to do with me; what does that prove? that the more
+we love the better we are loved: but if that axiom is false, from the
+earthly point of view, it is certainly exact from the divine point of
+view; which would be monstrous, and would come to this, that the Lord
+would not treat the soul of a Poor Clare better than mine."
+
+There was again a time of rest, and the attack turned and rushed on a
+new place.
+
+"Then you believe in an eternal hell? You suppose a God more cruel than
+yourself, a God who has created people, without their having been
+consulted, without their having asked to be born; and after having
+suffered during their existence, they will be again punished without
+mercy after their death; but consider, if you were to see your worst
+enemy in torture, you would be taken by pity, and would ask pardon for
+him. You would pardon, and the Almighty be implacable; you will admit
+this is to have a singular idea of Him."
+
+Durtal was silent; hell going on infinitely became in fact wearisome.
+The reply that it is legitimate, that punishment should be infinite,
+because rewards are so, was not decisive, since indeed it were the
+property of perfect goodness, to abridge the chastisements and prolong
+the joys.
+
+"But, in fact," he said to himself, "Saint Catherine of Genoa has
+elucidated the question. She explains very well that God sends a ray of
+mercy, a current of pity into hell, that no damned soul suffers as much
+as it deserves to suffer; that if expiation ought not to cease, it may
+be modified, and weakened, and become at length less rigorous, less
+intense.
+
+"She remarks also, that at the moment of its separation from the body,
+the soul becomes obstinate or yields; if it remain hardened and shows no
+contrition for its faults, its guilt cannot be remitted, since, after
+death, free will subsists no more; the will which we possess at the
+moment of quitting the world remains invariable.
+
+"If, on the contrary, it does not persist in those impenitent
+sentiments, a part of the repression will no doubt be removed; and
+consequently is not devoted to a continual gehenna, as that which
+deliberately, while there is yet time, will not return to amendment,
+refuses in fact to lay aside its sins.
+
+"Let us add that according to the saint, God does not even make the soul
+empty to be never polluted by sin, for it goes there of itself; it is
+led there by the very nature of its sins, it flings itself in as into
+its own good; is, if one may say so, naturally engulfed there.
+
+"In fact we may imagine to ourselves a very small hell, and a very large
+purgatory; may imagine that hell is scantily peopled, is only reserved
+for cases of rare wickedness, that in reality the crowd of disincarnate
+souls presses into Purgatory and there endures punishments proportioned
+to the misdeeds it has willed here below. These ideas have nothing which
+cannot be sustained, and they have the advantage of being in accord with
+the ideas of mercy and justice."
+
+"Exactly," replied the voice in railing tones. "Man then will do well to
+constrain himself; he may steal, rob, kill his father, and violate his
+daughter; the price is the same; provided he repent at the last minute,
+he is saved!"
+
+"But no, contrition takes away the eternity of punishment only, and not
+punishment itself; everyone must be punished or rewarded according to
+his works. He who will be soiled by a parricide or an incest will bear a
+chastisement different in pain and length to him who has not committed
+them; equality in expiatory suffering, in reparative pain, does not
+exist.
+
+"Moreover this idea of a purgative life after death is so natural, so
+certain, that all religions assume it. All consider the soul is a sort
+of air balloon, which cannot mount and attain its last end in space
+except by throwing away its ballast. In the religions of the East, the
+soul is re-incarnistic; in order to purify itself it rubs itself against
+a new body, like a blade in sandstone troughs, to brighten it. For us
+Catholics it undergoes no terrestrial avatar, but it lightens and scours
+itself, clears itself in the Purgatory, where God transforms it, draws
+it out, extracts it little by little from the dross of its sins, till it
+can raise itself and lose itself in Him.
+
+"To have done with this irritating question of a perpetual hell, why not
+conceive that divine justice hesitates in the majority of cases to
+pronounce inexorable decrees? Humanity is for the most part composed of
+unconscious rascals and fools, who do not take any count of the reach of
+their faults. These are saved by their complete want of comprehension.
+As for others who rot, knowing what they do, they are evidently more
+blameworthy, but society which hates superior beings takes on itself
+their punishment, humiliates and persecutes them; and it is therefore
+allowed us to hope that our Lord will pity these poor souls so miserably
+pelted during their stay upon earth by a horde of fools."
+
+"Then there is every advantage in being imbecile, since one is spared
+both on earth and in heaven?"
+
+"Ah! certainly, and yet ... and yet.... What is the good of discussion,
+since we cannot frame for ourselves the least idea of the infinite
+justice of a God?"
+
+"Moreover, this is enough, these debates overwhelm me." He tried to
+distract his thoughts from these subjects, and would feign to break the
+obsession, betake himself to Paris; but five minutes had not passed
+before his double returned to the charge.
+
+He entered once more on that halting dilemma which had so recently
+assailed the goodness of the Creator in regard to the sins of man.
+"Purgatory is then exorbitant, for after all," said he, "God knew that
+man would yield to temptations; then why allow them, and above all why
+condemn them? Is that goodness, is that justice?"
+
+"But it is a sophism," cried Durtal, growing angry. "God has left to
+every man his liberty; no one is tempted beyond his power. If in certain
+cases, he allows the seduction to overpass our means of resistance, it
+is to recall us to humility, to bring us back to Him by remorse, for
+other causes which we know not, which it is not His business to show us.
+Then probably those transgressions are appreciated in a different way to
+those which we have practised with our full accord."
+
+"The liberty of man! it is a pretty thing. Yes, let us speak of it, and
+atavism, and our surroundings and diseases of the brain, and of the
+marrow. Is a man driven by the impulses of sickness, overwhelmed by
+troubles of the generative organs, responsible for his acts?"
+
+"But what can be said if under these conditions these acts are imputed
+to him on high. It is after all idiotic always to compare divine justice
+to man's tribunals; for it is exactly the contrary; human judgments are
+often so infamous that they attest the existence of another equity.
+Rather than the proofs of a theodicy, the magistrature proves God; for
+without Him, how can be satisfied that instinct of justice so innate in
+each of us, that even the humblest beast possesses it?"
+
+"Yet," replied the voice, "all this does not hinder the change of
+character according as the stomach does its work ill or well; slander,
+anger, envy are accumulated bile, or faulty digestion; good temper, joy,
+come from a free circulation of blood, the expansion of the body at
+will; mystics are anemo-nervous people; your ecstatics are hysterical
+patients badly-fed, madhouses are full of them; they depend on science
+when visions begin."
+
+All at once Durtal recovered himself, the material arguments were but
+little disquieting, for none could remain standing: all confounded the
+function and the organ, the lodger and the lodging, the clock and the
+hour. Their assertions rested on no base. To liken the happy lucidity
+and unequalled genius of a Saint Teresa to the extravagances of
+nymphomaniacs and other mad women were so obtuse, so clumsy, that it
+could only raise a smile!
+
+The mystery would remain complete; no doctor has been able to discover
+or could discover the psyche in those round or fusiform cells, in the
+white matter or grey substance of the brain. They would recognize more
+or less justly the organs which the soul uses to pull the strings of the
+puppet, which it is condemned to move, but itself remains invisible; it
+has gone, when after death they force open the rooms of its habitation.
+
+"No; these newsmongers have no effect on me," Durtal assured himself.
+
+"But does this one do any better? Do you believe in the utility of life,
+in the necessity of this endless chain, this towage of sufferings, to be
+prolonged for the most part after death? True goodness would have
+consisted in inventing nothing, creating nothing, in leaving all as it
+was, in nothingness, in peace."
+
+The attack turned round on itself, and after apparent variations,
+returned always to the same starting point.
+
+Durtal lowered his head, for this argument dismasted him; all the
+replies which could be imagined were remarkably weak, and the least
+feeble, that which consists in denying to ourselves the right to judge
+because we only see the details of the divine plan, because we can
+possess no general view of it cannot avail against that terrible phrase
+of Schopenhauer: "If God made the world I would not be that God, for
+the misery of the world would break my heart!"
+
+"There is no haggling in the matter," he said to himself. "I can quite
+understand that sorrow is the true disinfectant of souls, yet I am
+obliged to ask myself why the Creator has not invented a less atrocious
+way of purifying us?
+
+"Ah! when I think of the sufferings shut up in madhouses, and hospital
+wards, I am revolted, and inclined to doubt everything.
+
+"If, again, grief were an antiseptic for future misdeeds or a detersive
+for past faults, one might again understand, but now it falls
+indifferently on the bad and on the good; it is blind. The best proof is
+the Virgin who was without spot, and who had not like her Son to expiate
+for us. She consequently ought not to be punished; yet she too underwent
+at the foot of Calvary the punishment exacted by this horrible law.
+
+"Good; but then," replied Durtal, after a silence of reflection, "if the
+innocent Virgin has given us an example, by what right do we who are
+culpable dare to complain?
+
+"No; we must therefore resolve to dwell in darkness, to live surrounded
+by enigmas. Money, love, nothing is clear; chance if it exist is as
+mysterious as Providence, and indeed still more so; it is inexplicable.
+God is at least an origin of the unknown, a key.
+
+"An origin which is itself another secret, a key which opens nothing!
+
+"Ah! it is irritating," he said to himself, "to be thus harassed in
+every sense. Enough of it; besides these are questions which a
+theologian is alone able to discuss; I am unarmed, the game is not
+equal; I will not answer any more."
+
+And he could not but hear a vague laughter which arose in him.
+
+He quitted the garden, and directed his steps towards the chapel, but
+the fear of being seized again by the madness of blasphemy turned him
+away from it. Knowing not whither to go, he regained his cell, saying to
+himself, that he ought not to wrangle thus; yes, but how could he help
+hearing the cavils which rose he knew not whence? He almost shouted
+aloud: "Be silent, let the other speak!"
+
+When he was in his chamber he desired to pray, and fell on his knees at
+his bedside.
+
+This was abominable; for memories of Florence recurred to him. He rose,
+but the old aberrations returned.
+
+He thought of that creature, her strange tastes, her mania for biting
+his ears, for drinking toilet scents in little glasses, for nibbling
+bread and butter with caviare, and dates. She was so wild, and so
+strange; a fool no doubt, but obscure.
+
+"And if she were in this room, before you, what would you do?"
+
+He stammered to himself: "I would try not to yield."
+
+"You lie; admit then that you would send your conversion, the monastery,
+all, to the devil."
+
+He grew pale at the thought; the possibility of his cowardice was a
+punishment. To have communicated, when one was no more certain of the
+future, no more certain of oneself, was almost a sacrilege, he thought.
+
+And he became angry. Up till now he had kept right, but the vision of
+Florence subdued him. He threw himself, in desperation, on a chair, no
+longer knowing what would become of him, gathering what of courage
+remained to him to descend to the church, where the Office was
+beginning.
+
+He dragged himself there, and held himself down, assailed by filthy
+temptations, disgusted with himself, feeling his will yielding, wounded
+in every part.
+
+And when he was in the court he remained overwhelmed, asking himself
+where he could take shelter. Every place had become hostile to him; in
+his cell were carnal memories, outside were temptations against Faith,
+"or rather," he cried, "I carry these with me always. My God, my God! I
+was yesterday so tranquil."
+
+He strolled by chance into an alley, when a new phenomenon arose.
+
+He had had, up to this hour, in the sky within him, a rain of scruples,
+a tempest of doubts, a thunderstroke of lust; now was silence and death.
+
+Complete darkness was within him.
+
+He sought his soul by groping for it, and found it inert, without
+consciousness, almost icy. He had a body living and healthy; all his
+intelligence, all his reason, and his other powers, his other faculties,
+were benumbed little by little, and stopped. In his being there was
+manifested an effect at once analogous and contrary to that which curara
+produces on the organism, when it circulates in the network of the
+blood; the members are paralyzed, no pain is experienced, but cold
+rises, the soul ends by being sequestered alive in a corpse; in this
+case it was the living body that detained a dead soul.
+
+Harassed by fear, he disengaged himself with a supreme effort, he would
+make a visit to himself, see where he was, and like a sailor who
+descends into the hold in a ship that has sprung a leak, he had to step
+backwards, for the gangway was cut, the steps opened upon an abyss.
+
+In spite of the terror which rushed upon him, he hung fascinated over
+the hole, and by fixing the black point he distinguished appearances; in
+a light as of eclipse in rarefied air, he perceived at the basis of
+himself the panorama of his soul, a desert twilight on the horizons that
+approached the night, and under this doubtful light there seemed
+something like bare fields, a marsh heaped with rubbish and cinders; the
+place of the sins torn up by the confessor remained visible, but besides
+the dry darnel of dead vices which grew still, nothing budded.
+
+He saw himself exhausted; he knew that he had no further force to
+extirpate the last roots, and he fancied that he had again to sow the
+seed of virtues, to till this arid soil, manure this dead ground. He
+felt himself incapable of all work, and had at the same time the
+conviction that God rejected him, that God would aid him no more. This
+certainty tore him to pieces. It could not be expressed, for nothing
+could translate the anxiety, the anguish of a state through which he
+must have passed who could understand it. The terror of a child who has
+never left its mother's petticoats, and who is deserted, without
+warning, in the open country in a fog, could only give a vestige of an
+idea of it, and again by reason of his age the child after having felt
+desolate would end by growing calmer, by distracting himself from his
+grief, no longer seeing the danger which surrounds him, while in this
+state is danger, clinging and absolute, the immovable thought of
+abandonment, obstinate fear, which nothing diminishes, nothing appeases.
+
+One dare not advance nor retreat; rather cast oneself on the ground,
+with bowed head, and wait the end of what we know not, and be assured
+that the menaces we ignore, and those at which we guess, are removed.
+Durtal was at this point; he could not return on his steps, for the way
+he had quitted horrified him. He would rather have died than return to
+Paris, there to begin again his carnal experiences, to live again his
+hours of libertinage and lassitude; but if he could not again retrace
+his road, neither could he advance, for the road ended in a blind alley.
+If earth repulsed him, heaven at the same time was closed for him.
+
+He was lying, half on his side, in the darkness, in the shade, he knew
+not where.
+
+And this state was aggravated by an absolute failure to understand the
+causes which brought him there, was exaggerated by the memory of graces
+before received.
+
+Durtal remembered the sweetness of the beginning, the caress of the
+divine touches, the steady progress without obstacles, the encounter
+with a solitary priest, his being sent to La Trappe, the very ease with
+which he bent to the monastic life, the absolution which had such truly
+sensible effects, the rapid and clear answer that he might communicate
+without fear.
+
+And suddenly, without his will, he had in fact failed. He who had till
+then held him by the hand, refused to guide him, cast him off into the
+darkness without a word.
+
+"All is over," he thought; "I am condemned to float here below, like a
+waif which no one wants; no shore is henceforward accessible, for if the
+world refuses me, I disgust God. Ah! Lord, remember the garden of
+Gethsemani, the tragic defection of the Father whom Thou didst implore
+in unspeakable pangs." In the silence which received his cry he gave
+way, and yet he desired to react against this desolation, endeavoured to
+escape from his despair; he prayed, and had again that very precise
+sensation that his petitions did not carry, were not even heard. He
+called her who superintends allegiance, the Mediatrix of pardon, to his
+aid, and he was persuaded that the Virgin heard him no longer.
+
+He was silent and discouraged, while the shade grew still more dense,
+and complete darkness covered him. He did not then suffer any longer in
+the true sense of the word, but it was worse, for this was annihilation
+in the void, the giddiness of a man who is bent over a gulf; and the
+scraps of reasoning which he could gather and knit together in this
+breaking up, ended by branching out into scruples.
+
+He sought for any sins which since his communion might justify such a
+trial, and he could not find them. He even tried to magnify his small
+faults, enlarge his want of patience; he wished to convince himself that
+he had taken a certain pleasure in finding the image of Florence in his
+cell, and he tortured himself so violently that he reanimated the soul,
+which had half fainted, by these moxas, and placed it again, without
+wishing it, in that acute state of scruples, in which it was when the
+crisis declared itself.
+
+And in these brawling reflections he did not lose the sad faculty of
+analysis. He said to himself while gauging himself at a glance: "I am
+like the litter in a circus, trodden down by all the sorrows which go
+and come to play their parts. Doubts about Faith, which seemed to
+stretch into every sense, turned in fact in the same circle. And now
+scruples, from which I thought myself freed, reappear and course through
+me."
+
+How should he explain this? Was he who inflicted this torture on him the
+Spirit of Malice, or God?
+
+That he had been bruised by the Evil One was certain, the very nature of
+his attacks showed his handiwork, but how could this abandonment of God
+be explained, for in fact, the Demon could not prevent the Saviour from
+assisting him, and he was quite obliged to conclude that if he were
+martyrized by the one, the Other took no interest in him, let him be,
+and retired from him completely?
+
+This certainty deduced from precise observations, this reasoned
+assurance, finished him. He cried out from the anguish of it, looking at
+the pond by which he was walking, wishing he might fall in, thinking
+that death by drowning were preferable to such a life.
+
+Then he trembled before the water which attracted him, and carried away
+his sorrows to the charm of the woods. He tried to wear himself out by
+long walking, but he wearied himself without effect, and he ended by
+sinking down worn and broken at the refectory table.
+
+He looked at his plate, with no courage to eat, no desire to drink; he
+breathed hard, and, exhausted as he was, could not keep in one place. He
+rose and wandered in the court till Compline, and there in the chapel,
+where at least he hoped to find some solace, was the crowning point of
+all; the mine went off; the soul, sapped since the morning, exploded.
+
+On his knees, desolate, he tried again to invoke help, and nothing came;
+he choked, immured in so deep a trench, under a vault so thick, that
+every appeal was stifled, and no sound vibrated. Without courage, he
+wept with his head in his hands, and while he complained to God that He
+had brought him thither to punish him in a Trappist monastery, ignoble
+visions assailed him.
+
+Fluids passed before his face, and peopled the space with priapisms. He
+did not see them with the eyes of his body, which were in no degree
+hallucinated, but perceived them outside him, and felt them within him;
+in a word, the touch was external, and the vision internal.
+
+He tried to gaze on the statue of Saint Joseph, before which he kept
+himself, and to see nothing but it, but his eyes seemed to revolve, to
+see only within, and were filled with indecencies. It was a medley of
+apparitions with undecided outlines, and confused colours, which gained
+precision only in those parts coveted by the secular infamy of man. And
+this changed again. The human forms vanished. There remained only, in
+invisible landscapes of flesh, marshes reddened by the fires of what
+sunset it was impossible to say, marshes shuddering under the divided
+shelter of the grasses. Then the sensual spot grew smaller still, but
+remained, and this time did not move; it was the growth of an unclean
+flood, the spreading of the daisy of darkness, the unfolding of the
+lotos of the caverns, hidden at the bottom of the valley.
+
+And there, burning gasps excited Durtal, enwrapped him, stifled him with
+furious gasps which drank his mouth.
+
+He looked in spite of himself, unable to withdraw himself from the
+outrages imposed by these violations, but the body was still and
+remained calm, while the soul revolted with a groan; the temptation was
+then of no effect; but if the tricks only succeeded in suggesting to him
+disgust and horror, they made him suffer beyond measure, while they
+delayed; all the days of his shameful existence came to the surface, all
+these enticements to greedy desires crucified him. Joined to the sum of
+sorrows accumulated since the dawn, the overcharge of these sorrows
+overwhelmed him, and a cold sweat bathed him from head to foot.
+
+He was in agony, and suddenly, as though he had come to overlook his
+ministers, and to see if his orders were carried out, the executioner
+himself entered on the scene. Durtal did not see him, but felt him, and
+it was indescribable. Since he had the impression of a real demoniac
+presence, his whole soul trembled and desired to fly, like a terrified
+bird that clings to the window-panes.
+
+And it fell back exhausted; then unlikely as it may appear, the parts of
+his life were inverted, the body was upright, and held its own,
+commanding the terrified soul, repressed this panic in a furious
+tension.
+
+Durtal perceived very plainly and clearly for the first time the
+distinction, the separation of the soul from the body, and for the first
+time also, he was conscious of the phenomenon of a body, which had so
+tortured its companion by its needs and wants, to forget all its hatred
+in the common danger, and hinder her who resisted it, the habit of
+sinking.
+
+He saw that in a flash, and suddenly all vanished. It seemed that the
+Demon had taken himself off, the wall of darkness which encompassed
+Durtal opened, and light issued from all parts; with an immense impulse
+the "Salve Regina," springing up from the choir, swept aside the
+phantoms, and put the goblins to flight.
+
+The elevated cordial of this chant restored him. He took courage, and
+began again to hope that this frightful desertion might cease; he
+prayed, and his petitions found vent; he understood that they were at
+last heard.
+
+The Office was at an end; he gained the guest-house, and when he
+appeared so worn out and pale before Father Etienne and the oblate, they
+cried: "What is the matter with you?"
+
+He sank on a chair, and endeavoured to describe to them the terrible
+Calvary he had climbed. "This has lasted," he said, "for more than nine
+hours; I wonder that I have not gone mad;" and he added, "Yet I never
+could have believed that the soul could suffer so much."
+
+The face of the father was illuminated. He pressed Durtal's hands and
+said,
+
+"Rejoice, my brother, you have been treated here like a monk."
+
+"How is that?" said Durtal, surprised.
+
+"Yes, this agony, for there is no other word to define the horror of the
+state, is one of the most serious trials which God inflicts on us; it is
+one of the operations of the purgative life. Be happy, for it is a great
+grace which Jesus does to you."
+
+"And this proves that your conversion is good," affirmed the oblate.
+
+"God! But it was not He at any rate who insinuated doubts about the
+Faith, who caused to be born in me that madness of scruples, who raised
+in me that spirit of blasphemy, who caressed my face with disgusting
+apparitions."
+
+"No, but He allows it. It is frightful, I know it," said the
+guest-master. "God conceals Himself, and however you may call on Him, He
+does not answer you. You think yourself deserted, yet He is very near
+you; and while He effaces Himself, Satan advances. He twists you about,
+places a microscope over your faults, his malice gnaws your brain like a
+dull file, and when to all this are joined, to try you to the utmost,
+impure visions...."
+
+The Trappist stopped; then, speaking to himself, he said, slowly,
+
+"It would be nothing to be in presence of a real temptation, of a true
+woman in flesh and bone, but these appearances on which imagination
+works, are horrible!"
+
+"And I used to think there was peace in the cloister!"
+
+"No, we are here on this earth to strive, and it is just in the cloister
+that the Lowest works; there, souls escape him, and he will at all price
+conquer them. No place on earth is more haunted by him than a cell, no
+one is more harassed than a monk."
+
+"A story which is told in the Lives of the Fathers in the Desert, is
+typical from this point of view. One demon only was charged to watch a
+town; and he went to sleep while two or three hundred demons who had
+orders to guard a monastery had no rest, but behaved themselves, here is
+the place for the phrase, like very devils.
+
+"And indeed, the mission to increase the sin of the towns is a sinecure,
+for Satan holds them, though they are not aware of it; all then he has
+to do is to torment them so as to take from them trust in God, since all
+obey him without his taking the least trouble about it.
+
+"And so he keeps his legions to besiege convents where resistance is
+determined. And indeed, you see the way in which he conducts the
+attack."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Durtal, "it is not he who makes you suffer the most; for
+what is worse than scruples, worse than temptations against purity, or
+against the Faith, is the supposed abandonment of Heaven; no, nothing
+can describe that."
+
+"That is what mystical theology calls 'the Night Obscure,'" answered M.
+Bruno.
+
+And Durtal exclaimed,
+
+"Ah! now I am with you; I remember.... That is why Saint John of the
+Cross declares that it is impossible to describe the sorrows of that
+night, and why he exaggerates nothing when he says, that one is then
+plunged alive into hell.
+
+"And I doubted the veracity of his books, I accused him of excess;
+rather he minimized. Only one must have felt this oneself to believe
+it."
+
+"And you have seen nothing," the oblate replied quietly; "you have
+passed through the first portion of that night, through the night of the
+senses; it is terrible enough, as I know by experience, but it is
+nothing in comparison with the Night of the Spirit which sometimes
+succeeds it. That is the exact image of the sufferings which our Lord
+endured in the Garden of Olives, when, sweating blood, He cried at the
+end of His force, 'Lord, let this chalice pass from me.'
+
+"This is so terrible ..." and M. Bruno was silent and grew pale.
+"Whoever has undergone that martyrdom," he said, after a pause, "knows
+beforehand what awaits the damned in another life."
+
+"But," said the monk, "the hour of bed-time has struck. There exists but
+one remedy for all these evils, the Holy Eucharist; to-morrow, Sunday,
+the community approaches the Sacrament; you must join us."
+
+"But I cannot communicate in the state in which I am...."
+
+"Well, then, be up to-night, at three o'clock. I will come for you to
+your cell, and will take you to Father Maximin, who confesses us at that
+time."
+
+And without waiting for his answer, the guest-master pressed his hand
+and went.
+
+"He is right," said the oblate; "it is the true remedy."
+
+And when he had regained his room, Durtal thought,
+
+"I now understand why the Abbé Gévresin made such a point of lending me
+Saint John of the Cross; he knew that I should enter into the 'Night
+Obscure'; he did not dare warn me clearly, for fear of alarming me, and
+yet he would put me on my guard against despair, and aid me by the
+remembrance here of that reading. Only how could he think that in such a
+shipwreck I should remember anything!
+
+"All this makes me think that I have omitted to write to him, and that
+to-morrow I must keep my promise by sending him a letter."
+
+And he thought again of Saint John of the Cross, that extraordinary
+Carmelite who described so placidly that terrible phase of the mystic
+genesis.
+
+He took count of the lucidity, the power of spirit of this saint,
+explaining the most obscure vicissitude of the soul and the least known,
+catching and following the operations of God, who dealt with that soul,
+pressed it in His hands, squeezed it like a sponge, then let it suck up
+again, fill itself out with sorrows, then wrung it again; making it drip
+tears of blood to cleanse it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"No," said Durtal, in a whisper, "I will not take the place of these
+good people."
+
+"But I assure you it is quite the same to them."
+
+And while Durtal was still refusing to go before the lay brothers who
+were waiting their turn for confession, Father Etienne insisted: "I will
+stay with you, and as soon as the cell is free, you will enter."
+
+Durtal was then on the landing of a staircase on every step of which was
+posted a brother kneeling or standing, his head wrapped in his hood, his
+face turned to the wall. All were sifting and closely examining their
+souls.
+
+"Of what sins can they really accuse themselves?" thought Durtal. "Who
+knows?" he continued, perceiving Brother Anacletus, his head sunk on his
+breast, and his hands joined, "who knows if he does not reproach himself
+for the discreet affection he has for me; for in monasteries all
+friendship is forbidden!"
+
+And he called to memory in the "Way of Perfection" of Saint Teresa, a
+page at once glowing and icy in which she cries out on the nothingness
+of human ties, declares that friendship is a weakness, and asserts
+clearly that every nun who desires to see her relations is imperfect.
+
+"Come," said Father Etienne, who interrupted these reflections, and
+pushed him towards the door of the cell out of which a monk came. Father
+Maximin was there, seated close to a prie-Dieu.
+
+Durtal knelt, and told him briefly his scruples and strifes of the
+evening before.
+
+"What has happened to you is not surprising after a conversion; indeed,
+it is a good sign, for those persons alone for whom God has views are
+submitted to these proofs," said the monk slowly, when Durtal had ended
+his story.
+
+And he continued,
+
+"Now that you have no more grave sins, the Demon endeavours to drown you
+by spitting at you. In fact, in these episodes of malice at bay, there
+is for you temptation and no sin.
+
+"You have, if I may sum up what you have said, undergone temptation of
+the flesh, and of Faith, and you have been tortured by scruples.
+
+"Let us leave on one side the sensual visions; such as they have been
+were produced independently of your will, painful no doubt, but
+ineffectual.
+
+"Doubts about Faith are more dangerous.
+
+"Steep yourself in this truth that besides prayer there exists but one
+efficacious remedy against this evil, to despise it.
+
+"Satan is pride; despise him, and at once his audacity gives way; he
+speaks; shrug your shoulders and he is silent. You must not discuss with
+him; however good a reasoner you may be, you will be worsted, for he is
+a most tricky dialectician."
+
+"Yes, but what can I do? I do not wish to listen to him, but I hear him
+all the same. I was obliged to answer him if only to refute him."
+
+"And it was just on that he counted to subdue you; keep this carefully
+in your mind; in order to let you give him an easy throw, he will
+present you at need grotesque arguments, and so soon as he sees you
+confident, simply satisfied with the excellence of your replies, he will
+involve you in sophisms so specious that you will fight in vain to solve
+them.
+
+"No; I repeat to you, had you the best reasons to oppose to him, do not
+riposte, refuse the strife."
+
+The prior was silent; then he began again, quietly,
+
+"There are two ways of getting rid of a thing which troubles you--to
+throw it far away, or let it fall. To throw it to a distance demands an
+effort of which one may not be capable; to let it fall imposes no
+fatigue, is simple, without danger, within the reach of all.
+
+"To throw to a distance implies again a certain interest, a certain
+animation, perhaps even a certain fear; to let it fall is indifference,
+complete contempt; believe me, use this means and Satan will fly.
+
+"This weapon of contempt will be also all-powerful to conquer the
+assault of scruples, if in combats of this nature the person assailed
+sees clear. Unfortunately, the peculiarity of scruples is to alarm
+people, to make them lose at once the clearing breeze, and then it is
+indispensable to have recourse to a priest to defend oneself.
+
+"Indeed," pursued the monk, who had interrupted himself a moment to
+think--"the closer one looks the less one sees; one becomes
+short-sighted the moment one observes; it is necessary to place oneself
+at a certain point of view to distinguish objects, for when they are
+very close they become as confused as if they were far. Therefore in
+such a case we must have recourse to the confessor, who is neither too
+distant, nor too near, who holds himself precisely at the spot where
+objects detach themselves in their relief. Only it is with scruples as
+with certain maladies which, when they are not taken in time, become
+almost incurable.
+
+"Do not allow them, then, to become implanted in you; scruple cannot
+resist being told as soon as it begins. The moment you formulate it
+before the priest it dissolves; it is a kind of mirage which a word
+effaces.
+
+"You will object to me," continued the monk, after a silence, "that it
+is very mortifying to avow delusions which generally are absurd; but it
+is for this very reason that the demon suggests to you less clever
+arguments than foolish. He takes hold of you thus by vanity, by false
+shame."
+
+The monk was silent again; then he continued,
+
+"Scruples not treated, scruples not cured, lead to discouragement which
+is the worst of temptations; for in other cases Satan attacks one virtue
+only in particular, and he shows himself; while in this case he attacks
+all at once, and he hides himself.
+
+"And this is so true that if you are seduced by lust, by the love of
+money, or by pride, you can, in examining yourself, give yourself
+account of the nature of the temptation which exhausts you; in
+discouragement, on the contrary, your understanding is obscured to such
+a degree that you do not even suspect that the state in which you
+succumb is only a diabolic manoeuvre which you must combat; and you let
+go all, you give up the only arm which can save you, prayer, from which
+the demon turns you aside as a vain thing.
+
+"Never hesitate, then, to cut the evil at its root, to take care of a
+scruple as soon as it is born.
+
+"Now tell me; you have nothing else to confess?"
+
+"No, except the indesire for the Eucharist, the languor in which I now
+faint."
+
+"There is some fatigue in your case, for no one can endure such a shock
+with impunity; do not be uneasy about that, have confidence, do not
+attempt to present yourself before God all neat and trim; go to Him
+simply, naturally, in undress even, just as you are; do not forget that
+if you are a servant you are also a son; have good courage, our Lord
+will dispel all these nightmares."
+
+And when he had received absolution, Durtal went down to the church to
+await the hour of mass.
+
+And when the moment for communion came, he followed M. Bruno behind the
+lay brothers. All were kneeling on the pavement, and one after the other
+rose to exchange the kiss of peace, and reach the altar.
+
+Though he repeated to himself the counsels of Father Maximin, though he
+exhorted himself to dismiss all his unrest, Durtal could not help
+thinking as he saw these monks approach the Table, "The Lord will find a
+change when I advance in my turn; after having descended into the
+sanctuaries, He will be reduced to visit hovel." And sincerely, humbly,
+he was sorry for Him.
+
+And as the first time that he approached this peace-giving mystery, he
+experienced a sensation of stifling, as if his heart were too large when
+he returned to his place. As soon as the mass was over, he quitted the
+chapel and escaped into the park.
+
+Then gently, without sensible effects, the Sacrament worked; Christ
+opened, little by little, his closed house and gave it air, light
+entered into Durtal in a flood. From the windows of his senses which had
+looked till then into he knew not what cesspool, into what enclosure,
+dank, and steeped in shadow; he now looked suddenly, through a burst of
+light, on a vista which lost itself in heaven.
+
+His vision of nature was modified; the surroundings were transformed;
+the fog of sadness which visited them vanished; the sudden clearness of
+his soul was repeated in its surroundings.
+
+He had the sensation of expansion, the almost childlike joy of a sick
+man who takes his first outing, of the convalescent, who having long
+crawled in a chamber, sets foot without; all grew young again. These
+alleys, this wood, through which he had wandered so much, which he began
+to know in all their windings, and in every corner, began to appear to
+him in a new aspect. A restrained joy, a repressed gladness emanated
+from this site, which appeared to him, instead of extending as formerly,
+to draw near and gather round the crucifix, to turn, as it were, with
+attention towards the liquid cross.
+
+The trees rustled trembling, in a whisper of prayers, inclining towards
+the Christ, who no longer twisted His painful arms in the mirror of the
+pool, but He constrained these waters, and displayed them before Him,
+blessing them.
+
+They were themselves different; the dark fluid was covered with monastic
+visions, in white robes, which the reflections of clouds left there in
+passing, and the swan scattered them, in a splash of sunlight, making as
+he swam great oily circles round him.
+
+One might have said that these waves were gilt by the oil of the
+catechumens, and the sacred Chrism, which the Church exorcises on the
+Saturday of Holy Week, and above them heaven half-opened its tabernacle
+of clouds, out of which came a clear sun like a monstrance of molten
+gold in a Blessed Sacrament of flames.
+
+It was a Benediction of nature, a genuflection of trees and flowers,
+singing in the wind, incensing with their perfume the sacred Bread which
+shone on high, in the flaming custody of the planet.
+
+Durtal looked on in transport. He desired to cry aloud his enthusiasm
+and his Faith to the landscape; he felt a joy in living. The horror of
+existence counted for nothing when there were such moments, as no
+earthly happiness can give. God alone had the power of thus filling a
+soul, of making it overflow, and rush in floods of joy; and He alone
+could also fill the basin of sorrows, as no event in this world could
+do. Durtal had just tried it; his spiritual sufferings and joys attained
+under the divine imprint an acuteness, which people most humanly happy
+or unhappy cannot even suspect.
+
+This idea brought him back to the terrible distresses of the evening
+before. He endeavoured to sum up what he had been able to observe of
+himself in this Trappist monastery.
+
+First, the clear distinction between body and soul; then the action of
+the demon, insinuating and obstinate, almost visible, while the heavenly
+action remained, on the contrary, dull and veiled, appeared only at
+certain moments, and seemed at others to vanish for ever.
+
+And all this, when felt and understood, had an appearance simple in
+itself, but scarcely explaining itself. The body appearing to throw
+itself forward to the rescue of the soul, and no doubt borrowing from it
+its will, to help it when it fainted, was unintelligible. How a body
+could itself react obscurely, and yet show, all at once, so strong a
+decision that it pressed its companion into a vice, and prevented its
+flight--
+
+"It is as mysterious as the rest," thought Durtal, and as in a dream he
+continued,
+
+"The secret action of Jesus in His Sacrament is not less strange. If I
+may judge by what has happened to me; a first communion exasperates the
+action of the devil, while a second represses it.
+
+"Ah, and how I put myself in line with all my calculations! In taking
+shelter here I thought myself pretty sure of my soul, and that my body
+would trouble me; whereas just the contrary has been the case.
+
+"My stomach has grown vigorous and shown itself fit to support an effort
+of which I should never have thought it capable, and my soul has been
+below everything, vacillating and dry, so fragile, so feeble!
+
+"But we will let all that alone."
+
+He walked about, lifted from earth by a confused joy. He grew vaporized
+in a sort of intoxication, in a vague etherization, in which arose,
+without his even thinking of formulating words, acts of thanksgiving; it
+was an effort of thanks of his soul, of his body, of his whole being, to
+that God whom he felt living in him, and diffused in that kneeling
+landscape which also seemed to expand in mute hymns of gratitude.
+
+The hour which struck by the clock in the portico reminded him it was
+breakfast time. He went to the guest-house, cut himself a slice of bread
+and butter with some cheese, drank half a glass of wine, and was about
+to go out again when he reflected that the horary of the offices was
+changed.
+
+"They must be different from those of the week," he thought; and he went
+up into his cell to consult his placards.
+
+He found only one, that of the rule of the monks themselves, which
+contained the regulations for the Sunday practices for the cloister; and
+he read:
+
+EXERCISES OF THE COMMUNITY FOR ALL ORDINARY SUNDAYS.
+
+          MORNING.
+
+           1.     Rise. Little Office. Prayer till 1.30.
+           2.     Grand Canonical Office chanted.
+           5.30.  Prime, Morning Mass, 6 o'clock.
+           6.45.  Chapter Instructions. Great Silence.
+           9.15.  Asperges, Tierce, Procession.
+          10.     High Mass.
+          11.10.  Sext and special examination.
+          11.30.  Angelus, Dinner.
+          12.15.  Siesta, Great Silence.
+
+
+          EVENING.
+
+           2.     End of Repose. None.
+           4.     Vespers and Benediction.
+           5.45.  Quarter of an hour for Prayer.
+           6.     Supper.
+           7.     Reading before Compline.
+           7.15.  Compline.
+           7.30.  Salve, Angelus.
+           7.45.  Examination of conscience and Retreat.
+           8.     Bed time, Great Silence.
+
+     Note.--After the Cross of September, no siesta. None is at 2
+     o'clock; Vespers at 3; Supper at 5; Compline at 6, and bed time at
+     7.
+
+Durtal copied this rule for his use on a scrap of paper. "In fact," he
+said to himself, "I have to be in chapel at 9.15 for Asperges, High Mass
+and the Office of Sext, afterwards at 2 for None, then at 4 for Vespers
+and Benediction, and lastly at 7.30 for Compline.
+
+"Here is a day which will be occupied, without counting that I got up at
+half-past two this morning," he concluded; and when he reached the
+chapel, about nine o'clock, he found the greater part of the lay
+brothers on their knees, the others saying their rosary; and when the
+clock struck all returned to their place.
+
+Assisted by two fathers in cowls, the prior, vested in a white alb,
+entered, and while the antiphon "Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et
+mundabor" was sung, all the monks in succession defiled before Father
+Maximin, standing on the steps, turning his back to the altar; and he
+sprinkled them with holy water, while they regained their stalls, each
+making the sign of the cross.
+
+Then the prior descended from the altar, and came to the entrance to the
+vestibule, where he dispersed the water crosswise, traced by the
+sprinkler over the oblate, and over Durtal.
+
+At last he vested, and went to celebrate the sacrifice.
+
+Then Durtal was able to think over his Sundays at the Benedictine nuns.
+
+The "Kyrie Eleison" was the same but slower and more sonorous, more
+grave on the prolonged termination of the last word; at Paris the voices
+of the nuns drew it out and put a gloss on it at the same time, turned
+into satin its final sound, rendered it less dull, less spaced, less
+ample. The "Gloria in Excelsis" differed; that of La Trappe was more
+primitive, more mounting, more sombre, interesting by its very
+barbarism, but less touching, for in its forms of adoration, in the
+"Adoramus te," for example, the "te" did not detach itself, did not drop
+like a tear of amorous essence, like an avowal retained by humility on
+the tip of the lips; but it was when the Credo arose, that Durtal could
+uplift himself at ease.
+
+He had never yet heard it so authoritative, and so imposing; it
+advanced, chanted in unison, developing its slow procession of dogmas,
+in sounds well furnished and rigid, of a violet almost obscure, a red
+almost black, growing lighter towards the end, till it expired in a long
+and plaintive Amen.
+
+In following the Cistercian office Durtal could recognize the morsels of
+plain chant still preserved in parish masses. All the part of the Canon,
+the "Sursum Corda," the "Vere Dignum," the Antiphons, the "Pater,"
+remained intact. Only the "Sanctus" and the "Agnus Dei" were changed.
+
+Massive, built up, as it were, in the Roman style, they draped
+themselves in the colour, glowing and dull, which clothes, in fact, the
+offices of La Trappe.
+
+"Well," said the oblate, when, after the ceremony, they sat at the table
+of the refectory; "well, what do you think of our High Mass?"
+
+"It is superb," answered Durtal. And he said dreamily, "Would that one
+could have the whole complete! to bring here, instead of this
+uninteresting chapel, the apse of St. Severin; hang on the walls the
+pictures of Fra Angelico, Memling, Grünewald, Gerard David, Roger van
+den Weyden, Bouts; add to these, admirable sculptures such as those of
+the great door of Chartres, altar screens of sculptured wood, such as
+those of the Cathedral of Amiens, what a dream!"
+
+"Yet," he went on after a silence, "this dream has been a reality, it is
+evident. This ideal church existed for ages, everywhere in the Middle
+Ages! The chant, the goldsmith's work, the panels, the sculptures, the
+tissues were all attractive; the liturgies possessed, to give them
+value, fabulous caskets, but all that is far off."
+
+"But you certainly cannot say," replied M. Bruno, with a smile, "that
+the church ornaments are ugly here!"
+
+"No; they are exquisite. First, the chasubles have not the shapes of a
+miner's apron, and they do not hoist themselves up on the shoulders of
+the priest, that excrescence, that puffing like the ear of a little
+donkey lying back, which the vestment makers use at Paris.
+
+"Nor is it any more that cross in stripe or woven, filling all the
+stuff, falling like a sack-coat over the back of the celebrant; the
+Trappist chasubles have kept the old form, as the old image makers and
+the old painters preserved them in their religious scenes; and that
+cross with four leaves, like those which the Gothic style chiselled on
+the walls of its churches, is related to the very expanded lotus a
+flower so full-blown that its falling petals droop."
+
+"Without counting," pursued Durtal, "that the stuff which seems cut in a
+sort of flannel or thick soft felt must have been plunged in threefold
+dyes, for it takes a depth, and a magnificent clearness of tone. The
+religious trimming-makers could trim these watered and plain silks with
+silver and gold, yet never attain to give a colour at once so vehement
+and so familiar to the eye as that crimson with sulphur-yellow flowers,
+which Father Maximin wore the other day."
+
+"Yes, and the mourning chasuble with its lobed crosses, and its discreet
+white fullings, in which the Father abbot vested himself, the day on
+which he communicated us, is not it also a caress for the eyes?"
+
+Durtal sighed: "Ah! if the statues in the chapel showed a like taste!"
+
+"By the way," said the oblate, "come and salute that Notre Dame de
+l'Atre, of which I have spoken to you, found among the remains of the
+old cloister."
+
+They rose from table, passed along a corridor, and struck into a lateral
+gallery, at the end of which they stopped before a statue of life size,
+in stone.
+
+It was heavy and massive, representing in a robe of long folds, a
+peasant woman, crowned, and round-cheeked, holding on her arm a child
+who blessed a ball.
+
+But in this portrait of a robust peasant woman, sprung from Burgundy or
+Flanders, there was a candour, a goodness almost tumultuous, which
+sprang from her smiling face, her innocent eyes, her good and large
+lips, indulgent, ready for all forgiveness.
+
+She was a rustic Virgin made for the humble lay brothers; she was not a
+great lady who could hold them at a distance, but she was indeed the
+nursing mother of their souls, their true mother. "How was it they had
+not understood her here? how instead of presiding in the chapel, did she
+grow chill at the end of a corridor?" cried Durtal.
+
+The oblate turned the conversation--"I warn you," he said, "that
+Benediction will not take place after Vespers as your placard indicates,
+but directly after Compline; this latter office will therefore be
+advanced a quarter of an hour at least."
+
+And the oblate went up to his cell, while Durtal went towards the large
+pond. There he lay down on a bed of dry reed, looking at the water which
+broke in wavelets at his feet. The coming and going of these limited
+waters, folding back on themselves, yet never overpassing the basin they
+had hollowed for themselves, led him on into long reveries.
+
+He said to himself that a river was the most exact symbol of the active
+life; one follows it from its source through all its courses across the
+territories it fertilizes; it has fulfilled its assigned task before it
+dies, immersing itself in the gaping sepulchre of the seas; but the
+pond, that tamed water, imprisoned in a hedge of reeds which it has
+itself caused to grow in fertilizing the soil of its bank, has
+concentrated itself, lived on itself, not seemed to achieve any known
+work, save to keep silence and reflect on the infinite of heaven.
+
+"Still water troubles me," continued Durtal. "It seems to me that unable
+to extend itself, it grows deeper, and that while running waters borrow
+only the shadows of things they reflect, it swallows them without giving
+them back. Most certainly in this pond is a continued and profound
+absorption of forgotten clouds, of lost trees, even of sensations seized
+on the faces of monks who hung over it. This water is full, and not
+empty, like those which are distracted in wandering about the country
+and in bathing the towns. It is a contemplative water, in perfect accord
+with the recollected life of the cloisters.
+
+"The fact is," he concluded, "that a river would have here no meaning;
+it would only be passing, would remain indifferent and in a hurry, would
+be in all cases unfit to pacify the soul which the monastic water of the
+ponds appeases. Ah! in founding Notre Dame de l'Atre, Saint Bernard knew
+how to fit the Cistercian rule and the site.
+
+"But we must leave these fancies," he said, rising; and, remembering
+that it was Sunday, he transferred himself to Paris, and revisited in
+thought his halts on this day in the churches.
+
+In the morning St. Severin enchanted him, but he ought not to thrust
+himself into that sanctuary for the other Offices. Vespers there were
+botched and mean; and if it were a feast day the organ master showed
+himself possessed by the love of ignoble music.
+
+Occasionally Durtal had taken refuge at St. Gervais, where at least they
+played at certain times motets of the old masters; but that church was,
+as well as St. Eustache, a paying concert, where Faith had nothing to
+do. No recollection was possible in the midst of ladies who fainted
+behind, their faces in their hands, and grew agitated in creaking
+chairs. These were frivolous assemblies for pious music, a compromise
+between the theatre and God.
+
+St. Sulpice was better, where at least the public was silent. There,
+moreover, Vespers were celebrated with more solemnity and less haste.
+
+In general the seminary reinforced the choir, and rendered by this
+imposing choir they rolled on majestically sustained by the grand organ.
+
+Chanted, only in half, and not in unison, reduced to a state of
+couplets, given, some by a baritone, others by the choir, they were
+twisted and frizzled by a curling iron, but as they were not less
+adulterated at the other churches, there was every advantage in
+listening to them at St. Sulpice, whose powerful choir, very well led,
+had not, as for example at Notre Dame, those dusty voices which break at
+the least whisper.
+
+This only became really odious when, with a formidable explosion, the
+first strophe of the Magnificat struck the arches.
+
+The organ then swallowed up one stanza out of two, and under the
+seditious pretext that the length of the Office of incensing was too
+long to be filled up entirely by singing, M. Widor, seated at his desk,
+rolled forth stale fragments of music splashed about above, imitating
+the human voice and the flute, the bagpipe and the bassoon, or indeed,
+tired of affectations, he blew furiously on the keys, ending by
+imitating the roll of locomotives over iron bridges, letting all the
+stops go.
+
+And the choirmaster, not wishing to show himself inferior to the
+organist in his instinctive hatred of plain chant, was delighted, when
+the Benediction began, to put aside Gregorian melodies and make his
+choristers gurgle rigadoons.
+
+It was no longer a sanctuary, but a howling place. The "Ave Maria," the
+"Ave Verum," all the mystical indecencies of the late Gounod, the
+rhapsodies of old Thomas, the capers of indigent musicasters, defiled in
+a chain wound by choir leaders from Lamoureux, chanted unfortunately by
+children, the chastity of whose voices no one feared to pollute in these
+middle-class passages of music, these by-ways of art.
+
+"Ah," thought Durtal, "if only this choirmaster, who is evidently an
+excellent musician; for indeed, when he must, he knows how to get
+executed better than anywhere else in Paris, the 'De Profundis' with
+organ accompaniment, and the 'Dies Irĉ'; if only this man would as at
+St. Gervais give us some Palestrina and Vittoria, some Aichinger and
+Allegri, some Orlando Lasso and De Près; but no, he must detest these
+masters also, consider them as archaic rubbish, good to send into the
+dust-heaps."
+
+And Durtal continued,
+
+"What we hear now at Paris, in the churches, is wholly incredible! Under
+pretence of managing an income for the singers, they suppress half the
+stanzas of canticles and hymns, and substitute, to vary the pleasure,
+the tiresome divagations of an organ.
+
+"There they howl the 'Tantum Ergo' to the Austrian National air; or what
+is still worse, muffle it up with operatic choruses, or refrains from
+canteens. The very text is divided into couplets which are ornamented
+like a drinking song with a little burthen.
+
+"The other Church sequences are treated in the same manner.
+
+"And yet the Papacy has formally forbidden, in many bulls, that the
+sanctuary should be soiled by those liberties. To cite one only, John
+XXII., in his Extravagant 'Doctor Sanctorum,' expressly forbade profane
+voices and music in churches. He prohibited choirs at the same time to
+change plain chant into fiorituri. The decrees of the Council of Trent
+are not less clear from this point of view, and more recently still a
+regulation of the Sacred Congregation of Rites has intervened to
+proscribe musical rioting in holy places.
+
+"Then what are the parish-priests doing who, in fact, have musical
+police charge in their churches? Nothing, they laugh at it.
+
+"Nor is this a mere phrase, but with those priests who, hoping for
+receipts, permit on fête days the shameless voices of actresses to dance
+gambols to the heavy sounds of the organ, the poor Church has become far
+from clean.
+
+"At St. Sulpice," Durtal went on, "the priest tolerates the villainy of
+jolly songs which are served up to him; but at least he does not, like
+the one at St. Severin, allow strolling women players to lighten up the
+Office by the shouts of such voices as remain to them. Nor has he
+accepted the solo on the English horn which I heard at St. Thomas one
+evening during the Perpetual Adoration. In short, if the grand
+Benedictions at St. Sulpice are a shame, the Complines remain in spite
+of their theatrical attitude really charming."
+
+And Durtal thought of those Complines of which the paternity is often
+attributed to Saint Benedict; they were in fact the integral prayer of
+the evenings, the preventive adjuration, the safeguard against the
+attempts of the Demon, they were in some measure the advanced sentinels
+of the out-posts placed round the soul to protect it during the night.
+
+And the regulation of this entrenched camp of prayer was perfect. After
+the benediction the best trained voice, the most threadlike of the
+choir, the voice of the smallest of the children, sang forth the short
+lesson taken from the first Epistle of Saint Peter, warning the faithful
+that they must be sober and watch, not allow themselves to be surprised
+unexpectedly. A priest then recited the usual evening prayers; the choir
+organ gave the intonation, and the psalms fell, chanted one by one, the
+twilight psalms, in which before the approaches of night peopled with
+goblins, and furrowed by ghosts, man calls God to aid, and prays Him to
+guard his sleep from the violence of the ways of hell, the rape of the
+lamias that pass.
+
+And the hymn of Saint Ambrose, the "Te lucis ante terminum," made still
+more precise the scattered meaning of these psalms, gathering it up in
+its short stanzas. Unfortunately, the most important, that which
+foresees and declares the luxurious dangers of darkness, was swallowed
+up by the full organ. This hymn was not rendered in plain chant at St.
+Sulpice as at La Trappe, but was sung to a pompous and elaborate air, an
+air full of glory, with a certain proud attractiveness, originating no
+doubt in the eighteenth century.
+
+Then there was a pause--and man, feeling himself more sheltered, behind
+a rampart of prayers, recollected himself, more assured, and borrowed
+innocent voices to address new supplications to God. After the chapter
+read by the officiant, the children of the choir chanted the short
+response "In manus tuus Domine, commendo spiritum meum," which rolled
+out, dividing in two parts, then doubled itself, and resolved at the
+last its two separate portions by a verse, and part of an antiphon.
+
+And after that prayer there was still the canticle of Simeon, who, as
+soon as he had seen the Messiah, desired to die. This "Nunc dimittis,"
+which the Church has incorporated in Compline to stimulate us at
+eventide to self-examination--for none can tell whether he shall wake on
+the morrow--was raised by the whole choir, which alternated with the
+responses of the organ.
+
+In fact, to end this Office of a besieged town, to take its last
+dispositions and try to repose in shelter from a violent attack, the
+Church built up again a few prayers, and placed her parishes under the
+tutelage of the Virgin, to whom it chanted one of the four antiphons
+which follow, according to the Proper.
+
+"At La Trappe Compline was evidently less solemn, less interesting than
+at St. Sulpice," concluded Durtal, "for the monastic breviary is, for a
+wonder, less complete for that Office than the Roman breviary. As for
+Sunday Vespers, I am curious to hear them."
+
+And he heard them; but they hardly differed from the Vespers adopted by
+the Benedictine nuns of the Rue Monsieur; they were more massive, more
+grave, more Roman, if it may be said, for necessarily the voice of women
+drew them out into sharp points, made them like acute arches, as it
+were, in Gothic style, but the Gregorian tunes were the same.
+
+On the other hand they resembled in nothing those at St. Sulpice, where
+the modern sauces spoilt the very essences of the plain chants. Only the
+Magnificat of La Trappe, abrupt, and with dry tone, was not so good as
+the majestic, the admirable Royal Magnificat chanted at Paris.
+
+"These monks are astonishing with their superb voices," said Durtal to
+himself, and he smiled as they finished the antiphon of Our Lady, for he
+remembered that in the primitive Church the chanter was called "Fabarius
+cantor," "eater of beans," because he was obliged to eat that vegetable
+to strengthen his voice. Now, at La Trappe, dishes of beans were common;
+perhaps that was the secret of the ever young monastic voices.
+
+He thought over the liturgy and plain chant while smoking cigarettes, in
+the walks, after Vespers.
+
+He brought to mind the symbolism of those canonical hours which recalled
+every day to the Christian the shortness of life in summing up for him
+its image from infancy to death.
+
+Recited soon after dawn, Prime was the figure of childhood; Tierce of
+youth; Sext the full vigour of age; None the approaches of old age,
+while Vespers were an allegory of decrepitude. They belonged, moreover,
+to the Nocturns, and were sung about six o'clock in the evening, at that
+hour when, at the time of the Equinoxes, the sun sets in the red cinder
+of the clouds. As for Compline, it resounds when night, the symbol of
+death, has come.
+
+This canonical Office was a marvellous rosary of psalms; every bead of
+each of these hours bore reference to the different phases of human
+existence, followed, little by little, the periods of the day, the
+decline of destiny, to end in the most perfect of offices, in Compline,
+that provisional absolution of a death, itself represented by sleep.
+
+And if, from these texts so wisely selected, these Sequences so solemnly
+sealed, Durtal passed to the sacerdotal robe of their sounds, to those
+neumatic chants, that divine psalmody all uniform, all simple, which is
+plain chant, he had to admit, that except in Benedictine cloisters, an
+organ accompaniment was everywhere added, that plain chant had been put
+forcibly in modern tonality, and it disappeared under vegetations which
+stifled it, became everywhere discoloured, amorphous and
+incomprehensible.
+
+One only of its executioners, Niedermayer, showed himself at least
+pitiful. He tried a system more ingenious and more honest. He reversed
+the terms of torture. Instead of wishing to make plain chant supple and
+to thrust it into the mould of modern harmony, he constrained that
+harmony to bend itself to the austere tonality of plain chant. He thus
+preserved its character, but how far more natural would it have been to
+leave it solitary and not obliged it to tow an useless companion and
+awkward following?
+
+Here at least at La Trappe it lived and spread in all security, without
+treason on the part of the monks. There was always sameness of sound, it
+was always chanted without accompaniment in unison.
+
+He was able to satisfy himself about this truth once more after supper,
+that evening, when at the end of Compline the father sacristan lighted
+all the candles on the altar.
+
+At that moment, in the silence of the Trappists on their knees, their
+head in their hands, or their cheek resting on the sleeve of their great
+cowl, three lay brothers entered, two carrying torches, and another
+preceding them with a censer, and behind them a few paces, came the
+prior with his hands joined.
+
+Durtal looked at the changed costume of the three brothers. They had no
+longer their robes of serge, made of bits and scraps, stained mud
+colour, but robes of violet-brown, like plums on which was spread the
+white twilling of a new surplice.
+
+While Father Maximin, vested in a copy of milky white, woven with a
+cross in orange yellow, placed the Host in the monstrance, the thurifer
+put down the censer, on the coals of which melted tears of real incense.
+Contrary to what takes place in Paris, where the censer, swung before
+the altar, sounds against its chains, and is like the clear tinkling of
+a horse which, as he lifts his head, shakes his curb and bit, the censer
+at La Trappe remained immovable before the altar, and smoked by itself
+behind the officiants.
+
+And everyone chanted the imploring and melancholy antiphon "Parce
+Domine," then the "Tantum Ergo," that magnificent song, which could be
+almost acted, so clear in their changes are the sentiments which succeed
+each other in their rhymed sequence.
+
+In the first stanza it seems indeed to shake the head gently, to put
+forward the chin, so to speak, so as to affirm the insufficiency of the
+senses to explain the dogma of the real presence, the finished avatar of
+the Bread. It is then admiring and reflective; then that melody so
+attentive, so respectful, does not wait to affirm the weakness of the
+reason, and the power of faith, but in the second stanza it goes
+forward, adores the glory of the three Persons, exults with joy, only
+recovers itself at the end, where the music adds a new sense to the text
+of Saint Thomas, in avowing in a long and mournful Amen the unworthiness
+of those present to receive the Benediction of the Flesh placed upon
+that cross which the monstrance is about to trace in the air.
+
+And slowly, while unrolling its coil of smoke, the censer spread, as it
+were, a blue gauze before the altar, while the Blessed Sacrament was
+lifted like a golden moon, amid the stars of the tapers, sparkling in
+the growing darkness of that fog, the bells of the abbey sounded with
+musical and sweet strokes. And all the monks bowed low with their eyes
+closed, then recovered themselves and entoned the "Laudate" to the old
+melody which is also sung at Notre Dame des Victoires at the Benediction
+in the evening.
+
+Then one by one, having genuflected before the altar, they went out,
+while Durtal and the oblate returned to the guest-house, where Father
+Etienne was waiting for them.
+
+He said to Durtal: "I would not go to bed without knowing how you have
+borne the day;" and as Durtal thanked him, assuring him that this Sunday
+had been very peaceful, Father Etienne smiled and revealed in a word,
+that under their reserved attitude all at La Trappe were more interested
+in their guest than he had himself believed.
+
+"The reverend Father abbot and the Father prior will be glad when I give
+them this answer," said the monk, who wished Durtal good-night, pressing
+his hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+At seven o'clock, just as he was preparing to eat his bread, Durtal
+encountered Father Etienne.
+
+"Father," he said, "to-morrow is Tuesday; the time of my retreat has
+expired, and I am going; how should I order a carriage for Saint
+Landry?"
+
+The monk smiled. "When the postman brings the letters I can charge him
+with the commission, but let us see; are you in a great hurry to leave
+us?"
+
+"No, but I would not trespass...."
+
+"Listen, since you are so well broken in to the life at La Trappe, stay
+here two days more. The Father procurator must go to settle a dispute at
+Saint Landry. He will take you to the station in our carriage. So you
+will avoid some expense, and the journey hence to the railroad will seem
+to you less long, since there will be two of you."
+
+Durtal accepted, and as it rained, he went up to his room. "It is
+strange," he said, as he sat down, "how impossible one finds it in a
+cloister to read a book; one wants nothing, one thinks of God by
+Himself, and not by the volumes which speak about Him."
+
+Mechanically he had taken up from a heap of books one in octavo, which
+he had found on his table the day he took possession of his cell; it
+bore the title "Manresa," or the "Spiritual Exercises" of Ignatius of
+Loyola.
+
+He had already run through the work at Paris, and the pages which he
+turned over afresh did not change the harsh, almost hostile, opinion
+which he had retained of this book.
+
+The fact is that these exercises leave no initiative to the soul; they
+consider it as a soft paste good to run into a mould; they show it no
+horizon, no sky. Instead of trying to stretch it, and make it greater,
+they make it smaller deliberately; they put it back into the cases of
+their wafer box, nourish it only on faded trifles, on dry nothings.
+
+This Japanese culture of deformed toes which remain dwarf; this Chinese
+deformation of children planted in pots, horrified Durtal, who closed
+the volume.
+
+He opened another, the "Introduction to the Devout Life," by Saint
+Francis de Sales.
+
+Certainly he found no need to read it again, in spite of its
+affectations, and its good nature, at first charming, but which ends by
+making you sick, by making the soul sticky with sweets with liqueurs in
+them, and lollypops; in a word, that work so much praised by Catholics
+was a julep scented with bergamot and ambergris. It was like a fine
+handkerchief shaken in a church in which a musty smell of incense
+remained.
+
+But the man himself, the Bishop Saint Francis de Sales, was suggestive;
+with his name was called up the whole mystical history of the
+seventeenth century.
+
+And Durtal recalled the memories he had kept of the religious life of
+that time. There were then in the Church two currents:
+
+That of the high Mysticism, as it was called, originating from Saint
+Teresa and Saint John of the Cross; and this current was concentrated on
+Marie Guyon.
+
+And another that of so-called temperate Mysticism, of which the adepts
+were Saint Francis de Sales and his friend the celebrated Baroness de
+Chantal.
+
+It was naturally this second current which triumphed. Jesus, putting
+Himself within the reach of drawing-rooms, descending to the level of
+women of the world, a moderate and proper Jesus, only dealing with the
+soul of His creature just enough to give it one attraction the more,
+this elegant Jesus became all the fashion; but Madame Guyon, whose
+source was above all Saint Teresa, who taught the mystical theory of
+love, and familiar intercourse with heaven, raised the opposition of the
+whole clergy who abominated Mysticism without understanding it; she
+exasperated the terrible Bossuet, who accused her of the fashionable
+heresy, Molinism and Quietism. She refuted, unhappy as she was, this
+trouble without much difficulty, but he persecuted her for it none the
+less; he was furious against her, and had her imprisoned at Vincennes;
+revealed himself obstinate, surly, and atrocious.
+
+Fenelon, who tried to conciliate these two tendencies in preparing a
+small Mysticism neither too hot nor too cold, a little less lukewarm
+than that of Saint Francis de Sales, and above all things much less
+ardent than that of Saint Teresa, ended in his turn by displeasing the
+cormorant of Meaux, and though he abandoned and denied Madame de Guyon,
+whose friend he had been for long years, he was persecuted and tracked
+down by Bossuet, condemned at Rome, and sent in exile to Cambrai.
+
+And here Durtal could not but smile, for he remembered the desolate
+complaints of his partisans weeping for this disgrace, representing thus
+as a martyr this archbishop whose punishment consisted in quitting his
+post as courtier at Versailles to go at last and administer his diocese,
+in which he appeared till then to have never resided.
+
+This mitred Job, who remained in his misfortune Archbishop and Duke of
+Cambrai, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and rich, so unhappy because
+he was obliged to visit his flock, well shows the state of the
+episcopate under the redundant reign of the great king. It was a
+priesthood of financiers and valets.
+
+Only there was at any rate a certain attraction, there was talent in
+every case; while now bishops are not for the most part less intriguing
+nor less servile, but they have no longer either talent or manners.
+Caught in part, in the fishpond of bad priests, they show themselves
+ready for everything, and turn out to be souls of old usurers, low
+jobbers, beggars, when you press them.
+
+"It is sad to say it, but so it is," concluded Durtal. "As for Madame
+Guyon," he went on, "she was neither an original writer nor a saint; she
+was only an unwelcome substitute for the true mystics; she was presuming
+and certainly lacked that humility which magnified Saint Teresa and
+Saint Clare; but after all she burst into a flame, she was overcome by
+Jesus; above all, she was not a pious courtier, a bigot softened by a
+court like the Maintenon.
+
+"After all, what a time for religion it was? All its saints have
+something formal and restricted, wordy and cold, which turns me away
+from them. Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Chantal
+... No, I prefer Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Bernard, Saint Angela
+... The Mysticism of the seventeenth century is all the fashion with its
+emphatic and mean churches, its pompous and icy painting, its solemn
+poetry, its gloomy prose.
+
+"But look," he said, "my cell is still neither swept nor set in order,
+and I am afraid that in lingering here I may give some trouble to Father
+Etienne. It rains, however, too hard to allow of my walking in the wood;
+the simplest thing is to go and read the Little Office of Our Lady in
+the chapel."
+
+He went down there; it was at this hour almost empty; the monks were at
+work in the fields or in the factory; two fathers only, on their knees
+before the altar of Our Lady, were praying so absorbedly that they did
+not even hear the opening of the door.
+
+And Durtal, who had placed himself near them opposite the porch which
+gave upon the high altar, saw them reflected in the sheet of glass,
+placed before the shrine of the Blessed Guerric. This sheet had indeed
+the effect of a mirror, and the white fathers were in the depths of it,
+lived in prayers under the table, in the very heart of the altar.
+
+And he also appeared there in a corner, reflected, at the back of the
+shrine, near the sacred remains of the monk.
+
+At one moment he lifted his head, and saw that the round window in the
+apse, behind the altar, reproduced on its glass ornamented with grey and
+blue, the marks engraved on the reverse of the medal of Saint Benedict,
+the first letters of its imperative formulas, the initials of its
+distiches.
+
+It might have been called an immense clear medal, sifting a pale light,
+straining it through prayers, not allowing them to penetrate to the
+altar till sanctified and blessed by the Patriarch.
+
+And while he was dreaming, the clock struck; the two Trappists regained
+their stalls, while the others entered.
+
+Waiting thus in the chapel, the hour of Sext had struck. The abbot
+advanced. Durtal saw him again for the first time since their
+conversation; he seemed less ill, less pale; he marched majestically in
+his great white cowl, at the hood of which hung a violet acorn, and the
+fathers bowed, kissing their sleeve before him; he reached his place,
+which was designated by a wooden cross standing before a stall, and all
+enfolded themselves with a great sign of the cross, bowed to the altar,
+and the feeble imploring voice of the old Trappist rose: "Deus in
+adjutorium meum intende."
+
+And the Office continued, in the monotonous and charming pitch of the
+doxology, interrupted by profound reverences, large movements of the arm
+lifting the sleeve of the cowl as it fell to the ground, to allow the
+hand freedom to turn the pages.
+
+When Sext was over Durtal went to rejoin the oblate.
+
+They found on the table of the refectory a little omelette, leeks cooked
+in a sauce of flour and oil, haricots and cheese.
+
+"It is astonishing," said Durtal, "how in regard to mystics, the world
+errs on preconceived ideas, on the old string. Phrenologists declare
+that mystics have pointed skulls; now here that their form is more
+visible than elsewhere, because they are all hairless and shaven, there
+are no more heads like eggs than anywhere else. I looked this morning at
+the shape of their heads, no two are alike. Some are oval and depressed,
+others like a pear and straight, some have lumps on them, and some have
+none; and it is just the same with faces; when they are not transfigured
+by prayer they are ordinary. If they did not wear the habit of their
+order, no one could recognize in these Trappists predestined beings
+living out of modern society, in the full Middle Ages, in absolute
+dependence on a God. If they have souls which are not like those of
+other people, they have, after all, faces and bodies like those of the
+first comer."
+
+"All is within," said the oblate. "Why should elect souls be enclosed in
+fleshly prisons different to others?"
+
+This conversation, which continued on different points of Trappist life,
+ended by turning on death in a monastery, and M. Bruno revealed some
+details.
+
+"When death is near," he said, "the Father abbot traces on the ground a
+cross in blessed ashes covered with straw, and the dying man is placed
+on it wrapped in serge cloth.
+
+"The brothers recite near him the prayers of the dying, and at the
+moment of his death the response 'Subvenite Sancti Dei' is chanted in
+choir. The Father abbot incenses the body, which is washed while the
+monks sing the Office of the Dead in another room.
+
+"Then his regular habit is put on the dead monk, and he is borne in
+procession to the church, where he lies on a stretcher with his face
+uncovered, until the hour destined for the funeral.
+
+"Then on the way to the cemetery the community intones no longer the
+chant of the dead, the psalms of grief, and the sequences of regret, but
+rather 'In exitu Israel de Ĉgypto,' which is the psalm of deliverance,
+the free song of joy.
+
+"And the Trappist is buried without a coffin, in his robe of stuff, his
+head covered with his hood.
+
+"Lastly, during thirty days, his place remains empty in the refectory,
+his portion is served as usual, but the brother porter distributes it to
+the poor.
+
+"Ah! the happiness to die thus," said the oblate, as he ended, "for if
+one dies after having honestly fulfilled one's task in the order, one is
+assured of eternal happiness, according to the promises made by our Lord
+to Saint Benedict and to Saint Bernard!"
+
+"The rain is over," said Durtal; "I should like to visit to-day that
+little chapel at the end of the park of which you spoke to me the other
+day. Which is the shortest way to reach it?"
+
+M. Bruno told him the way, and Durtal went off, rolling a cigarette, to
+gain the great pond, thence he struck a path to the left and mounted a
+lane of trees.
+
+He slipped on the wet ground, and got on with difficulty. At last,
+however, he gained a clump of chestnuts, which he skirted. Behind these
+rose a dwarf tower topped by a very small dome, pierced by a door. To
+the left and right of this door, on sockets where ornaments of the
+Romanesque epoch still were seen under the velvety crust of moss, two
+stone angels were still standing.
+
+They belonged, evidently, to the Burgundian school, with their big round
+heads, their hair puffed and divided into waves, their fat faces with
+turned-up noses, their solid draperies with hard folds. They also came
+from the ruins of the old cloister, but the interior of the chapel was
+unfortunately thoroughly modern; it was so small that the feet of him
+who knelt at the altar almost touched the wall at the entrance.
+
+In a niche veiled by white gauze a Virgin smiled with extended hands.
+She had blue plaster eyes and apple-shaped cheeks. She was wearisome in
+her insignificance, but her sanctuary retained the warmth of places
+always shut up. The walls, hung with red calico, were dusted, the floor
+was swept, and the holy water basins full; superb tea roses flourished
+in pots between the candelabra. Durtal then understood why he had so
+often seen M. Bruno walking in this direction with flowers in his hand;
+he was going to pray in this place, which he loved no doubt because it
+was isolated in the profound solitude of this Trappist monastery.
+
+"Excellent man!" cried Durtal, thinking over the affectionate services,
+the fraternal care the oblate had had for him; and he added, "He is a
+happy man too, for he is self-contained, and lives so placidly here.
+
+"And, indeed," he went on, "where is the good of striving, if not
+against oneself? to agitate oneself for money, for glory, to conduct
+oneself so as to keep others down, and gain adulation from them, how
+vain a task!
+
+"Only the Church, in decking the temporary altars of the liturgical
+year, in forcing the seasons to follow step by step the life of Christ,
+has known how to trace for us a plan of necessary occupations, of useful
+ends. She has given us the means of walking always side by side with
+Jesus, to live day by day with the Gospels; for Christians she has made
+time the messenger of sorrows and the herald of joys; she has entrusted
+to the year the part of servant of the New Testament, the zealous
+emissary of worship."
+
+And Durtal reflected on the cycle of the liturgy which begins on the
+first day of the religious year, with Advent, then turns with an
+insensible movement on itself till it returns again to its
+starting-point, to the time when the Church prepares by penitence and
+prayer to celebrate Christmas.
+
+And turning over his prayer-book, seeing the extraordinary circle of
+offices, he thought of that prodigious jewel, that crown of King
+Recceswinthe preserved in the Museum of Cluny.
+
+The liturgical year was, like it, studded with crystals and jewels by
+its admirable canticles and its fervent hymns set in the very gold of
+Benedictions and Vespers.
+
+It seemed that the Church had substituted for that crown of thorns with
+which the Jews had surrounded the temples of the Saviour, the truly
+royal crown of the Proper of the Seasons, the only one which was
+chiselled in a metal precious enough, with art pure enough to dare to
+place itself on the brow of a God.
+
+And the grand Lapidary had begun his work by incrusting, in this diadem
+of offices, the hymn of Saint Ambrose, and the invocation taken from the
+Old Testament, the "Rorate Coeli," that melodious chant of expectation
+and regret, that obscure gem violet-coloured; the lustre declares itself
+then, when after each of its stanzas rises the solemn prayer of the
+patriarchs, calling for the longed-for presence of Christ.
+
+And the four Sundays of Advent disappeared with the turned pages of the
+prayer-book; the night of the Nativity was come. After the "Jesu
+Redemptor" of Vespers, the old Portuguese chant, the "Adeste Fideles,"
+arose at Benediction from every lip. It was a sequence of a truly
+charming simplicity, an old carving wherein defiled the shepherds and
+the kings to a popular air appropriate to great marches, apt to charm,
+to aid by the somewhat military rhythm of its steps, the long lines of
+the faithful quitting their cottages to go to the distant churches in
+the towns.
+
+And imperceptibly, like the year in an invisible rotation, the circle
+turned, and stopped at the Feast of the Holy Innocents, where there
+flourished out, like a flower from a slaughter-house, on a shoot culled
+from a soil irrigated by the blood of lambs, this sequence, red, and
+smelling of roses, the "Salvate Flores Martyrum" of Prudentius; the
+crown moved again, and the hymn of the Epiphany, the "Crudelis Herodes"
+of Sedudius, appeared in its turn.
+
+Now the Sundays grew heavy, the violet Sundays when the "Gloria in
+Excelsis" is no more heard, when the "Audi Benigne" of Saint Ambrose is
+chanted, and the "Miserere," that cinder-coloured psalm, which is
+perhaps the most perfect masterpiece which the Church has ever drawn
+from her store-houses of plain chants.
+
+It was Lent, when the amethysts fade in the moist grey of onyxes, in the
+embrowned white of quartz, and the magnificent invocation, "Attende
+Domine," rose beneath the arches. Sprung like the "Rorate Coeli" from
+the sequences of the Old Testament, this humble and contrite chant,
+enumerating the deserved punishments of sins, became, if not more
+sorrowful, at all events more grave and more pressing when it
+confirmed, when it resumed in the initial stanza of its burthen, the
+avowal of shame already confessed.
+
+And suddenly on this crown there burst out after the expiring fires of
+Lent, the flaming ruby of the Passion. On the upturned yellow of the sky
+a red cross was raised, while majestic shouts and despairing cries
+proclaimed the blood-stained fruit of the tree; and the "Vexilla Regis"
+was again repeated the following Sunday at the Feast of Palms, which
+joined to that Sequence of Fortunatus the green hymn which it
+accompanied with a silky noise of palms, the "Gloria laus et honor" of
+Theodulph.
+
+Then the fires of precious stones grew grey and died. To the glowing
+coals of gems succeeded the dead cinders of obsidians, black stones
+scarcely swelling, without a gleam above the tarnished gold of their
+mountings; one entered no Holy Week, everywhere the "Pange Lingua" and
+the "Stabat Mater" wailed under the arches, and then came the "Tenebrĉ,"
+the lamentations, and the psalms, whose knell shook the flame of the
+brown waxen tapers, and after each halt, at the end of each of the
+psalms, one of the tapers expired, and its column of blue smoke
+evaporated still under the lighted circumference of the arches, while
+the choir recommenced the interrupted series of complaints.
+
+And the crown turned once more; the beads of this musical rosary still
+ran on, and all changed. Jesus had risen, and songs of joy issued from
+the organs. The "Victimĉ Paschali Laudes" exulted before the gospel of
+the masses, and at the Benediction the "O Filii et Filiĉ," created
+indeed to be intoned by the wild jubilations of crowds, ran and sported
+in the joyous hurricane of the organs, which uprooted the pillars and
+unroofed the naves.
+
+And the feasts rung in with bells followed at longer intervals. At
+Ascension the heavy and clear crystals of Saint Ambrose filled with
+their luminous water the tiny basin of the catkins; the fire of rubies
+and garnets lighted up again with the crimson hymn and scarlet sequence
+of Pentecost the "Veni Creator" and "Veni Spiritus." The Feast of the
+Trinity passed, signalized by the stanzas of Gregory the Great; and for
+the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, the liturgy could exhibit the most
+marvellous jewel case of its dower, the Office of Saint Thomas, the
+"Pange Lingua," the "Adore Te," the "Sacris Solemniis," the "Verbum
+Supernum," and above all the "Lauda Sion," that pure masterpiece of
+Latin poetry and scholasticism, that hymn so precise, so lucid in its
+abstraction, so firm in its rhymed words, round which is rolled the
+melody perhaps the most enthusiastic, the most supple in plain chant.
+
+The circle displaced itself again, showing on its different faces the
+twenty-three to twenty-eight Sundays which defile after Pentecost, the
+green weeks of the time of Pilgrimage, and stopped at the last feast, at
+the Sunday after the Octave of All Saints, at the Dedication of Churches
+which the "Coelestis Urbs" incensed, old stanzas of which the ruins were
+badly consolidated by the architects of Urban VIII., old jewels, on
+which the troubled water slept and was reanimated only in rare lights.
+
+The juncture of the religious crown, of the liturgical year, was then
+made at the masses, in which the gospel of the last Sunday after
+Pentecost, the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, repeats, as well as
+the Gospel according to Saint Luke, recited on the first Sunday in
+Advent, the terrible predictions of Christ on the desolation of the
+time, on the end of the world.
+
+"This is not all," Durtal continued, who was interested in this run
+through his prayer-book. "In this crown of the Proper of the Seasons are
+inserted, like smaller stones, the sequences of the Proper of Saints
+which fill the empty places, and finish the round of the circle.
+
+"First the pearls and gems of the Blessed Virgin, the limpid jewels, the
+blue sapphires and rose rubies of her antiphons; then the aquamarine, so
+lucid and pure, of the 'Ave Maris Stella,' the topaz, pale as tears, of
+the 'O Quot nudis Lacrymarum' on the Feast of the Seven Dolours, the
+hyacinth, colour of dried blood, of the 'Stabat;' then were told the
+feasts of the Angels and the Saints, the hymns dedicated to the Apostles
+and the Evangelists, to the Martyrs, whether solitary or in couples,
+both out of and during the Paschal season, to the Confessors, Pontiffs,
+and non-Pontiffs, to Virgins, to Holy Women, all Feasts differentiated
+by special Sequences, by special Proses of which some are very simple,
+like those stanzas made in honour of the Nativity of Saint John the
+Baptist, by Paul the Deacon.
+
+"There still remains All Saints, with the 'Placare Christe,' and the
+three blows on the alarm bell, the knell in triplets of the 'Dies Irĉ,'
+which resounds on the day set apart for the Commemoration of the Dead.
+
+"What an immense fund of poetry, what an incomparable estate of art the
+Church possesses!" he cried, closing his book; and many memories rose
+for him at this excursion into his prayer-book.
+
+On how many evenings had the sadness of life been dissipated in
+listening to these proses chanted in the churches!
+
+He thought over again of the suppliant voice of Advent, and recalled one
+evening, when he had wandered under a fine rain along the quays. He had
+been driven from home by ignoble visions, and at the same time had been
+harassed by the increasing disgust of his vices. He had ended by being
+brought up against his will at St. Gervais.
+
+In the chapel of the Virgin, some poor women were prostrate. He had
+knelt, tired and dazed, his soul so ill at ease, that he slumbered
+without power to wake himself. Some men and boys of the choir were
+installed in the chapel, with two or three priests; they had lighted
+candles, and the voice, light and sustained, of a child, had in the dark
+of the church chanted the long antiphons of the "Rorate."
+
+In the state of overwhelming sadness in which he was stagnant, Durtal
+felt himself open and bleeding to the bottom of his soul; then a voice
+older and less trembling, which understood the words it said, narrated
+ingenuously, almost without confusion, to the Just One, "Peccavimus et
+facti sumus tanquam immundus nos."
+
+And Durtal took up these words, and spelt them over in terror, thinking,
+"Ah! yes, we have sinned and become like the leprous, O Lord!" And the
+chant continued, and in His turn, the Most High borrowed that same
+innocent organ of childhood, to declare to man His pity, and to confirm
+to him the pardon assured by the coming of the Son.
+
+And the evening had ended by the Benediction in plain chant, in the
+midst of the silence and prostration of unhappy women.
+
+Durtal remembered how he left the church refreshed, freed from his
+hauntings, and he had gone away in the drizzling rain, surprised that
+the way was so short, humming the "Rorate," of which the air had taken
+possession of him, ending by seeing in it the personal touch of a kindly
+unknown.
+
+And there were other evenings ... the Octave of the Feast of All Souls
+at St. Sulpice and at St. Thomas Aquinas, where, after the Vespers of
+the Dead, they brought out again the old Sequence which has disappeared
+from the Roman Breviary, the "Lanquentilus in Purgatorio."
+
+This church was the only one in Paris which had retained these pages of
+the Gallican hymnal, and had them sung by two basses without a choir;
+but these singers, so poor as a rule, no doubt were fond of this air,
+for if they did not sing it with art, at least they put a little soul
+into its delivery.
+
+And this invocation to the Madonna, in which she was adjured to save the
+souls in Purgatory, was as sorrowful as the souls themselves, and so
+melancholy, so languid, that the surroundings were forgotten, the
+ugliness of that sanctuary of which the choir was a theatre scene,
+surrounded by closed dressing-rooms and garnished with lustres, one
+might think oneself for a few moments far from Paris, far from that
+population of devout women and servant girls, which attend that place in
+the evening.
+
+"Ah! the Church," he said to himself, as he descended the path which led
+to the great pond, "what a mother of art is she!" and suddenly the noise
+of a body falling into the water interrupted his reflections.
+
+He looked behind the hedge of reeds and saw nothing but great circles
+running on the water, and all at once in one of these rings a small
+dog-like head appeared holding a fish in its mouth; the beast raised
+itself a little out of the water, showed a thin body covered with fur,
+and gazed on Durtal quietly with its little black eyes.
+
+Then in a flash it passed the distance which separated it from the bank,
+and disappeared under the grasses.
+
+"It is the otter," he said to himself, remembering the discussion at
+table between the stranger priest and the oblate.
+
+And he went to gain the other pond, when he encountered Father Etienne.
+
+He told him his adventure.
+
+"Impossible!" cried the monk, "no one has ever seen the otter; you must
+have mistaken it for a water rat, or some other animal, for that beast,
+for which we have watched for years, is invisible."
+
+Durtal gave him a description of it.
+
+"It is certainly the otter," admitted the guest-master, surprised.
+
+It was evident that this otter lived in the pond in a legendary state.
+In monotonous lives, in days like those in a cloister, it took the
+proportions of a fabulous subject, of an event whereof the mystery would
+occupy intervals seized between prayers and offices.
+
+"We must point out to M. Bruno the exact spot where you remarked it, for
+he will begin to hunt it again," said Father Etienne after a silence.
+
+"But how can it trouble you in eating your fish, since you do not angle
+for them?"
+
+"I beg your pardon; we fish for them to send them to the Archbishop,"
+answered the monk, who went on: "Still, it is very strange that you saw
+the beast!"
+
+"When I leave this," thought Durtal, "they will certainly speak of me as
+the gentleman who saw the otter."
+
+While talking, they had arrived at the cross pond.
+
+"Look," said the father, pointing out the swan, who rose in a fury, beat
+his wings, and hissed.
+
+"What is the matter with him?"
+
+"The matter is that the white hue of my habit infuriates him."
+
+"Ah! and why?"
+
+"I do not know; perhaps he wants to be the only one who is white here;
+he spares the lay brothers, while as for a father ... wait, you will
+see."
+
+And the guest-master walked quietly towards the swan.
+
+"Come," he said to the angry creature, who splashed him with water; and
+he held out his hand which the swan snapped.
+
+"See," said the monk, showing the mark of a red pinch printed on the
+flesh.
+
+And he smiled, holding his hand, and quitted Durtal, who asked himself
+whether, in acting thus, the Trappist were not wishing to inflict on
+himself some corporal punishment to atone for some distraction the
+evening before; some peccadillo.
+
+"That stroke of the beak must have pinched him horribly, for the tears
+came into his eyes. How could he expose himself with joy to such a
+bite?"
+
+And he remembered that one day at the office of None, one of the young
+monks made a mistake in the tone of an antiphon; at the moment that the
+office ended, he knelt before the altar, then he lay his whole length on
+the tiles on his face, his mouth pressed on the ground, till the stroke
+of the prior's bell gave him the order to get up.
+
+This was a voluntary punishment for a negligence committed, a
+forgetfulness. Who knows whether Father Etienne did not in his turn
+punish himself for a thought he deemed to border on sin, in getting
+himself thus pinched?
+
+He consulted the oblate on the point in the evening, but M. Bruno
+contented himself with a smile, without answering.
+
+And when Durtal spoke to him of his speedy departure for Paris, the old
+man shook his head.
+
+"Considering," he said, "the fear and the discomfort that Communion
+caused you, you would act wisely if you approach the Holy Table
+immediately on your return."
+
+And seeing that Durtal did not reply, but hung his head,
+
+"Believe a man who has known these trials; if you do not force yourself
+while you are still under the warm impression of La Trappe, you will
+float between desire and regret without advancing; you will be ingenious
+in discovering excuses for not making your confession; you will try to
+think it impossible to find in Paris an abbé who understands you. Now
+allow me to assure you nothing is more false. If you desire an expert
+and easy confidant, go to the Jesuits; if you wish above all a
+zealous-souled priest, go to St. Sulpice.
+
+"You will find there honest and intelligent ecclesiastics, excellent
+hearts. In Paris, where the clergy of the parishes are so mixed, they
+are at the top of the basket of the priesthood, and, as may be imagined,
+they form a community, live in cells, do not dine out; and as the
+Sulpician rule forbids them to aspire to honours, or places, they do not
+run the chance of becoming bad priests by ambition. Do you know them?"
+
+"No; but to resolve that question, which in fact constantly troubles me,
+I count on a priest whom I often see, on the very man who, in fact, sent
+me into this Trappist monastery.
+
+"And that," he went on, "makes me remember," and he rose to go to
+Compline, "that I have as yet forgotten to write to him. It is true that
+now it is too late, I should arrive at his house almost as soon as my
+letter. It is strange, but by force of walking in one's own, by force of
+living to oneself, the days run by, and there is no time to do anything
+here!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+He had hoped for his last day at La Trappe a morning of quiet, when his
+mind might lounge, a mixture of spiritual siesta and of working, charmed
+by a round of offices, and not at all that the idea persistent and
+obstinate that he must quit the monastery next day, would spoil all the
+pleasures he had promised himself.
+
+Now that he had no longer to cleanse himself, and pass under the
+winnowing of confession, to present himself for the Communion in the
+morning, he remained irresolute, not knowing any longer how to occupy
+his time, terrified by the recommencement of that life of the world
+which would upset all the barriers of forgetfulness, and would get at
+him at once above all the broken defences of the cloister.
+
+Like a captured animal, he began to rub against the bars of his cage,
+made the tour of the enclosure, filling his sight with those places
+where he had tasted hours so kindly and so cruel.
+
+He felt in himself a shaking of the ground, a disturbance of soul, an
+absolute discouragement before the prospect of re-entering into his
+habitual existence, of mixing himself anew with the coming and going of
+men, and he experienced at the same time a great fatigue of brain.
+
+He dragged himself along the walks in a state of complete discomfort, in
+one of those attacks of religious spleen which determine, while they
+last during years, the "tĉdium vitĉ" of the cloisters. He had a horror
+of any life but this, and the soul overwrought by prayers was failing in
+a body insufficiently rested and ill-nourished; it had no further
+desire, asked only to be let alone, to sleep, to fall into one of those
+states of torpor in which everything becomes indifferent, in which one
+ends by losing consciousness gently, by being stifled without
+suffering.
+
+He might well, to re-act on him as a consolation, promise himself to
+assist in Paris at the offices of the Benedictine nuns, that he would
+keep himself on the outskirts of society, to himself; and he was at once
+obliged to answer that these subterfuges are impossible, that the very
+movement of the town is against all decoys, that isolation in a chamber
+is in no degree like the solitude of a cell, that masses celebrated in a
+chapel open to the public cannot be likened to the private Offices of
+the Trappists.
+
+Then what is the good of trying to misunderstand? It is with the soul as
+with the body, which is better on the sea shore, or in the mountains,
+than shut up in a town. There is a better spiritual air even at Paris,
+in certain religious quarters of the left bank, than in the districts
+situated on the other bank, more lively in certain churches, more pure,
+for example, at Notre Dame des Victoires than in churches such as La
+Trinité and the Madeleine.
+
+But the monastery was, as it were, the true shore and high plateau of
+the soul. There the atmosphere was balsamic, strength returned, lost
+appetite for God was there recovered, there was health succeeding
+weakness, a regimen, fortified and sustained, instead of languor and the
+restricted exercises of the towns.
+
+The conviction that no trickery was possible to him at Paris brought him
+to the ground. He wandered from cell to chapel, from chapel to woods,
+awaiting the dinner hour with impatience, in order to be able to speak
+to someone, for in his disorder a new need arose. For more than a week
+he had spent the whole afternoon without opening his lips; he did not
+suffer from it, was even satisfied with his silence, but since he was
+pressed by this idea of departure he could not keep silence any longer,
+thought aloud in the walks to assuage the sensations of his swelling
+heart, that stifled him.
+
+M. Bruno was too sagacious not to guess the uneasiness of his companion,
+who became by turns taciturn and over talkative during the meal. He
+made, however, as though he saw nothing, but after he had said grace he
+disappeared, and Durtal, who was strolling near the great pond, was
+surprised to see him coming in his direction with Father Etienne.
+
+They greeted him, and the Trappist with a smile proposed to him, if he
+had made no other plan, to pass his time in visiting the convent, and
+especially the library, which the Father prior would be delighted to
+show him.
+
+"If convenient to me! I shall be delighted!" cried Durtal.
+
+All three returned towards the abbey; the monk lifted the latch of a
+little door fashioned in a wall near the church, and Durtal entered a
+minute cemetery, planted with wooden crosses on grass graves.
+
+There was no inscription, no flower in this enclosure which they
+traversed; the monk pushed another door, which opened on a long corridor
+smelling of rats. At the end of this gallery, Durtal recognized the
+staircase he had ascended one morning for his confession in the prior's
+room. They left it on their right, turned into another gallery, and the
+guest-master led them into an immense hall, pierced by high windows,
+decorated with eighteenth century pier-glasses, and _grisailles_; it was
+furnished only with benches and stalls, above which was a single chair
+sculptured and painted with abbatial arms, which marked the place of Dom
+Anselm.
+
+"Oh! this chapter-house has nothing monastic," said Father Etienne,
+designating the profane pictures on the walls; "we have kept just as it
+was the drawing-room of this old chateau, but I beg you to believe that
+this decoration hardly pleases us."
+
+"And what takes place in this hall?"
+
+"Well, we meet here after mass; the chapter opens by reading the
+martyrology, followed by the concluding prayers of Prime. Then we read a
+passage from the rule, and the Father abbot comments on it. Lastly, we
+practise the exercise of humility, that is to say, that whoever among us
+has committed any fault against the rule, prostrates himself, and avows
+it before his brethren."
+
+They went thence to the refectory. This room had also a high ceiling,
+but was smaller, and garnished with tables in form of a horse-shoe. A
+kind of large cruets, each containing two half-bottles of wine and
+water, separated by a water bottle, and before them, instead of glasses,
+cups of brown earthenware, with two handles, were placed at equal
+distances. The monk explained that these sham cruets with three branches
+indicated the place of two covers, each monk having a right to his half
+bottle of drink, and partaking with his neighbour the water in the
+bottle.
+
+"This pulpit," said Father Etienne, pointing out a large wooden box
+fixed against the wall, "is destined for the reader of the week, the
+father who reads during the meal."
+
+"How long does the meal last?"
+
+"Just half an hour."
+
+"Yes; and the cookery which we eat is delicate in comparison with that
+which is served to the monks," said the oblate.
+
+"I should lie if I were to affirm that we make good cheer," answered the
+guest-master. "Do you know that the hardest thing to bear, in the
+earlier time especially, is the want of seasoning in our dishes. Pepper
+and spices are forbidden by our rule, and as no salt-cellar has place on
+our table, we swallow our food just as it is, and it is for the most
+part scarcely salted.
+
+"On certain days in summer, when one sweats in big drops, this becomes
+almost impossible, the gorge rises. Yet one must begin upon this warm
+paste, and at least swallow a sufficient quantity not to give out before
+the next day; we look at each other discouraged, unable to get any
+further; there is not another word to define our dinner in the month of
+August, it is a punishment."
+
+"And all, the Father abbot, the prior, the fathers, the brethren, have
+the same food?"
+
+"All. Now come and see the dormitory."
+
+They ascended to the first floor. An immense corridor, furnished like a
+stable with wooden boxes, extended before them, closed at each end by a
+door.
+
+"This is our lodging," said the monk, as he stopped before one of these
+cases. Cards were placed on them, affixing the name of each monk, and
+the first bore a ticket with this inscription: "The Father Abbot."
+
+Durtal felt the bed against one of the two walls.
+
+It was as rough as a carding comb, and as biting as a file. It was
+composed of a simple quilted paillasse extended on a plank; no sheets,
+but a prison coverlet of grey wool, a sack of straw instead of pillows.
+
+"God! it is very hard," said Durtal, and the monk laughed.
+
+"Our habits soften the roughness of this straw mattress," he said; "for
+our rule does not allow us to undress, we may only take off our shoes,
+therefore we sleep entirely clad, our head wrapped in our hood."
+
+"And it must be cold in this corridor swept by all the winds," added
+Durtal.
+
+"No doubt the winter is rough here, but it is not that season which
+alarms us; we live pretty well, even without fire in time of frost, but
+the summer--! If you knew what it is to wake in habits still steeped in
+sweat, not dried since the evening before, it is terrible!
+
+"Then, though because of the great heat we have often hardly slept, we
+must before dawn jump out of bed, and begin at once the great night
+office, the Vigils, which last at least two hours. Even after twenty
+years of Trappist life, one cannot but suffer at that getting up; in
+chapel you fight against sleep which crushes you, you sleep while you
+hear a verse chanted, you strive to keep awake, in order to be able to
+chant another, and fall asleep again.
+
+"One ought to be able to turn the key on thought, and one is incapable
+of it.
+
+"Truly, I assure you that even beyond the corporal fatigue which
+explains that state in the morning, there is then an aggression of the
+demon, an incessant temptation to make us recite the office badly."
+
+"And you all undergo this strife?"
+
+"All; and this does not hinder," concluded the monk, whose face was
+radiant, "this does not hinder us from being very happy here.
+
+"Because all these trials are nothing beside the deep and intimate joys
+which our good God gives us. Ah! He is a generous Master; he pays us a
+hundred-fold for our poor sorrows."
+
+As they spoke, they had passed through the corridor and had arrived at
+its other end.
+
+The monk opened the door, and Durtal was astounded to find himself in a
+vestibule just opposite his own cell.
+
+"I did not think," he said, "that I was living so near you."
+
+"This house is a regular labyrinth--but M. Bruno will take you to the
+library where the Father prior is waiting for you; for I must go to my
+business. We shall meet presently," he said, with a smile.
+
+The library was situated on the other side of the staircase by which
+Durtal reached his chamber. It was large, furnished with shelves from
+top to bottom, occupied in the middle by a sort of counter table on
+which also were spread rows of books.
+
+Father Maximin said to Durtal,
+
+"We are not very rich, but at any rate we possess tools for work fairly
+complete on theology and the monography of the cloisters."
+
+"You have superb volumes," cried Durtal, who looked at magnificent
+folios in splendid bindings with armorial bearings.
+
+"Wait; here are the works of Saint Bernard in a fine edition," and the
+monk presented to Durtal enormous volumes, printed in heavy letters on
+crackling paper.
+
+"When I think that I promised myself to make acquaintance with Saint
+Bernard in this very abbey which he founded, and here I am on the eve of
+my departure, and have read nothing!"
+
+"You do not know his works?"
+
+"Yes; scattered fragments of his sermons and of his letters. I have run
+through some _selectĉ mediocres_ of his works, but that is all."
+
+"He is our chief master here; but he is not the only one of our
+ancestors in Saint Benedict whom the convent possesses," said the monk
+with a certain pride. "See," and he pointed out on the shelves some
+heavy folios, "here: 'Saint Gregory the Great,' 'Venerable Bede,' 'Saint
+Peter Damian,' 'Saint Anselm.' ... And your friends are there," he said,
+following Durtal with a glance as he read the titles of the volumes,
+"'Saint Teresa,' 'Saint John of the Cross,' 'Saint Magdalen of Pazzi,'
+'Saint Angela,' 'Tauler,' ... and she who like Sister Emmerich dictated
+her conversations with Jesus during her ecstasy." And the prior took
+from the range of books in octavo, "The Dialogues of Saint Catherine of
+Siena."
+
+"That Dominican nun is terrible for the priests of her time," the monk
+went on. "She insists on their misdeeds, reproaches them roundly with
+selling the Holy Spirit, with practising sortilege, and with using the
+Sacrament to compose evil charms."
+
+"And there are besides the disorderly vices of which she accuses them
+in the series concerning the sin of the flesh," added the oblate.
+
+"Certainly, she does not mince her words, but she had the right to take
+up that tone, and menace in the name of the Lord, for she was truly
+inspired by Him. Her doctrine was drawn from divine sources. 'Doctrina
+ejus infusa non acquisita,' says the Church in the bull of her
+canonization. Her Dialogues are admirable; the pages in which God
+exposes the holy frauds which He sometimes uses to recall men to good,
+the passages in which she treats of the monastic life, of that barque
+which possesses three ropes: chastity, obedience, and poverty, and which
+faces the tempest under the conduct of the Holy Spirit, are delightful.
+She reveals herself in her work the pupil of the well-beloved disciple
+and of Saint Thomas Aquinas. One might believe that one heard the Angel
+of the School paraphrasing the last of the Evangelists."
+
+"Yes," said the oblate, striking in, "if Saint Catherine of Siena does
+not give herself to the high speculations of Mysticism; if she does not
+analyze like Saint Teresa the mysteries of divine love, nor trace the
+itinerary of souls destined to the perfect life, she reflects directly
+at least the conversations of Heaven. She calls, she loves! You have
+read, sir, her treatises on Discretion and Prayer?"
+
+"No. I have read Saint Catherine of Genoa, but the books of Saint
+Catherine of Siena have never fallen into my hands."
+
+"And what do you think of this collection?"
+
+Durtal looked at the title, and made a face.
+
+"I see that Suso hardly delights you."
+
+"I should tell a lie if I assured you that the dissertations of this
+Dominican pleased me. First, however illuminated the man may be, he does
+not attract me. Without speaking of the frenzy of his penances, what
+scrupulousness of devotion and narrowness of piety was his! Think that
+he could not decide on drinking till he had first, as a preliminary,
+divided his beverage into five parts. He thought thus to honour the five
+wounds of the Saviour, and, moreover, he swallowed his last mouthful in
+two gulps to call up before himself the water and the blood which flowed
+from the side of the Word.
+
+"No! these sort of things would never enter into my head; I would never
+admit that such practices would glorify Christ.
+
+"And remark well that this love of pounding things small, this passion
+for small blessings, is found in all his work. His God is so difficult
+to content, so scrupulous, so meddling, that no one would ever get to
+heaven if they believed what he said. This God of his is the
+fault-finder of eternity, the miser of paradise.
+
+"On the whole, Suso expands himself in impetuous discourses on trifles;
+then what with his insipid allegories, his morose 'Colloquy on the Nine
+Rocks' knocks me down."
+
+"You will, however, admit that his study on the Union of the Soul is
+substantial, and that the 'Office of the Eternal Wisdom' which he
+composed is worth reading?"
+
+"I cannot say, Father, I do not now remember that Office; but I
+recollect tolerably well the treatise on 'Union with God,' it seems to
+me more interesting than the rest, but you will admit that it is very
+short ... and then Saint Teresa has also elucidated that question of
+human renunciation and divine fruition; and, hang it then...!"
+
+"Come," said the oblate, with a smile, "I give up the attempt to make
+you a fervent reader of the good Suso."
+
+"For us," said Father Maximin, "if we had a little time to work, this
+ought to be the leaven of our meditations, the subject of our reading;"
+and he took down a folio which contained the works of Saint Hildegarde,
+abbess of the Convent of Rupertsberg.
+
+"She, you see, is the great prophetess of the New Testament. Never,
+since the visions of Saint John at Patmos, has the Holy Spirit
+communicated to an earthly being with such fulness and light. In her
+'Heptachronon' she predicts Protestantism and the captivity of the
+Vatican; in her 'Scivias, or Knowledge of the Ways of the Lord,' which
+was edited, according to her recital, by a monk of the Convent of Saint
+Désibode, she interprets the symbols of the Scriptures, and even the
+nature of the elements. She also wrote a diligent commentary on our
+rules and enthusiastic pages on sacred music, on literature, on art,
+which she defines admirably; a reminiscence, half-effaced, of a
+primitive condition from which we have fallen since Eden. Unfortunately,
+to understand her, it is necessary to give oneself to minute researches
+and patient studies. Her apocalyptic style has something retractile,
+which retreats and shuts itself up all the more when one will open it."
+
+"I am well aware that I am losing my little Latin," said M. Bruno. "What
+a pity there is not a translation of her works, with glosses to help."
+
+"They are untranslatable," said the father, who went on,
+
+"Saint Hildegarde is, with Saint Bernard, one of the purest glories of
+the family of Saint Benedict. How predestinate was that virgin, who was
+inundated with interior light at the age of three, and died at
+eighty-two, having lived all her life in the cloister!"
+
+"And add that she was as a permanent state, prophetical!" cried the
+oblate. "She is like no other woman saint; all in her is astonishing,
+even the way in which God addresses her, for He forgets that she is a
+woman, and calls her 'man.'
+
+"And she," added the prior, "employs, when she wishes to designate
+herself, the singular expression, 'the paltry form.' But here is another
+writer who is dear to us," and he showed Durtal the two volumes of Saint
+Gertrude. "She is again one of our great nuns, an abbess truly
+Benedictine, in the exact sense of the word, for she caused the Holy
+Scriptures to be explained to her nuns, wished that the piety of her
+daughters should be based on science, that this faith should be
+sustained by liturgical food, if I may say so."
+
+"I know nothing of her but her 'Exercises,'" observed Durtal, "and they
+have left with me the memory of echoed words, of things said again from
+the sacred books. So far as one may judge from simple extracts, she does
+not appear to have original expression, and to be far below Saint Teresa
+or Saint Angela."
+
+"No doubt," answered the monk. "But she comes near Saint Angela by the
+gift of familiarity when she converses with Christ, and also by the
+loving vehemence of what she says; only all this is transformed on
+leaving its proper source; she thinks liturgically; and this is so true,
+that the least of her reflections at once presents itself to her clothed
+in the language of the Gospels and the Psalms.
+
+"Her 'Revelations,' her 'Insinuations,' her 'Herald of Divine Love,' are
+marvellous from this point of view; and then her prayer to the Blessed
+Virgin is exquisite which opens with this phrase: 'Hail, O white lily
+of the Trinity, resplendent, and always at rest....'
+
+"As a continuation of her works, the Benedictine Fathers of Solesmes
+have edited also the 'Revelations' of Saint Mechtilde, her book on
+'Special Grace,' and her 'Light of the Divinity'; they are there on that
+shelf...."
+
+"Let me show you," said in his turn M. Bruno, "guides wisely marked out
+for the soul which escapes from itself, and will attempt to climb the
+eternal mountains," and he handed to Durtal the "Lucerna Mystica" of
+Lopez Ezquerra, the quartos of Scaramelli, the volumes of Schram, the
+"Christian Asceticism" of Ribet, the "Principles of Mystic Theology" of
+Father Seraphin.
+
+"And do you know this?" continued the oblate; the volume he offered was
+called "On Prayer," was anonymous, and bore at the bottom of its first
+page "Solesmes, printed at the Abbey of Saint Cecilia," and above the
+printed date, 1886, Durtal made out the word written in ink,
+"Confidential."
+
+"I have never seen this little book, which seems moreover to have never
+been brought into the market. Who is the author?"
+
+"The most extraordinary nun of our time, the abbess of the Benedictine
+nuns at Solesmes. I regret only that you are going so soon, for I should
+have been happy to let you read it.
+
+"As far as the document is concerned, it is of a most extraordinary
+science, and it contains admirable quotations from Saint Hildegarde and
+Cassien: as far as Mysticism is concerned, Mother Saint Cecilia
+evidently only reproduces the works of her predecessors, and she tells
+us nothing very new. Nevertheless, I remember a passage which seems to
+me more special, more personal. Wait...."
+
+And the oblate turned over a few pages. "Here it is:
+
+"'The spiritualized soul does not appear exposed to temptation properly
+so-called, but by a divine permission it is called upon to conflict with
+the Demon, spirit against spirit.... The contact with the Demon is then
+perceived on the surface of the soul, under the form of a burn at once
+spiritual and sensible.... If the soul hold good in its union with God,
+if it be strong, the pain, however sharp, is bearable; but if the soul
+commit any slight imperfection, even inwardly, the Demon makes just so
+much way, and carries his horrible burning more forward, until by
+generous acts the soul can repulse him further."
+
+"This touch of Satan, which produces an almost material effect on the
+most intangible parts of our being, is, you will admit, at least
+curious," concluded the oblate, as he closed the volume.
+
+"Mother Saint Cecilia is a remarkable strategist of the soul," said the
+prior, "but ... but ... this work, which she edited for the daughters of
+her abbey, contains, I think, some rash propositions which have not been
+read without displeasure at Rome."
+
+"To have done with our poor treasures," he continued, "we have only on
+this side," and he pointed out a portion of the book-cases which covered
+the room, "long-winded works, the 'Cistercian Menology,' 'Migné's
+Patrology,' dictionaries of the lives of the saints, manuals of sacred
+interpretation, canon law, Christian apology, Biblical exegesis, the
+complete works of Saint Thomas, tools of work which we rarely employ,
+for as you know we are a branch of the Benedictine trunk vowed to a life
+of bodily labour and penance; we are men of sorrow for God, above all
+things. Here is M. Bruno, who uses these books; so do I at times, for I
+have special charge of spiritual matters in this monastery," added the
+monk with a smile.
+
+Durtal looked at him; he handled the volumes with caressing hands,
+brooded over them with the blue lustre of his eye, laughed with the joy
+of a child as he turned their pages.
+
+"What a difference between this monk who evidently adores his books, and
+the prior with his imperious profile and silent lips who heard his
+confession the second day;" then thinking of all these Trappists, the
+severity of their countenances, the joy of their eyes, Durtal said to
+himself that these Cistercians were not at all as the world believed,
+solemn and funereal people, but that, quite the contrary, they were the
+gayest of men.
+
+"Now," said Father Maximin, "the reverend Father abbot has charged me
+with a commission; knowing that you will leave us to-morrow, he is
+anxious, now that he is better, to pass at least some minutes with you.
+He will be free this evening: will it trouble you to join him after
+Compline?"
+
+"Not at all; I shall be glad to talk with Dom Anselm."
+
+"That is understood, then."
+
+They went downstairs. Durtal thanked the prior, who re-entered the
+enclosure of the corridors, and the oblate, who went up to his cell. He
+trifled about, and in spite of the torment of his departure, which
+haunted him, reached the evening without too much trouble.
+
+The "Salve Regina," which he heard perhaps for the last time thus sung
+by male voices; that airy chapel built of sound, and evaporating with
+the close of the antiphon, in the smoke of the tapers, stirred him to
+the bottom of his soul; the Trappist monastery showed itself truly
+charming this evening. After the office, they said the Rosary, not as at
+Paris, where they recite a Pater, ten Aves, and a Gloria, and so over
+again; here they said in Latin a Pater, an Ave, a Gloria, and began
+again till in that manner they had finished several decades.
+
+This rosary was said on their knees, half by the prior, half by all the
+monks. It went at so rapid a pace that it was scarcely possible to
+distinguish the words, but as soon as it was ended, at a signal there
+was a great silence, and each one prayed with his head in his hands.
+
+And Durtal took notice of the ingenious system of conventual prayers:
+after the prayers purely vocal like these, came mental prayer, personal
+petitions, stimulated and set a-going by the very machine of
+paternosters.
+
+"Nothing is left to chance in religion; every exercise which seems at
+first useless has a reason for its being," he said to himself, as he
+went out into the court. "And the fact is, that the rosary, which seems
+to be only a humming-top of sounds, fulfils an end. It reposes the soul
+wearied with the supplications which it has recited, applying itself to
+them, thinking of them; it hinders it from babbling and reciting to God
+always the same petitions, the same complaints; it allows it to take
+breath, to take rest, in prayers in which it can dispense with
+reflection, and, in fact, the rosary occupies in prayer, those hours of
+fatigue in which one would not pray.... Ah! here is the Father abbot."
+
+The Trappist expressed to him his regret at visiting him only thus for a
+few moments; then after he had answered Durtal, who inquired after the
+state of his health, which he hoped was at last re-established, he
+proposed to him to walk in the garden, and begged him not to
+inconvenience himself by not smoking cigarettes if he had a mind to do
+so.
+
+And the conversation turned on Paris. Dom Anselm asked for some
+information, and ended by saying with a smile, "I see by scraps of
+newspapers which come to me, that society just now is infected with
+socialism. Everyone wishes to solve the famous social question. How does
+that get on?"
+
+"How does that get on? Why, not at all! Unless you can change the souls
+of workmen and masters, and make them disinterested and charitable
+between to-day and to-morrow, in what can you expect these systems to
+end?"
+
+"Well," said the monk, enwrapping the monastery with a gesture, "the
+question is solved here.
+
+"As wages do not exist, all sources of conflicts are suppressed.
+
+"As every task is according to aptitudes and powers, the fathers who are
+not strong-shouldered and big-armed fold the packages of chocolate, or
+make out the bills, and those who are robust dig the ground.
+
+"I add that the equality in our cloisters is such that the prior and the
+abbot have no advantage over the other monks. At table the portions, and
+in the dormitory the paillasses, are identical. The sole profits of the
+abbot consist on the whole in the inevitable cares arising from the
+moral conduct and the temporal administration of an abbey. There is
+therefore no reason why the workmen of a convent should go on strike,"
+concluded the abbot with a smile.
+
+"Yes, but you are minimists, you suppress the family and woman, you live
+on nothing, and expect the only real recompense for your labours after
+death. How can you make the people in the towns understand that?"
+
+"The social system may thus be summed up, as I think: the masters wish
+to profit by the workmen, who in their turn desire to be paid as much as
+possible for as little work as possible. Well, then, there is no way out
+of that."
+
+"Exactly, and there is the sad part of it, for socialism in fact arises
+from kindly ideas, just ideas, and will always run up against egotism
+and gain, against the inevitable breakers of the sins of man.
+
+"And your little chocolate factory gives you at least some income?"
+
+"Yes; that saves us."
+
+The abbot was silent for a second; then he went on,
+
+"You know, sir, how a convent is founded. I take for example our Order.
+A domain and the lands about it are offered the Order on condition that
+it peoples them. The Order takes a handful of its monks, and settles
+them as a swarm on the soil given to it. There its task stops. The grain
+must spring up of itself, or to put it differently, the Trappists,
+severed from their mother-house, must gain their livelihood, and suffice
+for themselves.
+
+"So when we took possession of these buildings we were so poor, that
+from bread to shoes everything was lacking; but we had no anxiety for
+the future, for there is no example in monastic history that Providence
+has not succoured abbeys who trusted in it. Little by little we drew our
+food from the estate, and we learnt useful trades; now we make our
+habits and our shoes; we reap our wheat and make our bread; our material
+existence is therefore assured, but the taxes crush us; therefore we
+have founded this factory, of which the report becomes better from year
+to year.
+
+"In a year or two the building which shelters us, and for want of money
+we have been unable to repair, will tumble down, but if God then allows
+generous souls to come to our aid, perhaps we shall be in a condition to
+build a monastery, which is the wish of all of us; for indeed this hovel
+with its rooms in confusion, and its rotunda-chapel, is painful to us."
+
+The abbot was silent again, then after a pause he said in a low voice,
+speaking to himself,
+
+"It cannot be denied, a convent which has not the look of a cloister is
+an obstacle to vocations; the postulant has need--and this is quite
+natural--to mould himself in surroundings which please him, to encourage
+himself in a church which wraps him round, in a somewhat sombre chapel;
+and to obtain that result you want the Romanesque or Gothic style."
+
+"Ah, yes, indeed. And have you many novices?"
+
+"We have especially many subjects who desire to feel the life of
+Trappists, but the greater part do not succeed in supporting our way of
+life. Beside even the question of knowing whether the vocation of the
+beginners is imaginary or real, we are from the physical point of view
+clearly fixed after a fortnight's trial."
+
+"Eating vegetables only must crush the most robust constitutions; I do
+not even understand how, leading an active life, you can bear it."
+
+"The truth is that bodies obey where souls are resolute. Our ancestors
+endured the life of the Trappists very well. We want souls at the
+present day. I remember that when I made my probation in a Cistercian
+cloister I had no health, and yet had it been necessary I would have
+eaten stones!
+
+"Moreover, the rule will soon be softened," pursued the abbot; "but in
+any case there is a country which, if there should be scarcity, assures
+us a good number of recruits, Holland."
+
+And seeing Durtal's look of astonishment, the father said,
+
+"Yes, in that Protestant country mystic vegetation is flourishing.
+Catholicism is all the more fervent that it is, if not persecuted, at
+least despised, drowned in the mass of Calvinists. Perhaps this belongs
+also to the nature of the soil, to its solitary plains, its silent
+canals, to the very taste of the Dutch for a regular and peaceable life;
+but in that little knot of Catholics the Cistercian vocation is always
+very common."
+
+Durtal looked at the Trappist as he walked majestic and quiet, his head
+buried in his hood, his hands passed under his cincture.
+
+From time to time his eyes grew bright inside his hood, and the amethyst
+which he wore on his finger sparkled in brief flames.
+
+No sound was heard; at this hour the monastery was asleep. Durtal and
+the abbot were walking on the banks of the great pond, where the water
+was alive, it alone wakeful in the slumber of the woods, for the moon,
+which shone in a cloudless sky, sowed a myriad of goldfish, and this
+luminous spawn, fallen from the planet, mounted, descended, sparkled in
+a thousand little points of fire, of which the wind as it blew increased
+the brightness.
+
+The abbot spoke no longer, and Durtal, who was thinking, intoxicated by
+the sweetness of the night, groaned suddenly. He had just considered
+that at this same hour the next day he would be at Paris, and seeing the
+monastery, whose pale front appeared at the end of a walk as at the end
+of a dark tunnel, he cried, thinking of all the monks who inhabited it,
+
+"Ah! they are happy!"
+
+And the abbot answered, "Too happy."
+
+Then gently, in a low voice,
+
+"Yes, it is true we enter here to do penance, to mortify ourselves, and
+we have hardly begun to suffer when God consoles us. He is so good that
+He Himself wishes to deceive Himself about our merits. If at certain
+moments He allows the Demon to persecute us, He gives us in exchange so
+much happiness that there is no proportion preserved between the
+recompense and the sorrow. Sometimes when I think of it, I ask myself
+how there still subsists that equilibrium that nuns and monks are
+charged to maintain, since neither of us suffer enough to neutralize the
+repeated sins of towns?"
+
+The abbot stopped, and then went on pensively,
+
+"The world does not even conceive that the austerity of the abbeys can
+profit it. The doctrine of mystical compensation escapes it entirely. It
+cannot represent to itself that the substitution of the innocent for the
+guilty is necessary when to suffer merited punishment is concerned. Nor
+does it explain to itself any more that in wishing to suffer for others,
+monks turn aside the wrath of heaven, and establish a solidarity in the
+good which is a counter-weight against the federation of evil. God
+knows, moreover, with what cataclysms the unconscious world would be
+menaced, if in consequence of a sudden disappearance of all the
+cloisters, the equilibrium which saves it were broken."
+
+"The case has already presented itself," said Durtal, who while
+listening to the Trappist thought of the Abbé Gévresin, and remembered
+how that priest had expressed himself on the same subject in nearly
+similar terms. "The Revolution, in fact, suppressed all convents with
+one stroke of a pen, but I think that the history of that time when so
+many hucksters were busy is still to be written. Instead of searching
+for documents on the acts, and even on the persons of the Jacobins, the
+archives of the religious orders which existed at that time should be
+ransacked.
+
+"In working thus at the side of the Revolution, in sounding its
+neighbourhood, its foundations will be exhumed. Its causes will be
+brought to the surface, and it will certainly be discovered that in
+proportion to the suppression of convents, monstrous excesses had birth.
+Who knows if the demoniacal madness of Carrier or Marat do not accord
+with the death of an abbey whose sanctity preserved France for years."
+
+"To be just," answered the abbot, "it is right to say that the
+Revolution destroyed ruins only. The rule of _in commendam_ ended by
+giving the monasteries over to Satan. It was they, alas! that by the
+relaxation of their morals, inclined the balance, and drew down the
+lightning on the land.
+
+"The Terror was only a consequence of their impiety. God, whom nothing
+longer withheld, let things take their course."
+
+"Yes; but how can you now prove the necessity of compensations to a
+world which wanders out of the way in continued accesses of gain; how
+persuade it that it is an urgent need, as a preventive against new
+crises, to shelter towns behind the sacred bulwarks of cloisters?
+
+"After the siege of 1870, Paris was wisely sheltered behind an immense
+net of impregnable forts; but is it not also indispensable to surround
+it with a cincture of prayers, to buttress its neighbourhood with
+conventual houses, to build everywhere in its suburbs convents of Poor
+Clares, Carmelites, Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament,
+monasteries which will be in some degree powerful citadels, destined to
+arrest the forward march of the armies of evil?
+
+"Certainly the towns have great need of being guaranteed against
+infernal invasions by a sanitary defence of Orders.... But come, sir, I
+must not deprive you of necessary rest, I will join you to-morrow,
+before you quit our solitude. I have now but to say that you have only
+friends here, and that you will be always welcome. I hope that on your
+side you will keep no unfavourable memory of our poor hospitality, and
+that you will prove it in coming to see us again."
+
+As they talked they had come in front of the guest-house.
+
+The father pressed Durtal's hands, and slowly ascended the stairs,
+sweeping with his robe the silver dust of the steps, as he mounted, all
+white, in a ray of the moon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+Durtal wished immediately after Mass to visit for the last time that
+wood through which he had walked, in turn so languidly and so rapidly.
+He went at first to the old lime alley, whose pale emanations were
+verily for his spirit what an infusion of their leaves is for the body,
+a sort of very weak panacea, a kindly and soothing sedative.
+
+Then he sat down in their shade on a stone bench. As he leant forward a
+little he could see through the moving spaces in the branches, the
+solemn front of the abbey, and opposite it, separated by the kitchen
+garden, the gigantic cross standing before that liquid plan of a church
+which the pond simulated.
+
+He rose, and approached the watery cross, of which the sky turned the
+marble water blue, and he contemplated the great crucifix in white
+marble, which towered above the whole monastery, and seemed to rise
+opposite to it as a permanent reminder of the vows of suffering which he
+had accepted, and reserved to himself to change at length into joys.
+
+"The fact is," said Durtal, who thought over again the contradictory
+declarations of the monks, confessing that they led at once the most
+attractive and the most atrocious life; "the fact is that the good God
+deceives them. They attain here below Paradise, while they seek hell
+there. I have myself tasted how strange is existence in this cloister,
+for I have been here, almost at the same time, very unhappy and very
+happy; and now I feel well the mirage which is already beginning: before
+two days are over the remembrance of the sorrows which then were, if I
+recall them with care, greatly above the joys, will have disappeared,
+and I shall only recall those interior emotions in the chapel, those
+delicious stolen moments in the morning in the pathways of the park.
+
+"I shall regret the open-air prison of this convent. It is curious I
+find myself attached to it by obscure bonds; when I am in my cell, there
+return to me all kinds of memories, like those of an ancient race. I
+find myself at once at home again, in a place I had never seen; I
+recognize from the first moment a very special life, of which
+nevertheless I know nothing. It seems to me that something which
+interests me, which is indeed personal to me, passed here before I was
+born. Truly, if I believed in metempsychosis I might imagine I had been
+a monk in anterior existences; a bad monk then," he said, smiling at his
+reflections, "since I should have been obliged to be reincarnate and to
+return to a cloister to expiate my sins."
+
+While thus talking with himself, he had passed across a long alley which
+led to the end of the enclosure, and, cutting across the road, and
+through the thickets, he strayed into the wood of the great pond.
+
+It was not in motion, as on certain days when the wind made hollows in
+it, and swelled it, made it flow and return on itself as soon as it
+touched its banks. It remained immovable, and was only stirred by the
+reflections of the moving clouds and of the trees. At moments a leaf
+fallen from the neighbouring poplars swam on the image of a cloud, at
+others bubbles of air came from the bottom and burst on the surface in
+the reflected blue of heaven.
+
+Durtal looked for the otter, but it did not show itself; he saw only the
+swallows which skimmed the water with their wing, the dragon-flies which
+sparkled like jewels, flashing like the blue flames of sulphur.
+
+If he had suffered near the cross-pond, before the sheet of water of the
+other pond he could only call up the memory of healing hours, which he
+had passed lying on a bed of moss, or a couch of dry reeds, and he
+looked at it tenderly, trying to fix and carry it away in his memory to
+re-live again in Paris, shutting his eyes on the bank.
+
+He pursued his walk, and stopped in an alley of chestnuts along the
+walls above the monastery; thence he went into the court in front of the
+cloister, the outbuildings, the stables, the woodsheds, even the
+pig-styes. He tried to see Brother Simeon, but he was probably engaged
+in the stables, for he did not appear. The buildings were silent, the
+pigs were shut up; only some lean cats prowled about in silence,
+scarcely looking when they met each other, going each on its own side,
+no doubt seeking some nourishing game which would console them for the
+eternal meals of vegetable soup served them at the monastery.
+
+Time was getting on; he prayed for the last time in the chapel, and went
+to his cell to get his portmanteau ready.
+
+While putting his things in order he thought of the inutility of
+decorated rooms. He had spent all his money at Paris in buying ornaments
+and books, for till now he had detested bare walls.
+
+But now, considering the blank walls of this room, he admitted to
+himself that he had done better between these four white-washed walls
+than in his room at Paris, hung with stuffs.
+
+Suddenly he recognized that La Trappe had weaned him from his
+preferences, had in a few days completely upset him. "The power of such
+an environment!" he said to himself, a little alarmed at feeling how he
+was transformed. And he thought in buckling his portmanteau, "I must
+however, go and find Father Etienne, for I must settle my account; I
+cannot be altogether a debtor to these good people."
+
+He went along the corridors, and ended by meeting the father in the
+court.
+
+He was a little confused how to open the question; at the first words
+the guest-master smiled.
+
+"The rule of Saint Benedict is formal," he said; "we must receive our
+guests as we receive our Lord Jesus Himself, that is to tell you that we
+cannot exchange our poor care for money."
+
+And when Durtal insisted, embarrassed,
+
+"If it does not suit you to have partaken of our meagre pittance without
+paying, do as you please; only the sum which you may give will be
+distributed in coins of ten or twenty sous, to the poor who come each
+morning, often from a great distance, to knock at our monastery gate."
+
+Durtal bowed and handed the money, which he had ready in his pocket, to
+the father, but he inquired if he might not have a word with Father
+Maximin before his departure.
+
+"Certainly; moreover, Father prior would not have let you go without
+shaking hands with you. I will go and make certain if he be free. Wait
+for me in the refectory." And the monk disappeared, and came back a few
+minutes afterwards, preceded by the prior.
+
+"Ah, well," said he, "then you are going to plunge again into the
+hurly-burly?"
+
+"Oh! without any pleasure, Father."
+
+"I understand that. It is so good, is it not, no longer to hear anything
+and to be silent. However, take courage; we will pray for you."
+
+And as Durtal thanked both of them for their kind attentions,
+
+"It is a pleasure to receive a retreatant such as you," cried Father
+Etienne, "nothing repulses you, and you are so exact that you are about
+before the hour: you rendered my task of overseer easy. If all were as
+little exacting and as pliable."
+
+And he admitted that he had given lodging to priests sent by their
+bishops as a penance, ecclesiastics of ill-repute whose complaints about
+food, lodging, the need of rising early in the morning, never ceased.
+
+"If, again," said the prior, "one could hope to recall them to good, to
+send them back healed to their parishes; but no, they go away still more
+rebellious than before, the Devil does not let them alone."
+
+During this conversation a lay brother brought in some dishes covered
+with plates and placed them on the table.
+
+"We have changed the hour of your dinner, because of the train," said
+Father Etienne.
+
+"Good appetite, adieu, and may the Lord bless you," said the prior.
+
+He raised his hand, and enwrapped Durtal, with a great sign of the
+cross, who knelt surprised at the sudden emotion in the monk's tone. But
+Father Maximin recovered himself at once, and he bowed to him as M.
+Bruno entered.
+
+The meal was silent; the oblate was visibly distressed at the departure
+of the companion whom he loved, and Durtal looked with a swelling heart
+at the old man, who had so charitably come out of his solitude to give
+him aid.
+
+"Will you not come some day to see me in Paris?" he said.
+
+"No. I have quitted life without any mind to return to it. I am dead to
+the world. I do not wish to see Paris again. I have no wish to live
+again.
+
+"But if God lend me still a few years of existence I hope to see you
+here again, for it is not in vain that one has crossed the threshold of
+mystic asceticism, to verify by one's own experience the reality of the
+requirements which our Lord brings about. Now, as God does not proceed
+by chance, He will certainly finish His work by sifting you as wheat. I
+venture to recommend you to try not to give way, and attempt to die in
+some measure to yourself, in order not to run counter to His plans."
+
+"I know well," said Durtal, "that all is displaced in me, that I am no
+longer the same, but what frightens me is that I am now sure that the
+works of the Teresan school are exact ... then, then ... if one must
+pass-through the cylinders of the rolling mill which Saint John of the
+Cross describes...."
+
+The noise of a carriage in the court interrupted him. M. Bruno went to
+the window and looked out.
+
+"Your luggage is down."
+
+"Yes."
+
+They looked at each other.
+
+"Listen! I would wish indeed to say to you...."
+
+"No, no, do not thank me," cried the oblate. "See, I have never so
+thoroughly understood the misery of my being. Ah! if I had been another
+man, I might, by praying better, have aided you more."
+
+The door opened and Father Etienne declared,
+
+"You have not a minute to lose, if you do not wish to miss the train."
+
+Thus hurried, Durtal had only time to press the hand of his friend, who
+accompanied him to the court. He found waiting a sort of open wagon
+driven by a Trappist, who, below a bald head, and cheeks streaked with
+rose threads, had a great black beard.
+
+Durtal pressed the hands of the guest-master and the oblate for the last
+time, when the Father abbot came in his turn to wish him a safe journey;
+and at the end of the court Durtal perceived two eyes fixed on him,
+those of Brother Anacletus, who, at a distance, said adieu by a slight
+bow, but without other gesture.
+
+Even this poor man, whose eloquent look told of a truly touching
+affection, had a saint's pity for the stranger whom he had seen so
+tumultuous and so sad in the desolate solitude of the wood!
+
+Certainly the stiffness of the rule forbade all show of feeling to these
+monks, but Durtal felt thoroughly that for him they had gone to the
+limit of concessions allowed, and his affliction was great as he cast
+them in parting a last expression of thanks.
+
+And the door of the monastery closed; that door at which he had trembled
+in arriving, and at which he now looked with tears in his eyes.
+
+"We must get on fast," said the procurator, "for we are late," and the
+horse went at a great speed along the lanes.
+
+Durtal recognized his companion, as having seen him in the chapel,
+singing in the choir during the Office.
+
+He had an air at once good-natured and firm, and his little grey eye
+smiled as it glanced behind his branched spectacles.
+
+"Well," said he, "how have you borne our regimen?"
+
+"I have had every chance; I came herewith my stomach out of order, my
+body ill, and the simple Trappist meals have cured me."
+
+And when Durtal narrated briefly the stages of soul he had undergone,
+the monk murmured,
+
+"That is nothing in regard to demoniacal attacks; we have had here true
+cases of possession."
+
+"And Brother Simeon discovered them!"
+
+"Ah! you know that...." And he replied quite simply to Durtal, who spoke
+to him of his admiration for the poor lay brothers,
+
+"You are right, sir; if you could talk with these peasants and
+illiterate men, you would be surprised at the often profound answers
+which these people give you; then they alone at the monastery are really
+courageous; we, the Fathers, when we think ourselves too weak, accept
+willingly the authorized addition of an egg; they never; they pray more,
+and it must be admitted that our Lord listens to them, since they get
+well again, and indeed are never ill."
+
+And to a question of Durtal who asked him in what consisted the
+functions of procurator, the monk answered,
+
+"They consist in keeping the accounts, in being the commercial agent, in
+travelling, in managing, alas! everything which does not concern the
+life of the cloister; but we are so few in number at Notre Dame de
+l'Atre, that we become necessarily Jacks-of-all-trades. For instance,
+Father Etienne is cellarer of the Abbey and guest-master, he is also
+sacristan and bell-ringer. I too, am first cantor and professor of plain
+song."
+
+And while the carriage rolled along, shaken by the ruts, the procurator
+declared to Durtal, who told him how much the offices chanted at the
+monastery had delighted him,
+
+"It is not with us that you ought to hear them; our choirs are too
+restricted, too weak to be able to raise the giant mass of those chants.
+You ought to go to the black monks of Solesmes or Ligugé if you wish to
+find the Gregorian melodies executed as they were in the Middle Ages. By
+the way, do you know in Paris, the Benedictine nuns in the Rue
+Monsieur?"
+
+"Yes; but do you not think they coo a little?"
+
+"I cannot say; all the same their collection of tunes is authentic, but
+at the little seminary at Versailles, you have better still, since they
+chant there exactly as at Solesmes; note this well, moreover, at Paris,
+when the churches decline to repudiate liturgical music, they use for
+the most part the false notation printed and spread in abundance in all
+the dioceses in France by the house of Pustet of Ratisbon."
+
+"But the errors and frauds with which those editions abound are well
+known."
+
+"The legend on which its partisans rely is incorrect. To assert, as they
+do, that this version is no other than that of Palestrina who was
+charged by Pope Paul V. to revive the musical liturgy of the Church, is
+an argument destitute of truth and void of force, for everyone knows
+that when Palestrina died, he had hardly begun the correction of the
+Gradual.
+
+"I will add that even if that musician had finished his work, that would
+not prove that his interpretation ought to be preferred to that which
+has been recently constituted after patient researches by the Abbey of
+Solesmes, for the Benedictine texts are based on the copy preserved at
+the monastery of St. Gall of the antiphonary of Saint Gregory, which
+represents the most ancient and the most certain monument which the
+Church preserves of the true plain chant.
+
+"This manuscript, of which photographic facsimiles exist, is the code of
+Gregorian melodies, and it ought to be, if I may use the expression, the
+neumatic Bible of choirs.
+
+"The disciples of Saint Benedict are then absolutely right when they
+declare that their version alone is faithful, alone correct."
+
+"How then comes it that so many churches get their music from Ratisbon?"
+
+"Alas, how comes it that Pustet has so long acquired the monopoly of
+liturgical books, and ... but no, better hold one's peace ... take this
+only for certain, that the German volumes are the absolute negation of
+the Gregorian tradition, the most complete heresy of plain chant."
+
+"By the way, what time is it? We must make haste," said the procurator,
+looking at the watch which Durtal held up to him. "Come up, my beauty,"
+and he whipped up the mare.
+
+"You drive with spirit," cried Durtal.
+
+"It is true; I forgot to say to you, that over and above my other
+functions, I also have, if need be, that of coachman."
+
+Durtal thought all the same that these people were extraordinary who
+lived an interior life in God. As soon as they consented to redescend on
+earth they revealed themselves as the most sagacious and the boldest of
+business men. An abbot founded a factory with the few pence he succeeded
+in gathering; he discerned the employment which suited each of his
+monks, and with them he improvised artisans, writing clerks, transformed
+a professor of plain chant into an agent, plunged into the tumult of
+purchases and sales, and little by little the house which scarcely was
+raised above the soil, grew, put forth shoots, and ended by nourishing
+with its fruit the abbey which had planted it.
+
+Transported into another environment these people would have as easily
+created great manufactories and started banks. And it was the same with
+the women. When one thinks of the practical qualities of a man of
+business, and the coolness of an old diplomatist which a mother abbess
+ought to possess in order to rule her community, one is obliged to admit
+that the only women, truly intelligent, truly remarkable are, outside of
+drawing-rooms, outside of the world, at the head of cloisters.
+
+And as he expressed his wonder aloud, that monks were so expert at
+setting up business.
+
+"It must be so," sighed the father, "but if you believe that we do not
+regret the time necessarily spent in digging the ground! then our spirit
+at least was free, then we could sanctify ourselves in silence which to
+a monk is as necessary as bread, for it is thanks to it, that he stifles
+vanity as it rises, that he represses disobedience as it murmurs, that
+he turns all his aspirations, all his thoughts towards God, and becomes
+at last attentive to His presence.
+
+"Instead of that ... but here we are at the station; do not trouble
+yourself about your portmanteau, but go and take your ticket, for I hear
+the whistle of the train."
+
+And in fact Durtal had only time to shake hands with the father, who put
+his luggage into the carriage.
+
+There, when he was alone, seated, looking at the monk as he departed, he
+felt his heart swell, ready to break.
+
+And in the clatter of the rails the train started.
+
+Sharply, clearly, in a minute, Durtal took stock of the frightful
+disorder into which he had thrown the monastery.
+
+"Ah! and outside it, all is the same to me, and nothing matters to me,"
+he cried. And he groaned, knowing that he should never more succeed in
+interesting himself in all that makes the joy of men. The uselessness of
+caring about any other thing than Mysticism and the liturgy, of thinking
+about aught else save God, implanted itself in him so firmly that he
+asked himself what would become of him at Paris with such ideas.
+
+He saw himself submitting to the confusion of controversies, the
+cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of
+proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of
+everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute or hold
+his tongue?
+
+In any case peace was for ever lost. How in fact was he to rally and
+recover when he was obliged to dwell in a place of passage, in a soul
+open to all winds, visited by a crowd of public thoughts?
+
+His contempt for relations, his disgust for acquaintances grew on him.
+"No, everything rather than mix myself again with society," he declared
+to himself, and then he was silent in despair, for he was not ignorant
+that he could not, apart from the monastic zone, live in isolation.
+After a short time would come weariness and a void, therefore why had
+he reserved nothing for himself, why had he trusted all to the cloister?
+He had not even known how to arrange the pleasure of entering into
+himself, he had discovered how to lose the amusement of bric-à-brac, how
+to extirpate that last satisfaction in the white nakedness of a cell! he
+no longer held to anything, but lay dismantled, saying, "I have
+renounced almost all the happiness which might fall to me, and what am I
+going to put in its place?"
+
+And terrified, he perceived the disquiet of a conscience ready to
+torment itself, the permanent reproaches of an acquired lukewarmness,
+the apprehensions of doubts against Faith, fear of furious clamours of
+the senses stirred by chance meetings.
+
+And he repeated to himself that the most difficult thing would not be to
+master the emotions of his flesh, but indeed to live Christianly, to
+confess, to communicate at Paris, in a church. He never could get so far
+as that, and he imagined discussions with the Abbé Gévresin, his gaining
+time, his refusal, foreseeing that their friendship would come to an end
+in these disputes.
+
+Then where should he fly? At the very recollection of the Trappist
+monastery the theatrical representations of St. Sulpice made him jump.
+St. Severin seemed to him distracted and worn. How could he live among
+stupid people like the devout, how listen without gnashing his teeth to
+the affected chants of the choirs? How, lastly, could he seek again in
+the chapel of the Benedictine nuns, and even at Notre Dame des
+Victoires, that dull heat radiating from the souls of the monks, and
+thawing little by little the ice of his poor being?
+
+And then it was not even that. What was truly crushing, truly dreadful,
+was to think that doubtless he would never again feel that admirable joy
+which lifts you from the ground, carries you, you know not where, nor
+how, above sense.
+
+Ah, those paths at the monastery wandered in at daybreak, those paths
+where one day after a communion, God had dilated his soul in such a
+fashion that it seemed no longer his own, so much had Christ plunged him
+in the sea of His divine infinity, swallowed him in the heavenly
+firmament of His person.
+
+How renew that state of grace without communion and outside a cloister?
+"No; it is all over," he concluded.
+
+And he was seized with such an access of sadness, such an outburst of
+despair, that he thought of getting out at the first station, and
+returning to the monastery; and he had to shrug his shoulders, for his
+character was not patient enough nor his will firm enough, nor his body
+strong enough to support the terrible trials of a noviciate. Moreover,
+the prospect of having no cell to himself, of sleeping dressed
+higgledy-piggledy in a dormitory, alarmed him.
+
+But what then? And sadly he took stock of himself.
+
+"Ah!" he thought, "I have lived twenty years in ten days in that
+convent, and I leave it, my brain relaxed, my heart in rags; I am done
+for, for ever. Paris and Notre Dame de l'Atre have rejected me each in
+their turn like a waif, and here I am condemned to live apart, for I am
+still too much a man of letters to become a monk, and yet I am already
+too much a monk to remain among men of letters."
+
+He leapt up and was silent, dazzled by jets of electric light which
+flooded him as the train stopped.
+
+He had returned to Paris.
+
+"If they," he said, thinking of those writers whom it would no doubt be
+difficult not to see again, "if they knew how inferior they are to the
+lowest of the lay brothers! if they could imagine how the divine
+intoxication of a Trappist swine-herd interests me more than all their
+conversations and all their books! Ah! Lord, that I might live, live in
+the shadow of the prayers of humble Brother Simeon!"
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, En Route, by J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans,
+Translated by W. Fleming</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: En Route</p>
+<p>Author: J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans</p>
+<p>Release Date: December 31, 2007  [eBook #24096]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EN ROUTE***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Camille François, Suzanne Shell,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><big><i>J. K. Huysmans</i></big></p>
+<h1 style="font-style: italic;">En Route</h1>
+<p class="center">Translated by W. Fleming</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<h2>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="contents">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X.</b></a></td></tr>
+</table>
+<h4>SECOND PART.</h4>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="contents">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII.</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#Part_II_CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX.</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 45%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER
+I.</h2>
+<p>During the first week in November, the week within the Octave
+of All
+Souls, Durtal entered St. Sulpice, at eight o'clock in the evening. He
+often chose to turn into that church, because there was a trained
+choir,
+and because he could there examine himself at peace, apart from the
+crowd. The ugliness of the nave, with its heavy vaulting, vanished at
+night, the aisles were often empty, it was ill-lighted by a few
+lamps&#8212;it was possible for a man to chide his soul in secret, as if at
+home.</p>
+<p>Durtal sat down behind the high altar, on the left, in the
+aisle along
+the Rue de St. Sulpice; the lamps of the choir organ were lighted. Far
+off, in the almost empty nave, an ecclesiastic was preaching. He
+recognized, by the unctuousness of his delivery, and his oily accent, a
+well-fed priest who poured on his audience, according to his wont, his
+best known commonplaces.</p>
+<p>"Why are they so devoid of eloquence?" thought Durtal. "I have
+had the
+curiosity to listen to many of them, and they are much the same. They
+only vary in the tones of their voice. According to their temperament,
+some are bruised down in vinegar, others steeped in oil. There is no
+such thing as a clever combination." And he called to mind orators
+petted like tenors, Monsabré, Didon, those Coquelins of the Church, and
+lower yet than those products of the Catholic training school, that
+bellicose booby the Abbé d'Hulst.</p>
+<p>"Afterwards," he continued, "come the mediocrities, each
+puffed by the
+handful of devotees who listen to them. If those cooks of the soul had
+any skill, if they served their clients with delicate meats,
+theological
+essences, gravies of prayer, concentrated sauces of ideas, they would
+vegetate misunderstood by their flocks. So, on the whole, it is all for
+the best. The low-water mark of the clergy must conform to the level of
+the faithful, and indeed Providence has provided carefully for this."</p>
+<p>A stamping of shoes, then the movement of chairs grinding on
+the flags
+interrupted him. The sermon was over.</p>
+<p>Then a great stillness was broken by a prelude from the organ,
+which
+dropped to a low tone, a mere accompaniment to the voices.</p>
+<p>A slow and mournful chant arose, the "De Profundis." The
+blended voices
+sounded under the arches, intermingling with the somewhat raw sounds of
+the harmonicas, like the sharp tones of breaking glass.</p>
+<p>Resting on the low accompaniment of the organ, aided by basses
+so hollow
+that they seemed to have descended into themselves, as it were
+underground, they sprang out, chanting the verse "De profundis ad te
+clamavi, Do&#8212;" and then stopped in fatigue, letting the last syllables
+"mine" fall like a heavy tear; then these voices of children, near
+breaking, took up the second verse of the psalm, "Domine exaudi vocem
+meam," and the second half of the last word again remained in suspense,
+but instead of separating, and falling to the ground, there to be
+crushed out like a drop, it seemed to gather itself together with a
+supreme effort, and fling to heaven the anguished cry of the
+disincarnate soul, cast naked, and in tears before God.</p>
+<p>And after a pause, the organ, aided by two double-basses,
+bellowed out,
+carrying all the voices in its torrent&#8212;baritones, tenors, basses, not
+now serving only as sheaths to the sharp blades of the urchin voices,
+but openly with full throated sound&#8212;yet the dash of the little soprani
+pierced them through all at once like a crystal arrow.</p>
+<p>Then a fresh pause, and in the silence of the church, the
+verses mourned
+out anew, thrown up by the organ, as by a spring board. As he listened
+with attention endeavouring to resolve the sounds, closing his eyes,
+Durtal saw them at first almost horizontal, then rising little by
+little, then raising themselves upright, then quivering in tears,
+before
+their final breaking.</p>
+<p>Suddenly at the end of the psalm, when the response of the
+antiphon
+came&#8212;"Et lux perpetua luceat eis"&#8212;the children's voices broke into a
+sad, silken cry, a sharp sob, trembling on the word "eis," which
+remained suspended in the void.</p>
+<p>These children's voices stretched to breaking, these clear
+sharp voices
+threw into the darkness of the chant some whiteness of the dawn,
+joining
+their pure, soft sounds to the resonant tones of the basses, piercing
+as
+with a jet of living silver the sombre cataract of the deeper singers;
+they sharpened the wailing, strengthened and embittered the burning
+salt
+of tears, but they insinuated also a sort of protecting caress,
+balsamic
+freshness, lustral help; they lighted in the darkness those brief
+gleams
+which tinkle in the Angelus at dawn of day; they called up,
+anticipating
+the prophecies of the text, the compassionate image of the Virgin,
+passing, in the pale light of their tones, into the darkness of that
+sequence.</p>
+<p>The "De Profundis" so chanted was incomparably beautiful. That
+sublime
+prayer ending in sobs, at the moment when the soul of the voices was
+about to overpass human limits, gave a wrench to Durtal's nerves, and
+made his heart beat. Then he wished to abstract himself, and cling
+especially to the meaning of that sorrowful plaint, in which the fallen
+being calls upon its God with groans and lamentations. Those cries of
+the third verse came back to him, wherein calling on his Saviour in
+despair from the bottom of the abyss, man, now that he knows he is
+heard, hesitates ashamed, knowing not what to say. The excuses he has
+prepared appear to him vain, the arguments he has arranged seem to him
+of no effect, and he stammers forth; "If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe
+iniquities, Lord, who shall endure it?"</p>
+<p>"It is a pity," said Durtal to himself, "that this psalm,
+which in its
+first verses chants so magnificently the despair of humanity, becomes
+in
+those which follow more personal to King David. I know well," he went
+on, "that we must accept the symbolic sense of this pleading, admit
+that
+the despot confounds his own cause with that of God, that his
+adversaries are the unbelievers and the wicked, that he himself,
+according to the doctors of the Church, prefigures the person of
+Christ;
+but yet the memory of his fleshly desires, and the presumptuous praise
+he gives to his incorrigible people, contracts the scope of the poem.
+Happily the melody has a life apart from the text, a life of its own,
+not arising out of mere tribal dissensions, but extending to all the
+earth, chanting the anguish of the time to be born, as well as of the
+present day, and of the ages which are no more."</p>
+<p>The "De Profundis" had ceased; after a silence, the choir
+intoned a
+motet of the eighteenth century, but Durtal was only moderately
+interested in human music in churches. What seemed to him superior to
+the most vaunted works of theatrical or worldly music, was the old
+plain
+chant, that even and naked melody, at once ethereal and of the tomb,
+the
+solemn cry of sadness and lofty shout of joy, those grandiose hymns of
+human faith, which seem to well up in the cathedrals, like irresistible
+geysers, at the very foot of the Romanesque columns. What music,
+however
+ample, sorrowful or tender, is worth the "De Profundis" chanted in
+unison, the solemnity of the "Magnificat," the splendid warmth of the
+"Lauda Sion," the enthusiasm of the "Salve Regina," the sorrow of the
+"Miserere," and the "Stabat Mater," the majestic omnipotence of the "Te
+Deum"? Artists of genius have set themselves to translate the sacred
+texts: Vittoria, Josquin de Près, Palestrina, Orlando Lasso, Handel,
+Bach, Haydn, have written wonderful pages; often indeed they have been
+uplifted by the mystic effluence, the very emanation of the Middle
+Ages,
+for ever lost; and yet their works have retained a certain pomp, and in
+spite of all are pretentious, as opposed to the humble magnificence,
+the
+sober splendour of the Gregorian chant&#8212;with them the whole thing came
+to an end, for composers no longer believed.</p>
+<p>Yet in modern times some religious pieces may be cited of
+Lesueur,
+Wagner, Berlioz, and Cĉsar Franck, and in these again we are conscious
+of the artist underlying his work, the artist determined to show his
+skill, thinking to exalt his own glory, and therefore leaving God out.
+We feel ourselves in the presence of superior men, but men with their
+weaknesses, their inseparable vanity, and even the vice of their
+senses.
+In the liturgical chant, created almost always anonymously in the depth
+of the cloisters, was an extraterrestrial well, without taint of sin or
+trace of art. It was an uprising of souls already freed from the
+slavery
+of the flesh, an explosion of elevated tenderness and pure joy, it was
+also the idiom of the Church, a musical gospel appealing like the
+Gospel
+itself at once to the most refined and the most humble.</p>
+<p>Ah! the true proof of Catholicism was that art which it had
+founded, an
+art which has never been surpassed; in painting and sculpture the Early
+Masters, mystics in poetry and in prose, in music plain chant, in
+architecture the Romanesque and Gothic styles. And all this held
+together and blazed in one sheaf, on one and the same altar; all was
+reconciled in one unique cluster of thoughts: to revere, adore and
+serve
+the Dispenser, showing to Him reflected in the soul of His creature, as
+in a faithful mirror, the still immaculate treasure of His gifts.</p>
+<p>Then in those marvellous Middle Ages, wherein Art,
+foster-child of the
+Church, encroached on death and advanced to the threshold of Eternity,
+and to God, the divine concept and the heavenly form were guessed and
+half-perceived, for the first and perhaps for the last time by man.
+They
+answered and echoed each other&#8212;art calling to art.</p>
+<p>The Virgins had faces almond-shaped, elongated like those
+ogives which
+the Gothic style contrived in order to distribute an ascetic light, a
+virginal dawn in the mysterious shrine of its naves. In the pictures of
+the Early Masters the complexion of holy women becomes transparent as
+Paschal wax, and their hair is pale as golden grains of frankincense,
+their childlike bosoms scarcely swell, their brows are rounded like the
+glass of the pyx, their fingers taper, their bodies shoot upwards like
+delicate columns. Their beauty becomes, as it were, liturgical. They
+seem to live in the fire of stained glass, borrowing from the flaming
+whirlwind of the rose-windows the circles of their aureoles. The ardent
+blue of their eyes, the dying embers of their lips, keeping for their
+garments the colours they disdain for their flesh, stripping them of
+their light, changing them, when they transfer them to stuffs, into
+opaque tones which aid still more by their contrast to declare the
+seraphic clearness of their look, the grievous paleness of the mouth,
+to
+which, according to the Proper of the season, the scent of the lily of
+the Canticles or the penitential fragrance of myrrh in the Psalms lend
+their perfume.</p>
+<p>Then among artists was a coalition of brains, a welding
+together of
+souls. Painters associated themselves in the same ideal of beauty with
+architects, they united in an indestructible relation cathedrals and
+saints, only reversing the usual process&#8212;they framed the jewel
+according to the shrine, and modelled the relics for the reliquary.</p>
+<p>On their side the sequences chanted by the Church had subtle
+affinities
+with the canvases of the Early Painters.</p>
+<p>Vittoria's responses for Tenebrĉ are of a like inspiration and
+an equal
+loftiness with those of Quentin Matsys' great work, the Entombment of
+Christ. The "Regina C&#339;li" of the Flemish musician Lasso has the same
+good faith, the same simple and strange attraction, as certain statues
+of a reredos, or religious pictures of the elder Breughel. Lastly, the
+Miserere of Josquin de Près, choirmaster of Louis XII., has, like the
+panels of the Early Masters of Burgundy and Flanders, a patient
+intention, a stiff, threadlike simplicity, but also it exhales like
+them
+a truly mystical savour, and its awkwardness of outline is very
+touching.</p>
+<p>The ideal of all these works is the same and attained by
+different
+means.</p>
+<p>As for plain chant, the agreement of its melody with
+architecture is
+also certain; it also bends from time to time like the sombre
+Romanesque
+arcades, and rises, shadowy and pensive, like complete vaulting. The
+"De
+Profundis," for instance, curves in on itself like those great groins
+which form the smoky skeleton of the bays; it is like them slow and
+dark, extends itself only in obscurity and moves only in the shadow of
+the crypts.</p>
+<p>Sometimes, on the other hand, the Gregorian chant seems to
+borrow from
+Gothic its flowery tendrils, its scattered pinnacles, its gauzy rolls,
+its tremulous lace, its trimmings light and thin as the voices of
+children. Then it passes from one extreme to another, from the
+amplitude
+of sorrow to an infinite joy; at other times again, the plain music,
+and
+the Christian music to which it gave birth, lend themselves, like
+sculpture, to the gaiety of the people, associate themselves with
+simple
+gladness, and the sculptured merriment of the ancient porches; they
+take
+the popular rhythm of the crowd, as in the Christmas carol "Adeste
+Fideles" and in the Paschal hymn "O Filii et Filiĉ;" they become
+trivial
+and familiar like the Gospels, submitting themselves to the humble
+wishes of the poor, lending them a holiday tune easy to catch, a
+running melody which carries them into pure regions where these simple
+souls can cast themselves at the indulgent feet of Christ.</p>
+<p>Born of the Church, and bred up by her in the choir-schools of
+the
+Middle Ages, plain chant is the aerial and mobile paraphrase of the
+immovable structure of the cathedrals; it is the immaterial and fluid
+interpretation of the canvases of the Early Painters; it is a winged
+translation, but also the strict and unbending stole of those Latin
+sequences, which the monks built up or hewed out in the cloisters in
+the
+far-off olden time.</p>
+<p>Now it is changed and disconnected, foolishly overwhelmed by
+the crash
+of organs, and is chanted, God knows how!</p>
+<p>Most choirs when they intone it, like to imitate the rumbling
+and
+gurgling of water-pipes, others the grating of rattles, the creaking of
+pullies, the grinding of a crane, but, in spite of all, its beauty
+remains, unextinguished, dulled though it be, by the wild bellowing of
+the singers.</p>
+<p>The sudden silence in the church roused Durtal. He rose and
+looked about
+him; in his corner was no one save two poor women, asleep, their feet
+on
+the bars of chairs, their heads on their knees. Leaning forward a
+little, he saw, hanging above him in a dark chapel, the light of a
+lamp,
+like a ruby in its red glass; no sound save the military tread of the
+Suisse, making his round in the distance.</p>
+<p>Durtal sat down again; the sweetness of his solitude was
+enhanced by the
+aromatic perfume of wax, and the memories, now faint, of incense, but
+it
+was suddenly broken. As the first chords crashed on the organ Durtal
+recognized the "Dies irĉ," that despairing hymn of the Middle Ages;
+instinctively he bowed his head and listened.</p>
+<p>This was no more as in the "De Profundis" an humble
+supplication, a
+suffering which believes it has been heard, and discerns a path of
+light
+to guide it in the darkness, no longer the prayer which has hope enough
+not to tremble; it was the cry of absolute desolation and of terror.</p>
+<p>And, indeed, the wrath divine breathed tempestuously through
+these
+stanzas. They seemed addressed less to the God of mercy, to the Son who
+listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him whom the Old
+Testament shows us, overcome with anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke
+of the pyres, the inconceivable attractions of burnt-offerings. In this
+chant it asserted itself still more savagely, for it threatened to
+strike the waters, and break in pieces the mountains, and to rend
+asunder the depths of heaven by thunder-bolts. And the earth, alarmed,
+cried out in fear.</p>
+<p>A crystalline voice, a clear child's voice, proclaimed in the
+nave the
+tidings of these cataclysms, and after this the choir chanted new
+strophes wherein the implacable judge came with shattering blare of
+trumpet, to purify by fire the rottenness of the world.</p>
+<p>Then, in its turn, a bass, deep as a vault, as though issuing
+from the
+crypt, accentuated the horror of these prophecies, made these threats
+more overwhelming, and after a short strain by the choir, an alto
+repeated them in yet more detail. Then, so soon as the awful poem had
+exhausted the enumeration of chastisement and suffering, in shrill
+tones&#8212;the falsetto of a little boy&#8212;the name of Jesus went by, and a
+light broke in on the thunder-cloud, the panting universe cried for
+pardon, recalling, by all the voices of the choir, the infinite mercies
+of the Saviour, and His pardon, pleading with Him for absolution, as
+formerly He had spared the penitent thief and the Magdalen.</p>
+<p>But in the same despairing and headstrong melody the tempest
+raged
+again, drowned with its waves the half-seen shores of heaven, and the
+solos continued, discouraged, interrupted by the recurrent weeping of
+the choir, giving, with the diversity of voices, a body to the special
+conditions of shame, the particular states of fear, the different ages
+of tears.</p>
+<p>At last, when still mixed and blended, these voices had borne
+away on
+the great waters of the organ all the wreckage of human sorrows, all
+the
+buoys of prayers and tears, they fell exhausted, paralyzed by terror,
+wailing and sighing like a child who hides its face, stammering "Dona
+eis requiem," they ended, worn out, in an Amen so plaintive, that it
+died away in a breath above the sobbing of the organ.</p>
+<p>What man could have imagined such despair, dreamed of such
+disasters?
+And Durtal made answer to himself: "No man."</p>
+<p>In fact the attempt has been vain to discover the author both
+of the
+music and of the sequence. They have been attributed to Frangipani,
+Thomas of Celano, St. Bernard and a crowd of others, and they have
+remained anonymous, simply formed by the sad alluvial deposits of the
+age. The "Dies irĉ" seemed to have, at first, fallen, like a seed of
+desolation, among the distracted souls of the eleventh century; it
+germinated there and grew slowly, nurtured by the sap of anguish,
+watered by the rain of tears. It was at last pruned when it seemed
+ripe,
+and had, perhaps, thrown out too many branches, for in one of the
+earliest known texts, a stanza, which has since disappeared, called up
+the magnificent and barbarous image of an earth revolving as it belched
+forth flames, while the constellations burst into shards, and heaven
+shrivelled like a parched scroll.</p>
+<p>"All this," concluded Durtal, "does not prevent these triple
+stanzas
+woven of shadow and cold, full of reverberating rhymes, and hard
+echoes,
+this music of rude stuff which wraps the phrases like a shroud, and
+masks the rigid outlines of the work, from being admirable! Yet that
+chant which constrains, and renders with such energy the breadth of the
+sequence, that melodic period, which without variation, remaining
+always
+the same, succeeds in expressing by turns prayer and terror, moves me
+less than the 'De Profundis,' which yet has not its grandiose
+spaciousness nor that artistic cry of despair.</p>
+<p>"But chanted to the organ the psalm is earthy and suffocating.
+It comes
+from out the very depths of the sepulchre, while the 'Dies irĉ' has its
+source only on the sill of the tomb. The first is the very voice of the
+dead, the second that of the living who inter him, and the dead man
+weeps, but takes courage a little, when those that bury him despair.</p>
+<p>"To sum up," Durtal concluded, "I prefer the text of the 'Dies
+irĉ' to
+that of the 'De Profundis,' and the melody of the 'De Profundis' to
+that
+of the 'Dies irĉ.' It is true also that this last sequence is
+modernized, and chanted theatrically here, without the imposing and
+needful march of unison.</p>
+<p>"This time, for instance, it is devoid of interest," he
+continued,
+ceasing his thoughts for a moment, to listen to the piece of modern
+music which the choir was just then rendering. "Ah, who will take on
+himself to proscribe that pert mysticism, those fonts of toilet-water
+which Gounod invented!... There ought indeed to be astonishing
+penalties for choir masters who allow such musical effeminacy in
+church.
+This is, as it was this morning at the Madeleine, when I happened to be
+present at the interminable funeral of an old banker; they played a
+military march with violin and violoncello accompaniments, with
+trumpets
+and timbrels, a heroic and worldly march to celebrate the departure and
+the decomposition of a financier!... It is too absurd." And listening
+no
+more to the music in St. Sulpice, Durtal transferred himself in thought
+to the Madeleine, and went off at full speed in his dreams.</p>
+<p>"Indeed," he said to himself, "the clergy make Jesus like a
+tourist,
+when they invite Him daily to come down into that church whose exterior
+is surmounted by no cross, and whose interior is like the grand
+reception-room at an hotel. But how can you make those priests
+understand that ugliness is sacrilege, and that nothing is equal to the
+frightful sin of this confusion of Romanesque and Greek, these pictures
+of aged men, that flat ceiling studded with skylights, from which
+filter
+in all weathers the spoiled gleams of a rainy day, to that futile altar
+surmounted by a circle of angels who, in discreet abandonment, dance in
+honour of our Lady, a motionless marble rigadoon?"</p>
+<p>Yet in the Madeleine, at a funeral, when the door opens, and
+the corpse
+advances in a gap of daylight, all is changed. Like a superterrestrial
+antiseptic, an extrahuman disinfectant, the liturgy purifies and
+cleanses the impious ugliness of the place.</p>
+<p>And thinking over his memories of the morning, Durtal saw
+again, as he
+closed his eyes, at the end of the semicircular apse, the procession of
+red and black robes, white surplices, joining in front of the altar,
+descending the steps together, making their way together to the
+catafalque, dividing again on each aide, joining to mix afresh in the
+great gangway between the chairs.</p>
+<p>This slow and silent procession, led by incomparable Suisses,
+in
+mourning, their swords horizontal, and a general's epaulets in jet,
+advanced, preceded by a cross, in front of the corpse laid on tressels,
+and far-off in all that confusion of lights falling from the roof, and
+lighted flambeaux round the catafalque and on the altar, the white of
+the tapers disappeared, and the priests who bore them seemed to march
+with empty hands uplifted as though to point out the stars which
+accompanied them, twinkling above their heads.</p>
+<p>Then when the bier was surrounded by the clergy, the "De
+Profundis"
+burst forth from the depths of the sanctuary, intoned by invisible
+singers.</p>
+<p>"That was good," said Durtal to himself. At the Madeleine the
+voices of
+the children are sharp and feeble, and the basses are badly trained and
+failing; we are evidently far from the choir of St. Sulpice, but all
+the
+same it was superb; then what a moment was that of the priests'
+communion, when suddenly arising from the murmuring of the choir, the
+voice of the tenor threw above the corpse the magnificent plain chant
+antiphon&#8212;</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza"><span class="i0">"Requiem
+ĉternam dona eis Domine<br />
+</span><span class="i0">Et lux perpetua luceat eis."<br />
+</span></div>
+</div>
+<p>It seems that after all the lamentations of the "De Profundis"
+and the
+"Dies irĉ," the presence of God, who comes then upon the altar, brings
+consolation, and sanctions the confident and solemn pride of that
+melodious phrase, which then invokes Christ, without dread and without
+tears.</p>
+<p>The mass ended, the celebrant disappeared, and, as at the
+moment when
+the corpse entered, the clergy, preceded by the Suisses, advanced
+towards the body, and in the blazing circle of the tapers, a priest, in
+his cope, said the mighty prayers of the general absolution.</p>
+<p>Then the liturgy took a higher tone, and became still more
+admirable.
+Mediative between the sinner and the judge, the Church, by the mouth of
+her priest, implores the Lord to pardon the poor soul: "Non intres in
+judicium cum servo tuo Domine"&#8212;then after the amen given by the organ
+and all the choir, a voice arose in the silence, and spoke in the name
+of the dead:&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Libera me!"</p>
+<p>and the choir continued the old chant of the tenth century.
+Just as in
+the "Dies irĉ," which appropriates to itself fragments of these
+plaints,
+the Last Judgment flamed out, and pitiless responses declare to the
+dead
+the reality of his alarms, declare to him that at the end of Time the
+Judge will come with the crash of thunder to chastise the world.</p>
+<p>The priest marched round the catafalque, sprinkling it with
+beads of
+holy water, incensed it, gave shelter to the poor weeping soul,
+consoled
+it, took it to himself, covered it, as it were, with his cope, and
+again, intervened to pray that, after so much weariness and sorrow, the
+Lord will permit the unhappy one to sleep the sleep that knows no
+waking, far from earth's noises.</p>
+<p>Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more
+august
+mission been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above
+humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while
+earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and
+intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who
+has no doubt forgotten her since that day, and may even have persecuted
+her up to the hour of his death.</p>
+<p>Nor does the Church shrink from the task. Before that fleshly
+dust
+heaped in a chest, she thinks of that sewage of the soul, and cries:
+"From the gates of hell deliver him, O Lord!" but at the end of the
+general absolution, at the moment when the procession, turning its
+back,
+is on the way to the sacristy, she too seems disquieted. Perhaps
+recalling in an instant, the ill deeds done by that body while it was
+alive, she seemed to doubt if her supplications were heard, and the
+doubt her words would not frame, passed into the intonation of the last
+amen, murmured at the Madeleine, by children's voices.</p>
+<p>Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this amen said: "We
+have done
+what we could, but ... but ..." And in the funereal silence which
+followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble
+reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a
+carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be
+made into soap at the factories.</p>
+<p>"If," continued Durtal, "in opposition to these sad prayers,
+these
+eloquent absolutions, we call up before us a marriage mass, all is
+changed. There the Church is disarmed and her musical liturgy is as
+nought. Then she may well play Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and borrow
+from profane authors the gaiety of their songs to celebrate the brief
+and empty joy of the body. Imagine, and indeed it happens, the canticle
+of the Virgin used to magnify the glad impatience of a bride. Fancy the
+Te Deum, to hymn the blessedness of a bridegroom!"</p>
+<p>Far away from this infamous barter of the flesh, plain chant
+remains
+shut up in the antiphonaries, like a monk in the cloister, and when it
+goes forth, it is to cast up before Christ his garnered pains and
+sorrows. It gathers and sums them up in admirable supplications, and
+if,
+fatigued with pleading it adores, its impulse is to glorify eternal
+events, Palm Sunday and Easter, Pentecost and the Ascension, Epiphany
+and Christmas, then its joy bursts forth so magnificently, that it
+springs beyond the world to show its ecstatic joy at the feet of God.</p>
+<p>As to the very ceremonies of the funeral, they are now only
+the regular
+way of getting money, an official routine, a prayer-wheel which is
+turned mechanically without thought of it.</p>
+<p>The organist while he plays thinks of his family, and
+considers how
+wearied he is; the bellows-blower thinks, as he fills the pipes, of the
+half-pint which will dry his sweat; the tenors and basses are careful
+of
+their effects, and admire themselves in the more or less rippled water
+of their voices; the choir boys dream of their scampers after mass;
+and,
+moreover, not one of them at all understands a word of the Latin they
+sing and abridge, as for instance the "Dies irĉ," of which they
+suppress
+a part of the stanzas.</p>
+<p>In its turn beadledom calculates the sum the dead man brings
+in, and
+even the priest, wearied with the prayers of which he has read so many,
+and needing his breakfast, prays mechanically from the lips outward,
+while the assistants are in a hurry that the mass to which they have
+not
+listened should come to an end, that they may shake hands with the
+relations, and leave the dead.</p>
+<p>There is absolute inattention, profound weariness. Yet how
+terrible is
+that thing on the tressels that is waiting there in the church, that
+empty dwelling-place, that body which is already breaking up. Liquid
+manure that stinks, gases which evaporate, flesh that rots is all that
+remains!</p>
+<p>And the soul, now that life is over, and all begins? No one
+thinks of
+it, not even the family worn out by the length of the service, absorbed
+in their own sorrow; who in fact regret only the visible presence of
+the
+being they have lost; no one except myself, thought Durtal, and a few
+curious people, who associate themselves in their alarm with the "Dies
+irĉ" and the "Libera," of which they understand both the language and
+the meaning.</p>
+<p>Then by the external sound of the words, without the aid of
+contemplation, without even the help of thought, the Church acts.</p>
+<p>There it is, the miracle of her liturgy, the power of her
+word, the
+constantly renewed prodigy of phrases created by revolving time, of
+prayers arranged by ages which are dead. All has passed, nothing exists
+that was raised up in those bygone times. Yet those sequences remain
+intact, cried aloud by indifferent voices and cast out from empty
+hearts, plead, groan, and implore even with efficacy, by their virtual
+power, their talismanic might, their inalienable beauty by the almighty
+confidence of their faith. The Middle Ages have left us these to help
+us
+to save, if it may be, the soul of the modern and dead fine gentleman.</p>
+<p>At the present time, concluded Durtal, there is nothing left
+peculiar to
+Paris, but the ceremonies, very like each other, of taking the veil and
+of funerals. It is unfortunate that when we have to do with a sumptuous
+corpse, undertakers have their way.</p>
+<p>They then bring out their terrible upholstery, plated statues
+of our
+Lady in atrocious taste, zinc basins in which blaze bowls of green
+punch, tin candelabra at the end of a branch, like a cannon on end with
+its mouth upwards, supporting spiders on their backs, with burning
+candles set about their legs, all the funeral ironmongery of the First
+Empire, with curtain rods in relief, acanthus leaves, winged
+hour-glasses, lozenges and Greek frets. It is unfortunate, too, that to
+touch up the miserable furniture of these ceremonies they play Massenet
+and Dubois, Benjamin Godard and Widor, or, worse still, the sacristy
+orchestra, mystical bellowing, such as the women sing, who are
+affiliated to the confraternities of the month of May.</p>
+<p>And alas, we hear no longer the tempests of the great organs
+and the
+majestic dolours of plain chant, save at the funerals of the monied
+classes; for the poor, nothing&#8212;no choir, no organ, just a handful of
+prayers, then a few dips of the brush in the holy water stoup, and
+there
+is a dead man the more on whom the rain falls, who is carried away. But
+the Church knows that the carrion of the rich rots as much as that of
+the poor, while his soul stinks more, but she jobs indulgences and
+haggles about masses; she, even she, is consumed by the lust of gold.</p>
+<p>"Yet I must not think too ill of these wealthy fools," said
+Durtal,
+after silent thought, "for after all it is thanks to them that I can
+hear the admirable liturgy of the burial service, these people who
+perhaps have done no good action in their life, do at least this
+kindness to a few, without knowing it, after their death."</p>
+<p>A noise recalled him to St. Sulpice; the choir was going, the
+church was
+about to close. "I might as well have tried to pray," he said to
+himself, "it would have been better than to dream in the empty church
+on
+a chair. Pray indeed? I have no desire for it. I am haunted by
+Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and wax, I prowl
+about it, moved even to tears by its prayers, touched even to the
+marrow
+by its psalms and chants. I am thoroughly disgusted with my life, very
+tired of myself, but it is a far cry from that to leading a different
+existence! And yet&#8212;and yet ... If I am perturbed in these chapels, I
+become unmoved and dry again, as soon as I leave them. After all," he
+said to himself, getting up, and following the few persons who were
+moving towards a door, driven out by the Suisse, "after all, my heart
+is
+hardened and smoke-dried by dissipation, I am good for nothing."</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER
+II.</h2>
+<p>How had he again become a Catholic, and got to this point?</p>
+<p>Durtal answered himself: "I cannot tell, all that I know is
+that, having
+been for years an unbeliever, I suddenly believe.</p>
+<p>"Let us see," he said to himself, "let us try at least to
+consider if,
+however great the obscurity of such a subject, there be not common
+sense
+in it.</p>
+<p>"After all, my surprise depends on preconceived ideas of
+conversions. I
+have heard of sudden and violent crises of the soul, of a thunderbolt,
+or even of faith exploding at last in ground slowly and cleverly mined.
+It is quite evident that conversions may happen in one or other of
+these
+two ways, for God acts as may seem good to Him, but there must be also
+a
+third means, and this no doubt the most usual, which the Saviour has
+used in my case. And I know not in what this consists; it is something
+analogous to digestion in a stomach, which works though we do not feel
+it. There has been no road to Damascus, no events to bring about a
+crisis; nothing has happened, we awake some fine morning, and, without
+knowing how or why, the thing is done.</p>
+<p>"Yes, but in fact this man&#339;uvre is very like that of the mine
+which
+only explodes after it has been deeply dug. Yet not so, for in that
+case
+the operations are material, the objections in the way are resolved; I
+might have reasoned, followed the course of the spark along the thread,
+but in this case, no! I sprang unexpectedly, without warning, without
+even having suspected that I was so carefully sapped. Nor was it a clap
+of thunder, unless I admit that a clap of thunder can, be occult and
+silent, strange and gentle. And this again would be untrue, for sudden
+disorder of the soul almost always follows a misfortune or a crime, an
+act of which we are aware.</p>
+<p>"No, the one thing which seems certain, in my case, is that
+there has
+been divine impulse, grace.</p>
+<p>"But," said he, "in that case the psychology of conversion is
+worthless," and he made answer to himself,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"That seems to be so, for I seek in vain to retrace the stages
+through
+which I have passed; no doubt I can distinguish here and there some
+landmarks on the road I have travelled: love of art, heredity,
+weariness
+of life; I can even recall some of the forgotten sensations of
+childhood, the subterranean workings of ideas excited by my visits to
+the churches; but I am unable to gather these threads together, and
+group them in a skein, I cannot understand the sudden and silent
+explosion of light which took place in me. When I seek to explain to
+myself how one evening an unbeliever, I became without knowing it, on
+one night a believer, I can discover nothing, for the divine action has
+vanished, and left no trace.</p>
+<p>"It is certain," he continued, after silent thought, "that in
+these
+cases the Virgin acts upon us, it is she who moulds and places us in
+the
+hands of her Son, but her fingers are so light, so supple, so
+caressing,
+that the soul they have handled has felt nothing.</p>
+<p>"On the other hand, if I ignore the course and stages of my
+conversion,
+I can at least guess the motives which, after a life of indifference,
+have brought me into the harbours of the Church, made me wander round
+about her borders, and finally gave me a shove from behind to bring me
+in."</p>
+<p>And he said to himself, without more ado, there are three
+causes:&#8212;</p>
+<p>"First, the atavism of an old and pious family, scattered
+among the
+monasteries;" and the memories of childhood returned to him, of
+cousins,
+of aunts, seen in convent parlours; gentle women and grave, white as
+wafers, who alarmed him by their low voices, who troubled him by their
+looks, and asked if he were a good boy.</p>
+<p>He felt a sort of terror, and hid himself in his mother's
+skirts,
+trembling when he went away, and was obliged to bend his brow to those
+colourless lips, and undergo the touch of a chilly kiss.</p>
+<p>Now that he thought of them at a distance, the interviews
+which had
+wearied him so much in his childhood, seemed to him charming. He put
+into them all the poetry of the cloister, clothed those bare parlours
+with a faded scent of wainscotting and of wax, and he saw again the
+convent gardens through which he had passed, impregnated with the
+bitter
+salt scent of box, planted with clipped hedges, intermingled with
+trellises, whose green grapes never ripened, divided by benches whose
+mouldering stone kept the traces worn by water; and a thousand details
+came back to him of those silent lime alleys, of the paths where he ran
+in the interlaced shade which branches threw upon the ground. These
+gardens had seemed to him to become larger as he grew older, and he
+retained a somewhat confused memory of them, amid which was the vague
+recollection of an old stately park, and of a presbytery orchard in the
+north, always somewhat damp, even when the sun shone.</p>
+<p>It was not surprising that these sensations, transformed by
+time, had
+left in him some traces of pious thought, which grew deeper as his mind
+embellished them; all this might have fermented indistinctly for thirty
+years, and now began to work.</p>
+<p>But the two other causes which he knew, must have been still
+more
+active.</p>
+<p>These were his disgust for his life, and his passion for art;
+and the
+disgust was certainly aggravated by his solitude and his idleness.</p>
+<p>After having, in old days, made friends by chance, and having
+taken the
+impression of souls which had nothing in common with his own, he had at
+last chosen after much useless vagabondage; he had become the intimate
+friend of a certain Doctor des Hermies, a physician, who devoted much
+attention to demoniac possession and to mysticism, and of a Breton,
+named Carhaix, the bell-ringer at St. Sulpice.</p>
+<p>These friendships were not like those he had formerly made,
+entirely
+superficial and external, they were wide and deep, based on similarity
+of thought, and the indissoluble ties of soul, and these had been
+roughly broken; within two months of each other Des Hermies and Carhaix
+died, the former of typhoid fever, the latter of a chill that
+prostrated him in his tower, after he had rung the evening Angelus.</p>
+<p>These were frightful blows for Durtal. His life, now without
+an anchor,
+drifted; he wandered all astray, declaring to himself that this
+desolation was final, since he had reached an age at which new friends
+are not made.</p>
+<p>So he lived alone, apart among his books, but the solitude
+which he bore
+bravely, when he was occupied, when he was writing a book, became
+intolerable to him now that he was idle. He lounged in an arm-chair in
+the afternoons, and abandoned himself to his dreams: then, especially,
+fixed ideas took hold on him, and these ended by playing pantomimes of
+which the scenes never varied behind the lowered curtain of his eyes.
+Nude figures danced in his brain to the tune of psalms, and he woke
+from
+these dreams weak and panting, ready, if a priest had been there, to
+throw himself at his feet with tears, just as he would have abandoned
+himself to the basest pleasures, had the temptation suddenly come to
+him.</p>
+<p>"Let me chase away these phantoms by work," he cried. But at
+what should
+he work? He had just published the "Life of Gilles de Rais," which
+might
+interest a few artists, and he now remained without a subject, on the
+hunt for a book. As, in art, he was a man of extremes, he always went
+from one excess to the other, and after having dived into the Satanism
+of the Middle Ages, in his account of "Marshal de Rais," he saw nothing
+so interesting to investigate as the life of a saint. Some lines which
+he had discovered in Görres' and Ribet's "Studies in Mysticism" had put
+him on the trace of a certain Blessed Lidwine in search of new
+documents.</p>
+<p>But admitting that he could unearth anything about her, could
+he write
+the life of a saint? He did not believe it, and the arguments on which
+he based his opinion seemed plausible.</p>
+<p>Hagiography was now a lost branch of art, as completely lost
+as wood
+carving, and the miniatures of the old missals. Nowadays it is only
+treated by church officers and priests, by those stylistic agents who
+seem when they write to put the embryos of their ideas on ballast
+trucks, and in their hands it has become a commonplace of goody-goody,
+a
+translation into a book of the statuettes of Froc Robert, and the
+coloured images of Bouasse.</p>
+<p>The way then was free, and it seemed at first easy enough to
+plan it
+out, but to extract the charm of the legends needed the simple language
+of bygone centuries, the ingenuous phrases of the days that are dead.
+Who in our time can express the melancholy essence, the pale perfume of
+the ancient translations of the Golden Legend of Voragine, how bind in
+one bright posy the plaintive flowers, which the monks cultivated in
+their cloistered enclosures, when hagiography was the sister of the
+barbaric and delightful art of the illuminators and glass stainers, of
+the ardent and chaste paintings of the Early Masters?</p>
+<p>Yet we may not think of giving ourselves over to studious
+imitations,
+nor coldly attempt to ape such works as these. The question remains,
+whether we can with the present artistic resources, succeed in setting
+up the humble yet lofty figure of a saint; and this is at least
+doubtful, for the lack of real simplicity, the over-ingenious art of
+style, the tricks of careful design and the false craft of colour would
+probably transform the elect lady into a strolling player. She would be
+no longer a saint, but an actress who rendered the part more or less
+adroitly; and then the charm would be destroyed, the miracles would
+seem
+mechanical, the episodes would be absurd, then ... then ... one must
+have a lively faith, and believe in the sanctity of one's heroine, if
+one would try to exhume her, and put her alive again in a book.</p>
+<p>This is so true that we may examine Gustave Flaubert's
+admirable pages
+on the legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller. Their development is like
+a
+dazzling yet regulated tumult, evolved in superb language whose
+apparent
+simplicity is only due to the complicated ingenuity of consummate
+skill.
+All is there, all except the accent which would have made this work a
+true masterpiece. Given the subject, the fire which should course
+through these magnificent phrases is absent, there lacks the cry of the
+love that faints, the gift of the superhuman exile, the mystical soul.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, Hello's "Physionomies de Saints" are worth
+reading.
+Faith flashes out in each of his portraits, enthusiasm runs over in
+each
+chapter, unexpected allusions form deep reservoirs of thought between
+the lines; but after all Hello was so little of an artist that the
+fairest legends fade when his fingers touch them; the meanness of his
+style impoverishes the miracles and renders them ineffectual. The art
+is
+lacking which would rescue the book from the category of pale and dead
+publications.</p>
+<p>The example of these two men, in complete opposition as ever
+writers
+were, neither of whom attained perfection, one in the legend of St.
+Julian because faith was wanting, the other because his art was poor
+and
+narrow, thoroughly discouraged Durtal. He ought to be both at once, and
+yet remain himself, if not, there was no good in buckling to for such a
+task, it were better to be silent; and he threw himself back in his
+chair sullen and hopeless. Then the contempt of his desolate life grew
+upon him, and once more he wondered what interest Providence could have
+in thus tormenting the descendants of the first convicts. If there were
+no answer, he was obliged to admit that the Church in these disasters
+gathered up the waifs, sheltered the shipwrecked, brought them home
+again, and assured them a resting-place.</p>
+<p>No more than Schopenhauer, whom he had once admired, but whose
+plan of
+labelling every one before death and whose herbarium of dry sorrows had
+wearied him, has the Church deceived man, nor sought to decoy him, by
+boasting the mercy of a life which she knew to be ignoble.</p>
+<p>In all her inspired books she proclaims the horror of fate,
+and mourns
+over the enforced task of living. Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, the
+book
+of Job, the Lamentations of Jeremias manifest this sorrow in their
+every
+line, and the Middle Ages too in the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" cursed
+existence, and cried out loudly for death.</p>
+<p>More plainly than Schopenhauer the Church declared that there
+is nothing
+to wish for here below, nothing to expect, but where the mere
+catalogues
+of the philosopher stop, the Church went on, overpassing the limits of
+the senses, declared the end of man, and defined his limitations.</p>
+<p>"Then," he said to himself, "if it be well considered, the
+vaunted
+argument of Schopenhauer against the Creator, drawn from the misery and
+injustice of the world, is not irrefutable, for the world is not as God
+made it, but as man has refashioned it."</p>
+<p>Before accusing heaven for our ills, it is, no doubt, fitting
+to examine
+through what phases of consent, through what voluntary falls the
+creature has passed, before ending in the gloomy disaster it deplores.
+We may well curse the vices of our ancestors and our own passions which
+beget the greater part of the woes from which we suffer; we may well
+loathe the civilization which has rendered life intolerable to cleanly
+souls, and not the Lord, who, perhaps, did not create us to be shot
+down
+by cannon in time of war, to be cheated, robbed, and stripped in time
+of
+peace, by the slave drivers of commerce and the brigands of the money
+market.</p>
+<p>But that which remains for ever incomprehensible is the
+initial horror,
+the horror imposed on each of us, of having to live, and that is a
+mystery no philosophy can explain.</p>
+<p>"Ah!" he went on, "when I think of that horror, that disgust
+of
+existence which has for years and years increased in me, I understand
+how I am forced to make for the Church, the only port where I can find
+shelter.</p>
+<p>"Once I despised her, because I had a staff on which to lean
+when the
+great winds of weariness blew; I believed in my novels, I worked at my
+history, I had my art. I have come to recognize its absolute
+inadequacy,
+its complete incapacity to afford happiness. Then I understood that
+Pessimism was, at most, good to console those who had no real need of
+comfort; I understood that its theories, alluring when we are young,
+and
+rich, and well, become singularly weak and lamentably false, when age
+advances, when infirmities declare themselves, when all around is
+crumbling.</p>
+<p>"I went to the church, that hospital for souls. There, at
+least, they
+take you in, put you to bed and nurse you, they do not merely turn
+their
+backs on you as in the wards of Pessimism and tell you the name of your
+disease."</p>
+<p>Finally Durtal had been brought back to religion by art. More
+even than
+his disgust for life, art had been the irresistible magnet which drew
+him to God. The day, when out of curiosity and to kill time, he had
+entered a church, and after so many years of forgetfulness, had heard
+the Vespers for the dead fall heavily, psalm after psalm, in antiphonal
+chant, as the singers threw up, like ditchers, their shovelful of
+verses, his soul had been shaken to its depths. The evenings when he
+had
+listened at St. Sulpice to the admirable chanting during the Octave of
+All Souls, he had felt himself caught once for all; but that which had
+put most pressure on him, and brought him yet more completely into
+bondage were the ceremonies and music of Holy Week.</p>
+<p>He had visited the churches during that week; and they had
+opened to him
+like palaces ruined, like cemeteries laid waste by God. They were
+forbidding with their veiled images, their crucifixes wrapped
+lozenge-wise in purple, their organs dumb, their bells silent. The
+crowd
+flowed in, busy, but noiseless, along the floor over the immense cross
+formed by the nave and the two transepts, and entering by the wounds of
+which the doors were figures, they went up to the altar, where the
+blood-stained head of Christ would lie, and there on their knees
+eagerly
+kissed the crucifix which marked the place of the chin below the steps.</p>
+<p>And the crowd itself, as it ran in the cruciform mould of the
+church,
+became itself an enormous cross, living and crawling, silent and sombre.</p>
+<p>At St. Sulpice, where the whole assembled seminary lamented
+the ignominy
+of human justice and the fore-ordained death of a God, Durtal had
+followed the incomparable offices of those mournful days, through all
+their black minutes, had listened to the infinite sadness of the
+Passion, so nobly and profoundly expressed at Tenebrĉ by the slow
+chanting of the Lamentations and the Psalms, but when he thought it
+over, that which above all made him shudder was the thought of the
+Virgin coming on the scene on the Thursday at nightfall.</p>
+<p>The Church, till then absorbed in her sorrow, and prostrate
+before the
+Cross, raised herself and fell a-weeping on beholding the Mother.</p>
+<p>By all the voices of the choir, it pressed round Mary,
+endeavouring to
+console her, mixing the tears of the "Stabat Mater" with her own,
+sighing out that music of plaintive weeping, pressing the wound of that
+sequence, which gave forth water and blood like the wound of Christ
+Himself.</p>
+<p>Durtal left the church, worn out with these long services, but
+his
+temptations to unbelief were gone; he had no further doubt; it seemed
+to
+him that at St. Sulpice, grace mixed with the eloquent splendours of
+the
+liturgies, and that in the dim sorrow of the voices there had been
+appeals to him; and he therefore felt filial gratitude to that church
+where he had lived through hours so sweet and sad.</p>
+<p>Yet, in ordinary weeks he did not go there; it seemed to him
+too great
+and too cold, and it was so ugly. He preferred warmer and smaller
+sanctuaries, in which there were still traces of the Middle Ages.</p>
+<p>Thus on idle days when he came out of the Louvre, where he had
+strayed
+for a long time before the canvases of the Early Painters, he was wont
+to take refuge in the old church of St. Severin, hidden away in a
+corner
+of the poorer part of Paris.</p>
+<p>He carried with him the visions of the canvases he had admired
+at the
+Louvre, and contemplated them again, in this surrounding where they
+were
+thoroughly at home.</p>
+<p>Then he spent delightful moments, in which he was carried away
+in the
+clouds of harmony, divided by the white splendour of a child's voice
+flashing out from the rolling thunder of the organ.</p>
+<p>There, without even praying, he felt a plaintive languor, a
+vague
+uneasiness steal over him; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more
+than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of
+joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth of his
+senses, to weave together the regret and the terror of his soul.</p>
+<p>He often went there, especially on Sunday mornings to High
+Mass at ten
+o'clock.</p>
+<p>He was wont to place himself behind the high altar, in that
+melancholy
+and delicate apse, planted like a winter garden with rare and somewhat
+fantastic trees. It might have been called a petrified arbour of very
+old trunks in flower, but stripped of leaf, forests of pillars, squared
+or cut in broad panels, carved with regular notches near the base,
+hollowed through their whole length like rhubarb stalks, channelled
+like
+celery.</p>
+<p>No vegetation expanded at the summit of those trunks which
+bent their
+naked boughs along the vaulting, joined and met and gathered at their
+junction, and thin, engrafted knots, extravagant bunches of heraldic
+roses, armorial flowers with open tracery; and for more than four
+hundred years no sap had run, no bud had formed in these trees. The
+shafts bent for ever remained untouched, the white bark of these
+pillars
+was scarcely worn, but the greater part of the flowers were withered,
+the heraldic petals were wanting, some keystones of the arches had only
+stratified calices, open like nests, with holes like sponges, in rags
+like handfuls of russet lace.</p>
+<p>And among this mystic flora, amid these petrified trees, there
+was one,
+strange and charming, which suggested the fanciful idea, that the blue
+smoke of the rolling incense had condensed, and, as it coagulated, had
+grown pale with age, to form, in twisting, the spiral of a column which
+was inverted on itself, and ended broadening out into a sheaf, whereof
+the broken stems fell from above the arches.</p>
+<p>The corner where Durtal took refuge was faintly lighted by
+pointed
+stained windows, with black diamond-shaped divisions set with minute
+panes darkened by the accumulated dust of years, rendered still more
+obscure by the woodwork of the chapels, which cut off half their
+surface.</p>
+<p>This apse might have been called a frozen grove of skeleton
+trees, a
+conservatory of dead specimens belonging to the palm family, calling up
+the memory of an impossible ph&#339;nix and unlikely palms; but it also
+recalled by its half-moon shape and doubtful light, the image of a
+ship's prow below water. In fact it allowed to filter through its bars,
+to its windows trellised with all black network, the murmur, suggested
+by the rolling of the carriages which shook the street, of a river
+which
+sifted the golden light of day through the briny course of its waters.</p>
+<p>On Sundays, at the time of High Mass, the apse was empty. The
+public
+filled the nave before the high altar, or spread themselves somewhat
+further into a chapel dedicated to Our Lady. Durtal was therefore
+almost
+alone, and even the people who crossed his refuge were neither stupid
+nor hostile, like the faithful in other churches. In this district were
+beggars, the very poor, hucksters, Sisters of Charity, rag pickers,
+street arabs; above all, there were women in tatters walking on tiptoe,
+who knelt without looking round, poor creatures overwhelmed by the
+piteous splendour of the altars, looking out of the corner of their
+eyes, and bending low when the Suisse passed them.</p>
+<p>Touched by the timidity of this silent misery, Durtal listened
+to the
+mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of
+St. Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plain chant, better than
+it was done at St. Sulpice, where, however, the offices were as a rule
+solemn and correct. It bore it, as it were, to the top of the choir,
+and let it spread with its great wings open and almost without motion,
+above the prostrate flock, when the verse "Et homo factus est" took its
+slow and reverent flight in the low voice of the singer. It was at once
+monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed
+itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in
+their
+last meeting, to the united apostles of Christ.</p>
+<p>At St. Severin a powerful voice declaimed a verse as a solo,
+then all
+the children, sustained by the rest of the singers, delivered the
+others, and the unchangeable truths declared themselves in their order,
+more attentive, more grave, more accentuated, even a little plaintive
+in
+the solo voice of a man, more timid perhaps, but also more familiar and
+more joyous, in the dash, however restrained, of the boys.</p>
+<p>At such a moment Durtal was roused, and exclaimed within
+himself: "It is
+impossible that the alluvial deposits of Faith which have created this
+musical certainty are false. The accent of these declarations is such
+as
+to be superhuman, and far from profane music, which has never attained
+to the solid grandeur of this naked chant."</p>
+<p>The whole mass, moreover, at St. Severin was perfect. The
+"Kyrie
+eleison," solemn and sumptuous, the "Gloria in excelsis," shared by the
+grand and the choir organs, the one taking the solos, the other guiding
+and sustaining the singers, was full of exultant joy; the "Sanctus,"
+concentrated, almost haggard, resounded through the arches when the
+choir shouted the "Hosanna in excelsis," and the "Agnus Dei" was sung
+low to a clear, suppliant melody, so humble that it dared not become
+loud.</p>
+<p>Indeed, except for a contraband "O Salutaris," introduced
+there as in
+other churches, St. Severin maintained, on ordinary Sundays, the
+musical
+liturgy, sang it almost reverentially with the fragile but well-toned
+voices of the boys, the solidly built basses bringing vigorous sounds
+from the deep.</p>
+<p>It was a joy to Durtal to linger in the delightful
+surroundings of the
+Middle Ages, in that shadowy loneliness, amid the chants which rose
+behind him, without being annoyed by tricks of the mouths which he
+could
+not see.</p>
+<p>He ended by being moved to the very marrow, choked by nervous
+tears, and
+all the bitterness of his life came up before him; full of vague fears,
+of confused prayers which stifled him, and found no words, he cursed
+the
+ignominy of his life and swore to master his carnal affections.</p>
+<p>When the mass was over, he wandered in the church itself, and
+was
+delighted with the spring of the nave, which four centuries built and
+sealed with their arms, placing on it those strange impressions, those
+wonderful seals which expand in relief under the reversed groining of
+the arches. These centuries combined to bring to the feet of Christ the
+superhuman effort of their art, and the gifts of each are still
+visible.
+The thirteenth century shaped those low and stunted pillars, whose
+capitals are crowned with water-lilies, water-parsley, foliage with
+large leaves, voluted with crochets and turned in the form of a
+crosier.
+The fourteenth century raised the columns of the neighbouring bays on
+the sides of which prophets, monks and saints uphold the spring of the
+arches. The fifteenth and sixteenth created the apse, the sanctuary,
+some windows pierced above the choir, and though they have been
+restored
+by incompetent builders, they have still retained a barbaric grace, and
+a really touching simplicity.</p>
+<p>They seem to have been designed by ancestors of the Epinal
+foundries,
+and stained by them with crude colours. The donors and the saints who
+pass through these bright, stone-framed pictures are all awkward and
+pensive, dressed in robes of gamboge, bottle-green, prussian-blue,
+gooseberry-red, pumpkin-purple and wine lees, and these are made still
+deeper by contact with the flesh tints, either omitted or destroyed,
+which have at any rate remained uncoloured like a thin skin of glass.
+In
+one of these windows Christ on His cross seems limpid, all in light,
+between blue splashes of sky, and the red and green patches, formed by
+the wings of the two angels whose faces also seem cut in crystal and
+full of light.</p>
+<p>These windows differ from those of other churches, in that
+they absorb
+the rays of the sun, without refracting them. No doubt they have been
+deliberately divested of reflection that they may not by the insolent
+joyousness of stones on fire insult the melancholy sorrow of this
+church
+which rises in the squalid haunts of a quarter inhabited by beggars and
+thieves.</p>
+<p>Then these thoughts assailed Durtal. In Paris the modern
+churches are
+useless, they remain deaf to the prayers which break against the icy
+indifference of their walls. No man recollects himself in those naves
+where souls have left nothing of themselves, or where they have perhaps
+given themselves away, have had to turn and fall back on themselves,
+rebuffed by the insolence of a photographic glare, darkened by the
+neglect of those altars at which no saint has ever said mass. It seemed
+that God had always gone out, and would only come home to keep His
+promise to appear at the moment of consecration, and that He would
+retire immediately afterwards, despising these edifices which have not
+been built expressly for Him, since by the baseness of their form they
+might be put to any profane use, since above all they do not bring Him,
+in default of sanctity, the only gift which might please Him, the gift
+of art which He has lent to man, and which allows Him to see Himself in
+the abridged restitution of His work, and to rejoice in the development
+of that flower of which He has sowed the seed in souls which He has
+carefully chosen, in souls which are truly the elect, second only to
+those of His Saints.</p>
+<p>Ah, those charitable churches of the Middle Ages, those
+chapels damp and
+smoky, full of ancient song, of exquisite paintings, of the odour of
+extinguished tapers, of the perfume of burning incense!</p>
+<p>In Paris there remain now only a few specimens of this art of
+other
+years, a few sanctuaries whose stones really exude the Faith; among
+these St. Severin seemed to Durtal the most exquisite and the most
+certain. He only felt at home there, he believed that if he could ever
+pray in earnest he could do it in that church; and he said to himself
+that there lived the spirit of the fabric. It is impossible but that
+the
+burning prayers, the hopeless sobs of the Middle Ages, have not for
+ever
+impregnated the pillars and stained the walls; it is impossible but
+that
+the vine of sorrows whence of old the Saints gathered warm clusters of
+tears, has not preserved from those wonderful times emanations which
+sustain, a breath which still awakes a shame for sin, and the gift of
+tears.</p>
+<p>As Saint Agnes remained immaculate in the brothels, this
+church remained
+intact amid infamous surroundings, when all near it in the streets from
+the Château Rouge to the Cremerie Alexandre, only two paces off, the
+modern rabble of rascality combine their misdeeds, mingling with
+prostitutes their brewage of crime, their adulterated absinthe and
+spirits.</p>
+<p>In this especial territory of Satanism, the church rises,
+delicate and
+little, closely enveloped in the rags of taverns and hovels, and seen
+far off, raises above the roofs its light spire, like a netting needle,
+its point below, and lifting its eye into the light and air, through
+which can be seen a minute bell surmounting a sort of anvil. Such it
+appears, at least, from the Place Saint André des Arts. Symbolically it
+might be called a piteous appeal, always rejected by souls hardened and
+hammered by vice, of that anvil which was only an optical illusion, and
+that very real bell.</p>
+<p>"They say," thought Durtal, "they say that ignorant architects
+and
+unskilled archĉologists wish to free St. Severin from its rags, and
+surround it with trees in an enclosed square. But it has always lived
+in
+its network of black streets, and is voluntarily humble, in accordance
+with the miserable district it aids. In the Middle Ages the church was
+a
+monument seen only within, and not one of those impetuous basilicas
+which are put up as a show in open spaces.</p>
+<p>"Then it was an oratory for the poor, a church on its knees,
+and not
+standing; it would, therefore, be the most absolute nonsense to free it
+from its surroundings, to take it out of the day of an eternal
+twilight,
+out of those hours of shadow which brighten the melancholy beauty of a
+servant in prayer behind the impious hedge of hovels.</p>
+<p>"Ah, were it possible to steep the church in the glowing
+atmosphere of
+Notre Dame des Victoires, and join to its meagre psalmody the powerful
+choir of St. Sulpice, that would be complete," said Durtal, "but alas,
+here below, nothing whole, nothing perfect exists!"</p>
+<p>Indeed from an artistic point of view, it was the only church
+which
+satisfied him, for Notre Dame de Paris was too grand, and too much
+overrun by tourists; there were few ceremonies there, just the
+necessary
+amount of prayers were weighed out, and the greater part of the chapels
+remained closed; and lastly the voices of the choir boys always wanted
+mending; they broke, while the advanced age of the basses made them
+hoarse. At St. Etienne du Mont it was worse still; the shell of the
+church was charming, but the choir was an offshoot of the school of
+Sanfourche, you might think yourself in a kennel, where a medley pack
+of
+sick beasts were growling; as for the other sanctuaries on the right
+bank of the river, they were worthless, plain chant was as far as
+possible suppressed, and the poverty of the voices was everywhere
+ornamented with promiscuous tunes.</p>
+<p>Yet on the right bank were the more self-respecting churches,
+for
+religious Paris stops on that side of the Seine, and comes to an end as
+you pass the bridges.</p>
+<p>In fact, to sum up all, he might believe that St. Severin by
+its scent,
+and the delightful art of its old nave, St. Sulpice by its ceremonies
+and its chanting, had brought him back towards Christian art, which in
+its turn had directed him to God.</p>
+<p>Then when once urged on this way, he had pursued it, had left
+architecture and music, to wander in the mystic territories of the
+other
+arts, and his long visits to the Louvre, his researches into the
+breviaries, into the books of Ruysbröck, Angela da Foligno, Saint
+Teresa, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, had
+confirmed
+him in his belief.</p>
+<p>But the upheaval of all his ideas which he had undergone was
+too recent
+for his soul at once to regain its equilibrium. From time to time it
+seemed to wish to go back, and he discussed with himself in order to
+set
+it at rest. He spent himself in disputation, came to doubt the reality
+of his conversion, and said: "After all I am united to the church only
+on the side of art. I only go there to see or hear and not to pray; I
+do
+not seek the Lord, but my own pleasure. This is not business. Just as
+in
+a warm bath I do not feel the cold if I am motionless, but if I move I
+freeze, so in the church my impulses are upset when I move, I am almost
+on fire in the nave, less warm in the porch, and I become perfectly icy
+outside. These are literary postulates, vibrations of the nerves,
+skirmishes of thought, spiritual brawls, whatever you please, except
+Faith."</p>
+<p>But what disquieted him still more than the need of helps to
+feeling,
+was that his shameless senses rebelled at the contact of religious
+ideas. He floated like wreckage between Licentiousness and the Church,
+they each threw him back in turn, obliging him as he approached one to
+return at once to that which he had left, and he was inclined to ask if
+he were not a victim to some mystification of his lower instincts,
+seeking to revive themselves, without his consciousness, by the cordial
+of a false piety.</p>
+<p>In fact he had often seen realized in himself that unclean
+miracle, when
+he had left St. Severin, almost in tears. Insensibly, without
+connection
+of ideas, without any welding together of sensations, without the
+explosion of a spark, his senses took fire, and he was powerless to let
+them burn themselves out, to resist them.</p>
+<p>He loathed himself afterwards, and it was high time. Then came
+the
+reverse movement; he longed to run to some chapel, there to wash and be
+clean, and he was so disgusted with himself that now and then he went
+as
+far as the door and dared not enter.</p>
+<p>At other times, on the contrary, he rebelled against himself,
+and cried
+in fury: "It is monstrous, I have in fact spoiled for myself the only
+pleasure that remained to me&#8212;the flesh. Once I amused myself without
+blame, now I pay for my poor debauches with torments. I have added one
+more weariness to existence&#8212;would that I could undo it."</p>
+<p>He lied to himself in vain, trying to justify himself by
+suggesting
+doubts.</p>
+<p>"Suppose all this were not true, if there were nothing in it,
+if I were
+deceiving myself, what if the freethinkers were right?"</p>
+<p>But he was obliged to be sorry for himself, for he felt
+distinctly to
+the bottom of his soul, that he held unshaken the certitude of true
+Faith.</p>
+<p>"These discussions are miserable, and the excuses I make for
+my
+filthinesses are odious," he said to himself, and a flame of enthusiasm
+sprang up within him.</p>
+<p>How doubt the truth of dogmas, how deny the divine power of
+the Church,
+for she commands assent?</p>
+<p>First she has her superhuman art and her mysticism, then she
+is most
+wonderful in the persistent folly of conquered heresies. All since the
+world began have had the flesh as their spring-board. Logically and
+humanly speaking they should have triumphed, for they allowed man and
+woman to satisfy their passions, saying to themselves there was no sin
+in these, even sanctifying them as the Gnostics, rendering homage to
+God
+by the foulest uncleanness.</p>
+<p>All have suffered shipwreck. The Church, unbending in this
+matter, has
+remained upright and entire. She orders the body to be silent, and the
+soul to suffer, and contrary to all probability, humanity listens to
+her, and sweeps away like a dung-heap the seductive joys proposed to
+her.</p>
+<p>Again, the vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves
+her in
+spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the
+disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the
+awkwardness and lack of ability in her defenders, a very strong point.</p>
+<p>"No, the more I think of her," he cried, "the more I think her
+prodigious, unique, the more I am convinced that she alone holds the
+truth, that outside her are only weaknesses of mind, impostures,
+scandals. The Church is the divine breeding ground, the heavenly
+dispensary of souls; she gives them suck, nourishes them, and heals
+them; she bids them understand, when the hour of sorrow comes, that
+true
+life begins, not at birth, but at death. The Church is indefectible,
+before all things admirable, she is great&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Yes, but then we must follow her directions and practise the
+sacraments
+she orders!"</p>
+<p>And Durtal, shaking his head, gave himself no further answer.</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER
+III.</h2>
+<p>Before his conversion he had said like all unbelievers: "If I
+believed
+that Jesus Christ is God, and that eternal life is not a decoy, I would
+not hesitate to change all my habits, to follow as far as possible the
+rules of religion, and, in any case, to live chaste." And he was
+surprised that people he knew, who were in these conditions, did not
+maintain an attitude higher than his own. He who had so long
+indulgently
+forgiven himself became singularly intolerant, so soon as he had to do
+with a Catholic.</p>
+<p>He now understood the injustice of his judgments, and
+confessed that
+between faith and practice was a gulf difficult to overpass.</p>
+<p>He did not like to discuss this question with himself, but it
+returned
+and took possession of him all the same, and he was obliged to admit
+the
+meanness of his arguments, the despicable reasons for his resistance.</p>
+<p>He was still honest enough to say: "I am no longer a child; if
+I have
+Faith, if I admit Catholicism, I cannot conceive it as lukewarm and
+unfixed, warmed up again and again in the saucepan of a false zeal. I
+will have no compromise or truce, no alternations of debauch and
+communions, no stages of licentiousness and piety, no, all or nothing;
+to change from top to bottom, or not change at all."</p>
+<p>Then he drew back in alarm, endeavoured to escape the part he
+was about
+to take, endeavoured to exculpate himself, cavilling for hours,
+invoking
+the most wretched motives for remaining as he was, and not budging a
+jot.</p>
+<p>"What am I to do? If I do not obey orders, which I feel with
+increasing
+force, I am preparing for myself a life of uneasiness and remorse, for
+I
+know well I ought not to remain for ever on the threshold, but to
+penetrate into the sanctuary and stay there. And if I make up my
+mind&#8212;no indeed&#8212;for then I must bind myself to a heap of observances,
+bend to a series of rules, assist at mass on Sunday, abstain on Friday,
+live like a bigot, and look like a fool."</p>
+<p>And then to help his revolt, he thought of the air, the look
+of people
+who frequented the churches; for two men who looked intelligent and
+clean, how many were without doubt rascals and impostors!</p>
+<p>Almost all had a side-long look, an oily voice, downcast eyes,
+immovable
+spectacles, clothes like sacristans as if of black wood, almost all
+told
+thin beads ostentatiously, and with more strategy and more knavery than
+the wicked, took toll from their neighbours on leaving God.</p>
+<p>The devout women were still less reassuring, they invaded the
+church,
+walking about as if quite at home, disturbing everybody, upsetting
+chairs, knocking against you without begging pardon; then they knelt
+down with much ado, in the attitude of contrite angels, murmured
+interminable paternosters, and left the church more arrogant and sour
+than before.</p>
+<p>"It is not encouraging to have to mix with this flock of pious
+geese,"
+he exclaimed.</p>
+<p>But soon, against his will, he made answer to himself: "You
+have nothing
+to do with others, were you more humble, these people would certainly
+seem less offensive; at any rate they have the courage you lack, they
+are not ashamed of their faith, and are not afraid to kneel to God in
+public."</p>
+<p>And Durtal remained dumfounded, for he had to admit that the
+riposte
+struck home. It was clear his humility was at fault, but what was
+worse,
+he could not free himself from human respect.</p>
+<p>He was afraid of being taken for a fool; the prospect of being
+seen on
+his knees, in church, made his hair stand on end; the idea, that, if he
+ever had to communicate, he would have to rise and go to the altar in
+the sight of all, was intolerable to him.</p>
+<p>"If that moment ever come it will be hard to bear," said he;
+"and yet I
+am an idiot, for what have I to do with the opinion of people I do not
+know?" but much as he might repeat that his alarms were absurd, he
+could not get over them, or free himself from the fear of ridicule.</p>
+<p>"After all," he said, "even if I decide to jump the ditch, to
+confess
+and communicate, that terrible question of the senses would always have
+to be resolved. I must determine to fly the lusts of the flesh, and
+accept perpetual abstinence. I could never attain to that.</p>
+<p>"Without counting that in any case, the time would be
+ill-chosen were I
+now to make such an effort, for never have I been so tormented as since
+my conversion; Catholicism unfortunately excites unclean suggestions
+when I prowl about it, without entering."</p>
+<p>And to this exclamation another answered at once: "Yes, but
+you must
+enter."</p>
+<p>He was irritated at this change of front without change of
+place, and he
+tried to turn the conversation, as though it had been held with
+another,
+whose questions perplexed him; but he came back to it all the same,
+and,
+in his annoyance, summoned all his reasoning powers to his aid.</p>
+<p>"Come, let us try to take stock at any rate! It is plain that
+as I have
+drawn near the Church, my unclean desires have become more frequent and
+more persistent; and yet another fact is certain that I have been so
+used up by twenty years of debauchery that I ought not to have any
+further carnal appetites. In fact, if I chose it, I could perfectly
+well
+remain chaste; but then I must bid my miserable brain be silent, and I
+have no power to do so! It is frightful all the same that I am more
+excited than in youth, for now my desires go a-travelling, and since
+they have not their ordinary shelter they go off in search of evil
+haunts. How may this be explained? It is a sort of dyspepsia of the
+soul, which cannot digest ordinary meats, and tries to feed on spiced
+dreams, highly seasoned thoughts; it is then want of appetite for
+wholesome meals which has begotten this greediness for strange dishes,
+this trouble of the mind, this wish to escape from myself, and jump
+were
+it but for a moment over the permitted limits of the senses.</p>
+<p>"In that case Catholicism would play a part at once repellent
+and
+depressing. It would stimulate these sick desires, and weaken me at the
+same time, would give me over to nervous emotions without strength to
+resist them."</p>
+<p>Wandering thus in self-examination, he came to a dead stand
+where was no
+issue, arriving at this conclusion: "I do not practise my religion,
+because I yield to my baser instincts, and I yield to these instincts
+because I do not practise my religion."</p>
+<p>Brought up thus by a dead wall, he resisted, asking if this
+last
+observation were indeed true; for, after all, nothing proved that if he
+approached the Sacraments he would not be attacked with even greater
+violence. It was even probable he would be, for the devil makes a dead
+set at pious people.</p>
+<p>Then he rebelled against the cowardice of these remarks, and
+cried: "I
+lie, for I know well, that if I made the least sign of resistance, I
+should be powerfully aided from on high."</p>
+<p>Clever at self-torture, he continued to harass his soul,
+always on the
+same line. "Suppose," he said, "for the sake of argument, that I have
+tamed my pride, and subdued my body, suppose that at present there were
+nothing to do, but to go forward, I am still brought up, for the final
+obstacle terrifies me.</p>
+<p>"Up to now I have been able to walk alone, without earthly
+assistance,
+without advice; I have been converted without the help of anyone, but
+now I cannot make a step without a guide, I cannot approach the altar
+without the aid of an interpreter, and the bulwark of a priest."</p>
+<p>And once more, he drew back, for in former times he had been
+intimate
+with a certain number of ecclesiastics, and had found them so mediocre,
+so lukewarm, above all so hostile to Mysticism, that he was revolted at
+the very notion of laying before them the schedule of his requirements
+and his regrets.</p>
+<p>"They will not understand me," he thought; "they will answer
+that
+Mysticism was interesting in the Middle Ages, but has now become
+disused
+and is in any case quite out of touch with the modern spirit. They will
+think me mad, will assure me, moreover, that God does not want so much,
+will advise me with a smile, not to make myself singular, to do as
+others, and to think like them.</p>
+<p>"I have indeed no intention of entering on the way of
+Mysticism, but
+they may at least allow me to envy it and not inflict on me their
+middle-class ideal of a God.</p>
+<p>"For, not to deceive oneself, Catholicism is not only that
+moderate
+religion that they offer us; it is not composed only of petty cases and
+formulas; it is not wholly confined to rigid observances, and the toys
+of old maids, to all that goody-goody business, which spreads itself
+abroad in the Rue Saint Sulpice; it is far more exalted, far purer, but
+then we must penetrate its burning zone, and seek in Mysticism, the
+art,
+the essence, and the very soul of the Church.</p>
+<p>"Using the powerful means at her disposal, we then have to
+empty
+ourselves, and strip the soul, so that Christ if He will may enter it;
+we have to purify the house, to cleanse it with the disinfectant of
+prayer and the sublimate of Sacraments; in a word, to be ready when the
+Guest shall come and bid us to empty ourselves wholly into Him, as He
+will pour Himself into us.</p>
+<p>"I know thoroughly well, that this divine alchemy, this
+transmutation of
+the human creature into God, is generally impossible, for the Saviour,
+as a rule, keeps His singular favours for His elect; but after all,
+every one, however unworthy, is presumably able to attain that majestic
+end, since God only decides, and not man, whose humble acquiescence
+alone is requisite.</p>
+<p>"I see myself saying that to the priests! They will tell me I
+have no
+business with mystical ideas, and will give me in exchange the petty
+religion of rich women; they will wish to mix themselves up with my
+life, to inquire about the state of my soul, to insinuate their own
+tastes; they will try to convince me that art is dangerous, will
+sermonize me with imbecile talk, and pour over me their flowing bowls
+of
+pious veal broth.</p>
+<p>"I know what I am; at the end of a couple of interviews I
+shall rebel,
+and become wicked."</p>
+<p>Durtal shook his head, remained in thought, and began again,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Yet one must be just; perhaps the secular clergy are only the
+leavings,
+for the contemplative orders and the missionary army carry away every
+year the pick of the spiritual basket; the mystics, priests athirst for
+sorrows, drunk with sacrifice, bury themselves in cloisters or exile
+themselves among savages whom they teach. So when the cream is off, the
+rest of the clergy are plainly but skim milk, the scourings of the
+seminaries.</p>
+<p>"Yes, but after all," he continued, "the question is not
+whether they
+are intelligent or narrow, it is not my business to take the priest to
+pieces to discover under the consecrated rind the nothingness of the
+man; not my business to abuse his inadequacy since it is thoroughly
+suited to the understanding of the crowd. Would it not be, after all,
+more courageous and more humble to kneel before a being of whose brains
+you know the weakness?</p>
+<p>"And then ... then ... I am not reduced to that, for indeed I
+know one
+in Paris, a true mystic. Suppose I go and see him!"</p>
+<p>And he thought of a certain Abbé Gévresin, with whom he had
+formerly
+some acquaintance; he had often met him at a bookseller's in the Rue
+Servandoni, old Tocane, who had rare books on liturgy and the lives of
+the saints.</p>
+<p>Learning that Durtal was looking for works on Blessed Lidwine,
+the
+priest was at once interested in him, and on leaving the shop they had
+a
+long conversation. The abbé was very old and walked with difficulty,
+therefore he willingly took Durtal's arm, who saw him home.</p>
+<p>"The life of that victim of the sins of her time is a
+magnificent
+subject," he said; "you remember it, do you not?" and as they walked he
+sketched its lines, broadly.</p>
+<p>"Lidwine was born towards the end of the fourteenth century,
+at
+Schiedam, in Holland. Her beauty was extraordinary, but she lost it
+through illness at the age of fifteen. She recovered, but while skating
+one day with her companions on the frozen canals, she fell and broke a
+rib. From the time of that accident to her death she was bed-ridden.
+She
+was afflicted with most frightful ailments, her wounds festered, and
+worms bred in her putrefying flesh. Erysipelas, that terrible malady of
+the Middle Ages, consumed her. Her right arm was eaten away, a single
+muscle held it to the body, her brow was cleft in two, one of her eyes
+became blind, and the other so weak that it could not bear the light.</p>
+<p>"While she was in this condition, the plague ravaged Holland,
+and
+decimated the town in which she lived; she was the first attacked. Two
+boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the heart. 'Two boils,
+it is well,' she said to the Lord, 'but three would be better in honour
+of the Holy Trinity,' and immediately a third pustule broke out on her
+face.</p>
+<p>"For thirty-five years she lived in a cellar, taking no solid
+food,
+praying and weeping, so chilly in winter, that each morning her tears
+formed two frozen streams down her cheeks.</p>
+<p>"She thought herself still too fortunate, and entreated the
+Lord not to
+spare her, and obtained from Him the grace that by her sufferings she
+might expiate the sins of others. Christ heard her prayers, visited her
+with His angels, communicated her with His own hand, gave her the
+delight of heavenly ecstasies, and caused her festering wounds to
+exhale
+delicious perfumes.</p>
+<p>"At the moment of her death He stood by her, and restored her
+poor body
+to its former soundness. Her beauty, so long vanished, shone out again,
+the town was moved, the sick came in crowds, and all who drew near were
+healed.</p>
+<p>"She is the true patroness of the sick," concluded the abbé,
+and, after
+a silence, he added,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"From the point of view of the higher mysticism, Lidwine is
+wonderful,
+for in her we can verify that plan of substitution which was, and is,
+the glorious reason for the existence of convents."</p>
+<p>And as, without answering, Durtal questioned him with a look,
+he went
+on,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"You are aware, sir, that in all ages, nuns have offered
+themselves to
+heaven as expiatory victims. The lives of saints, both men and women,
+who desired these sacrifices abound, of those who atoned for the sins
+of
+others by sufferings eagerly demanded and patiently borne. But there is
+a task still more arduous and more painful than was desired by these
+admirable souls. It is not now that of purging the faults of others,
+but
+of preventing them, hindering their commission, by taking the place of
+those who are too weak to bear the shock.</p>
+<p>"Read Saint Teresa on this subject; you will see that she
+gained
+permission to take on herself, and without flinching, the temptations
+of
+a priest who could not endure them. This substitution of a strong soul
+freeing one who is not strong from perils and fears is one of the great
+rules of mysticism.</p>
+<p>"Sometimes this exchange is purely spiritual, sometimes on the
+contrary
+it has to do only with the ills of the body. Saint Teresa was the
+surrogate of souls in torment, Sister Catherine Emmerich took the place
+of the sick, relieved, at least, those who were most suffering; thus,
+for instance, she was able to undergo the agony of a woman suffering
+from consumption and dropsy, in order to permit her to prepare for
+death
+in peace.</p>
+<p>"Well, Lidwine took on herself all bodily ills, she lusted for
+physical
+suffering, and was greedy for wounds; she was, as it were, the reaper
+of
+punishments, and she was also the piteous vessel in which everyone
+discharged the overflowings of his malady. If you would speak of her in
+other fashion than the poor hagiographies of our day, study first that
+law of substitution, that miracle of perfect charity, that superhuman
+triumph of Mysticism; that will be the stem of your book, and
+naturally,
+without effort, all Lidwine's acts graft themselves on it."</p>
+<p>"But," asked Durtal, "does this law still take effect?"</p>
+<p>"Yes: I know convents which apply it. Moreover, Orders like
+the
+Carmelites and the Poor Clares willingly accept the transfer to them of
+temptations we suffer; then these convents take on their backs, so to
+speak, the diabolical expiations of those insolvent souls whose debts
+they pay to the full."</p>
+<p>"All the same," said Durtal, shaking his head, "if you consent
+to take
+on yourself the assaults intended for your neighbour, you must make
+pretty sure not to sink."</p>
+<p>"The nuns chosen by our Lord," replied the abbé, "as victims
+of
+expiation, as whole burnt-offerings, are in fact few, and they are
+generally, especially in this age, obliged to unite and coalesce in
+order to bear without failing the weight of misdeeds which try them,
+for
+in order that a soul may bear alone the assaults of Satan, which are
+often terrible, it must be indeed assisted by the angels and elect of
+God." And after a silence the old priest added,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"I believe I may speak with some experience in these matters,
+for I am
+one of the directors of those nuns who make reparation in their
+convents."</p>
+<p>"And yet," cried Durtal, "the world asks what is the good of
+the
+contemplative Orders."</p>
+<p>"They are the lightning conductors of society," said the abbé,
+with
+great energy. "They draw on themselves the demoniacal fluid, they
+absorb
+temptations to vice, preserve by their prayers those who live, like
+ourselves, in sin; they appease, in fact, the wrath of the Most High
+that He may not place the earth under an interdict. Ah! while the
+sisters who devote themselves to nursing the sick and infirm are indeed
+admirable, their task is easy in comparison with that undertaken by the
+cloistered Orders, the Orders where penance never ceases, and the very
+nights spent in bed are broken by sobs."</p>
+<p>"This priest is far more interesting than his brethren," said
+Durtal to
+himself as they parted; and, as the abbé invited his visits, he had
+often called on him.</p>
+<p>He had always been cordially welcomed. On several occasions he
+had
+warily sounded the old man on several questions. He had answered
+evasively in regard to other priests. But he did not seem to think much
+of them, if Durtal might judge by what he said one day in regard to
+Lidwine, that magnet of sorrows.</p>
+<p>"Notice," he said, "that a weak and honest soul has every
+advantage in
+choosing a confessor, not from the clergy who have lost the sense of
+Mysticism, but from the monks. They alone know the effects of the law
+of
+substitution, and if they see that in spite of their efforts the
+penitent succumbs, they end by freeing him by taking his trials on
+themselves, or by sending them off to some convent in the country where
+resolute people can use them."</p>
+<p>Another time the question of nationalities was discussed in a
+newspaper
+which Durtal showed him. The abbé shrugged his shoulders, putting aside
+the patriotic twaddle. "For me," he said calmly, "for me my country is
+that where I can best pray."</p>
+<p>Durtal could not make out what this priest was. He understood
+from the
+bookseller, that the Abbé Gévresin on account of his great age and
+infirmity was incapacitated for the regular duties of the priesthood.
+"I
+know that, when he can, he still says his mass each morning in a
+convent; I believe also he receives a few of his brethren for
+confession
+in his own house;" and Tocane added with disdain, "He has barely enough
+to live on, and they do not look on him with favour at the archbishop's
+because of his mystical notions."</p>
+<p>There ended all he knew about him. "He is evidently a very
+good priest,"
+repeated Durtal; "his physiognomy declares it, and his mouth and eyes
+contradict each other; his eyes certainly declare his entire goodness,
+his lips, somewhat thick, purple and always moist, have on them an
+affectionate but somewhat sad smile, and to this his blue eyes give the
+lie&#8212;blue, childlike eyes which laugh out astonished under white
+eyebrows in a rather red face, touched on the cheeks like a ripe
+apricot, with little points of blood.</p>
+<p>"In any case," said Durtal, waking from his meditations, "I am
+very
+wrong not to continue the relations into which I have entered with him.</p>
+<p>"Yes, but then nothing is so difficult as to become really
+intimate with
+a priest; first by the very education he receives at the seminary the
+ecclesiastic thinks himself obliged to disperse his affections and not
+concentrate himself on particular friendships; then, like a doctor, he
+is a man harassed with business, who is never to be found. You can
+catch
+them now and then between two confessions or two sick calls. Nor even
+then are you quite certain that the eager welcome of the priest rings
+true, for he is just the same to all who come to him, and indeed, since
+I do not call on the Abbé Gévresin for his help or advice, I am afraid
+of being in his way, and of taking up his time, hence I am acting with
+discretion in not going to see him.</p>
+<p>"Yet I am sorry; suppose I write, or go to him one morning,
+but what
+have I to say to him? I ought to know what I want before I allow myself
+to trouble him. If I go only to complain, he will answer I am wrong not
+to be a communicant, and I have nothing to answer. No: the better plan
+is to meet him as by chance, on the quays, where no doubt he sometimes
+looks over the book-stalls, or at Tocane's, for then I can talk to him
+more intimately, at least less officially, about my vacillations and
+regrets."</p>
+<p>So Durtal searched the quays, and never once met the abbé. He
+went to
+the bookseller's, and pretended to look over his stock, but as soon as
+he pronounced the name Gévresin, Tocane exclaimed, "I have heard
+nothing
+of him, he has not been here for the last two months."</p>
+<p>"I will not turn back, but just disturb him in his own house,"
+said
+Durtal, "but he will wonder why I came back after so long an absence.
+Besides the awkwardness I feel in calling on people whom I have
+neglected, I am also troubled by thinking the abbé may suspect some
+interested object in my visit. That is not convenient; if I had but a
+good pretext; there is certainly that life of Lidwine which interests
+him, I might consult him on various points. Yes, but which? I have not
+concerned myself with that saint for a long time, and must read over
+again the meagre old books on her biography. After all, it will be
+simpler and better to be frank, and say, 'This is why I have come; I
+want to ask advice, which I have not determined to follow, but I have
+so
+much need of speaking, of giving the reins to my soul, that I beg you
+to
+be so kind as to lose an hour for my sake.'</p>
+<p>"He will do it certainly and willingly.</p>
+<p>"Then that is agreed on; suppose I go to-morrow?" But he
+checked himself
+at once. "There was nothing pressing; there was plenty of time; better
+take time and think; ah, yes, here is Christmas close upon us, I cannot
+decently trouble a priest who has his penitents to confess, for there
+are many communicants on that day. Let him get his hard work over, and
+then we will see."</p>
+<p>He was at first pleased at having invented that excuse, then
+he had to
+admit in his heart that, after all, there was not much in it, for there
+was nothing to show that this priest, who was not attached to a parish,
+was busy in hearing confessions.</p>
+<p>It was hardly probable, but he tried to convince himself that
+it might
+be so after all, and his hesitation began again. Angry at last with the
+discussion, he adopted a middle course. For greater certainty, he would
+not call on the abbé till after Christmas, but he would not be later
+than a given time; he took an almanack, and swore to keep his
+promise&#8212;three days after that feast.</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER
+IV.</h2>
+<p>Oh! that midnight mass! He had had the unfortunate idea of
+going to it
+at Christmas. He went to St. Severin, and found a young ladies' day
+school installed there, instead of the choir, who, with sharp voices
+like needles, knitted the worn-out skeins of the canticles. He had fled
+to St. Sulpice, and plunged into a crowd which walked and talked as if
+in the open air; had heard there choral-society marches, tea-garden
+waltzes, firework tunes, and had come away in a rage.</p>
+<p>It had seemed to him superfluous to try St. Germain-des-Près,
+for he
+held that church in horror. Besides the weariness inspired by its
+heavy,
+ill-restored shell, and the miserable paintings with which Flandrin
+loaded it, the clergy there were specially, almost alarmingly, ugly,
+and
+the choir was truly infamous. They were like a set of bad cooks, boys
+who spat vinegar, and elderly choir-men, who cooked in the furnace of
+their throats a sort of vocal broth, a thin gruel of sound.</p>
+<p>Nor did he think of taking refuge in St. Thomas Aquinas, where
+he
+dreaded the barking and the choruses; there was indeed St. Clotilde,
+where the psalmody, at least, is upright, and has not, like that of St.
+Thomas, lost all shame. He went there, but again encountered dance
+music
+and profane tunes, a worldly orgie.</p>
+<p>At last he went to bed in a rage, saying to himself, "In
+Paris, at any
+rate, a singular baptism of music is reserved for the New-Born."</p>
+<p>Next day, when he woke, he felt he had no courage to face the
+churches;
+the sacrileges of last night would, he thought, continue; and as the
+weather was almost fine, he went out, wandered in the Luxembourg,
+gained
+the square of the Observatoire, and the Boulevard de Port Royal, and
+mechanically made his way along the interminable Rue de la Santé.</p>
+<p>He knew that street of old, and had taken melancholy walks in
+it,
+attracted by its poor houses, like those of a provincial town; then it
+was fit for a dreamer, for it was bounded on the right by the Prison de
+la Santé and Sainte Anne's madhouse, and on the left by convents. Light
+and air circulated in the street, but, behind it, all was black; it was
+a kind of prison corridor, with cells on either side, where some were
+condemned to temporary sentences, and others, of their own free will,
+suffered lasting sorrows.</p>
+<p>"I can imagine," thought Durtal, "how it would have been
+painted by an
+Early Flemish master; the long street paved by patient pencils, the
+stories open from top to bottom, and the cupboards the same; and on one
+side massive cells with iron bedsteads, a stoneware jug; little
+peepholes in the doors secured by strong bolts, inside, scoundrels and
+thieves, gnashing their teeth, turning round and round, their hair on
+end, howling like caged animals; on the other side little rooms,
+furnished with a pallet-bed, a stoneware jug, a crucifix, these also
+closed by doors iron-banded, and within nuns or monks, kneeling on the
+flags, their faces clean cut against the light of a halo, their eyes
+lifted to heaven, their hands joined, raised from the ground in
+ecstasy,
+a pot of lilies at their side."</p>
+<p>Then at the back of the canvas, between these two rows of
+houses, rises
+a great avenue, at the end of which in a dappled sky sits God the
+Father
+with Christ on His right, choirs of Seraphim playing on guitar and
+viol;
+God the Father immovable under his lofty tiara, His breast covered by
+His long beard, holds scales which balance exactly, the holy captives
+expiating precisely by their penances and prayers the blasphemies of
+the
+rascals and the insane.</p>
+<p>"It must be admitted," thought Durtal, "that this street is
+very
+peculiar, that there is probably none like it in Paris, for it unites
+in
+its course virtues and vices, which in other quarters, in spite of the
+efforts of the Church, trend apart as far as possible from each other."</p>
+<p>Thus thinking he had come as far as St. Anne's, where the
+street grows
+lighter and the houses are lower, with only one or two stories, then,
+gradually, there is greater space between them, and they are only
+joined to each other by blank ends of walls.</p>
+<p>"At any rate," thought Durtal, "if this street has no
+distinction, it is
+very private; here at least one need not admire the impertinent
+decoration of those modern shops which expose in their windows as
+precious commodities, chosen piles of firewood, and in glass sweetmeat
+jars, coal drops and coke lollipops."</p>
+<p>And here is an odd lane, and he looked at an alley which led
+down a
+sharp decline into a main street, where was to be seen the tricolor
+flag
+in zinc on a washhouse; he read the name: Rue de l'Ebre.</p>
+<p>He entered it, it was but a few yards long; the whole of one
+side was
+occupied by a wall, behind which were half seen some stunted buildings,
+surmounted by a bell. An entrance-gate with a square wicket was placed
+in the wall, which was raised higher as it sloped downwards, and at the
+end was pierced by round windows, and rose into a little building,
+surmounted by a clock-tower so low that its point did not even reach
+the
+height of the two-storied house opposite.</p>
+<p>On the other side three hovels sloped down, closely packed
+together;
+zinc pipes ran everywhere, growing like vines, ramifying like the
+stalks
+of a hollow vine along the walls, windows gaped on rusty leaden hinges.
+Dim courts of wretched hovels could be seen; in one was a shed where
+some cows were reposing; in two others were coach-houses for
+wheel-chairs, and a rack behind the bars of which appeared the capsuled
+necks of bottles.</p>
+<p>"But this must be a church," thought Durtal, looking at the
+little clock
+tower, and the three or four round bays, which seemed cut out in emery
+paper to look like the black rough mortar of the wall; "where is the
+entrance?"</p>
+<p>He found it on turning out of the alley into the Rue de la
+Glacière. A
+tiny porch gave access to the building.</p>
+<p>He opened the door, and entered a large room, a sort of closed
+shed,
+painted yellow, with a flat ceiling, with small iron beams coloured
+grey, picked out with blue, and ornamented with gas-jets like a wine
+shop. At the end was a marble altar, six lighted tapers, and gilt
+ornaments, candelabra full of tapers, and under the tabernacle, a very
+small monstrance, which sparkled in the light of the tapers.</p>
+<p>It was almost dark, the panes of the windows having been
+crudely daubed
+with bands of indigo and yellowish green; it was freezing, the stove
+was
+not alight, and the church, paved like a kitchen floor, had no matting
+or carpet.</p>
+<p>Durtal wrapped himself up as best he could and sat down. His
+eyes
+gradually grew accustomed to the obscurity of the room, and what he saw
+was strange; in front of the choir on rows of chairs were seated human
+forms, drowned in floods of white muslin. No one stirred.</p>
+<p>Suddenly there entered by a side door a nun equally wrapped
+from head to
+foot in a large veil. She passed along the altar, stopped in the
+middle,
+threw herself on the ground, kissed the floor, and by a sudden effort,
+without helping herself by her arms, stood upright, advanced silently
+into the church, and brushed by Durtal, who saw under the muslin a
+magnificent robe of creamy white, an ivory cross at her neck, at her
+girdle a white cord and beads.</p>
+<p>She went to the entrance-door, and there ascended a little
+staircase
+into a gallery which commanded the church.</p>
+<p>He asked himself what could be this Order so sumptuously
+arrayed, in
+this miserable chapel, in such a district?</p>
+<p>Little by little the room filled, choir-boys in red with capes
+trimmed
+with rabbit's skin lighted the candelabra, went out, and ushered in a
+priest, vested in a grand cope, with large flowers, a priest tall and
+young, who sat down, and in a sonorous tone chanted the first antiphon
+of vespers.</p>
+<p>Suddenly Durtal turned round. In the gallery an harmonium
+accompanied
+the responses of voices never to be forgotten. It was not a woman's
+voice, but one having in it something of a child's voice, sweetened,
+purified, sharpened, and something of a man's, but less harsh, finer
+and
+more sustained, an unsexed voice, filtered through litanies, bolted by
+prayers, passed through the sieves of adoration and tears.</p>
+<p>The priest, still sitting, chanted the first verse of the
+unchanging
+psalm, "Dixit Dominus Domino meo."</p>
+<p>And Durtal saw in the air, in the gallery, tall white statues,
+holding
+black books in their hands, chanting slowly with eyes raised to heaven.
+A lamp cast its light on one of these figures, which for a second leant
+forward a little, and he saw under the lifted veil a face attentive and
+sorrowful, and very pale.</p>
+<p>The verses of the vesper psalms were now sung alternately, by
+the nuns
+above and by the congregation below. The chapel was almost full; a
+school of girls in white veils filled one side; little girls of the
+middle-class, poorly dressed brats who played with their dolls occupied
+the other. There were a few poor women in <i>sabots</i>,
+and no men.</p>
+<p>The atmosphere became extraordinary. The warmth of the souls
+thawed the
+ice of the room; here were not the vespers of the rich, such as were
+celebrated on Sundays at St. Sulpice, but the vespers of the poor,
+domestic vespers, in the plain chant of the country side, followed by
+the faithful with mighty fervour in silent and singular devotion.</p>
+<p>Durtal could fancy himself transported beyond the city, to the
+depths of
+some village cloister; he felt himself softened, his soul rocked by the
+monotonous amplitude of these chants, only recognizing the end of the
+psalms by the return of the doxology, the "Gloria Patri et Filio,"
+which
+separated them from each other.</p>
+<p>He had a real impulse, a dim need of praying to the
+Unknowable,
+penetrated to the very marrow by this environment of aspiration, it
+seemed to him that he thawed a little, and took a far-off part in the
+united tenderness of these bright spirits. He sought for a prayer, and
+recalled what St. Paphnutius taught Thais, when he cried, "Thou art not
+worthy to name the name of God, thou wilt pray only thus: 'Qui
+plasmasti
+me miserere mei;' Thou who hast formed me have mercy on me." He
+stammered out the humble phrase, prayed not out of love or of
+contrition, but out of disgust with himself, unable to let himself go,
+regretting that he could not love. Then he thought of saying the Lord's
+Prayer, but stopped at the notion that this is the hardest of all
+prayers to pronounce, when the phrases are weighed in the balance. For
+in it we declare to God that we forgive our neighbours' trespasses. Now
+how many who use these words forgive others? How many Catholics do not
+lie when they tell the All-knowing that they hate no one?</p>
+<p>He was roused from these reflections by sudden silence;
+vespers were
+over. Then the organ played again, and all the voices of the nuns
+joined, those in the choir below and in the gallery above, singing the
+old carol "Unto us a child is born."</p>
+<p>He listened, moved by the simplicity of the strain, and
+suddenly, in a
+minute, brutally, without understanding why, infamous thoughts filled
+his mind.</p>
+<p>He resisted in disgust, wished to repulse the assault of these
+shameful
+feelings, and they were persistent. He seemed to see before him a woman
+whose perverse ways had long maddened him.</p>
+<p>All at once this hallucination ceased; his eye was
+mechanically
+attracted towards the priest, who was looking at him, while speaking in
+a low voice to a beadle.</p>
+<p>He lost his head, imagining that the priest guessed his
+thoughts and was
+turning him out, but this notion was so foolish, that he shrugged his
+shoulders, and more sensibly thought that men were not admitted to this
+convent of women, and that the abbé who had seen him was sending the
+beadle to beg him to leave.</p>
+<p>The beadle came straight to him; Durtal was ready to take his
+hat, when
+in persuasive and gentle tones that functionary said that the
+procession
+was about to begin, that it was the custom for the gentlemen to follow
+the Blessed Sacrament, and that although he was the only man there, the
+abbé thought he would not refuse to follow the procession about to
+start.</p>
+<p>Overwhelmed by this request, Durtal made a vague gesture, in
+which the
+beadle seemed to see assent.</p>
+<p>"No," he thought as soon as he was left alone; "I will not
+meddle with
+the ceremony; first I know nothing about it, and I should spoil it all,
+and again I will not make a fool of myself." He prepared to slip away
+quietly, but he had no time to carry out his intention; the usher
+brought him a lighted candle and asked him to accompany him. He put the
+best face he could on the matter, and while thinking that he was
+blushing all over, he followed the beadle to the altar.</p>
+<p>There the beadle stopped him and bid him not to move. The
+whole
+congregation was now standing, the girls' school divided into two
+files,
+preceded by a woman carrying a banner. Durtal came in front of the
+first
+rank of nuns.</p>
+<p>Their veils lowered before the profane, even in church, were
+raised
+before the Blessed Sacrament, before God. Durtal was able to look at
+these sisters for a moment; at first his disillusion was complete. He
+had supposed them pale and grave like the nun he had seen in the
+gallery, and almost all of them were red, freckled, crossing their poor
+hands swelled and wounded by chilblains. Their faces were puffy and all
+seemed at the beginning or end of a cold; they were evidently country
+girls, and the novices, known by their grey robes under the white veil,
+were still more common looking; they had certainly been accustomed to
+farm labour, and yet on seeing them all turned to the altar, the
+poverty
+of their faces, the ugliness of their hands blue with cold, their
+broken
+nails, injured in the wash, disappeared; their eyes, modest and humble
+under their long lashes, changed their coarse features into pious
+simplicity. Lost in prayer, they did not even see his curious looks,
+and
+did not even suspect a man was there examining them.</p>
+<p>Durtal envied the admirable wisdom of these poor girls who
+alone
+understood it was mad to wish to live. He thought: "Ignorance leads to
+the same result as knowledge. Among the Carmelites are rich and pretty
+women who have lived in the world and left it, wholly convinced of the
+vainness of its joys; and these nuns, who evidently know nothing, have
+had an intuition of that vacuity which it has needed years of
+experience
+for the others to gain. By different ways they have arrived at the same
+meeting-place. Then what clearness of thought is revealed by their
+entrance into an Order! for if indeed they had not been gathered by
+Christ, what would have become of these unhappy girls? Married to
+drunkards and hammered by beatings; or perhaps maids in taverns,
+ill-treated by their masters, brutalized by the other servants,
+destined
+to the scorn of the streets and the dangers of ill-usage. And without
+knowing anything they have avoided it all, have remained innocent, far
+from these perils, and far from this defilement, under an obedience
+which is not ignoble, disposed by their very way of life to experience,
+should they be worthy, the most powerful joys which the soul of a human
+creature can feel. They remain, perhaps, beasts of burthen, but at any
+rate God's beasts of burthen."</p>
+<p>He had got so far in his reflections when the beadle beckoned
+to him.
+The priest, who had descended from the altar, held the little
+monstrance; the girls' procession was moving before him. Durtal passed
+in front of the line of nuns who did not take part in the ceremony, and
+torch in hand he followed the beadle, who carried behind the priest an
+open white silk parasol.</p>
+<p>Then the harmonium in the gallery filled the church with its
+drawling
+tones, like an enlarged accordion, and the nuns standing beside it
+intoned the old chant, rhythmical as a march, the "Adeste Fideles,"
+while below the novices and the faithful repeated after each stanza the
+sweet chorus of invitation, "Venite adoremus."</p>
+<p>The procession went several times round the chapel, above the
+heads
+bowed in the smoke from the censers, which the choir boys swung,
+turning
+at each pause to face the priest.</p>
+<p>"Well, after all, I have not come so badly out of it," said
+Durtal to
+himself, when they had returned to the altar. He thought his part was
+finished, but, this time without asking his permission, the beadle
+asked
+him to kneel at the communion rail in front of the altar.</p>
+<p>He was ill at ease and annoyed, at knowing that the whole
+school and the
+whole convent was behind him, nor was he accustomed to kneel; it seemed
+as if wedges were thrust into his limbs, as if he were subjected to the
+tortures of the Middle Ages. Embarrassed by his taper, which was
+guttering, and threatened to cover him with spots, he shifted his
+position quietly, trying to make himself more comfortable by slipping
+the skirts of his great coat between his knees and the steps; but in
+moving he only increased the evil, his flesh was folded back between
+the
+bones, and his skin was chafed and burning. He sweated at last with the
+pain, and feared to distract the fervour of the community by falling;
+while the ceremony went on for ever, the nuns sang in the gallery, but
+he listened no more and deplored the length of the service.</p>
+<p>At last the moment of Benediction approached.</p>
+<p>Then in spite of himself, seeing himself there, so near to
+God, Durtal
+forgot his sufferings, and bowed his head, ashamed to be so placed,
+like
+a captain at the head of his company, in the first rank of this maiden
+troop; and when in a great silence, the bell tinkled, and the priest
+turning, lightly cut the air in the form of a cross, and, with the
+Blessed Sacrament, blessed the congregation kneeling at his feet,
+Durtal
+remained, his body bent, his eyes closed, seeking to hide himself, to
+make himself small, and not be seen there in front amid that pious
+crowd.</p>
+<p>The psalm "Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes," rang out when the
+beadle came
+to take his taper. Durtal could hardly resist a cry, when he had to
+stand up; his benumbed knees cracked, and their joints would hardly
+work.</p>
+<p>Yet he regained his place somehow; let the crowd pass, and
+approaching
+the beadle, asked him the name of the convent, and the order to which
+the nuns belonged.</p>
+<p>"They are the Franciscan missionaries of Mary," answered the
+man, "but
+the chapel is not theirs as you seem to think; it is a chapel of ease
+for the parish of St. Marcel de la Maison Blanche: it is only joined by
+a corridor to the house those sisters occupy behind us there in the Rue
+de l'Ebre. They join in the offices, in fact, just as you and I may do,
+and they keep a school for the children of the district."</p>
+<p>"It is a touching little chapel," thought Durtal, when he was
+alone. "It
+is well matched with the neighbourhood it shelters, with the gloomy
+brook of the tanners, which runs through the yards below the Rue de la
+Glacière. It gives me the effect of being to Notre Dame de Paris what
+its neighbour the Bièvre is to the Seine. It is the streamlet of the
+church, the pious pavement, the miserable suburb of worship.</p>
+<p>"How poor and yet how exquisite are those nuns' voices, which
+seem
+non-sexual and mellow! God knows how I hate the voice of a woman in the
+holy place, for it still remains unclean. I think woman always brings
+with her the lasting miasma of her indispositions and she turns the
+psalms sour. Then, all the same, vanity and concupiscence rise from the
+worldly voice, and its cries of adoration accompanied by the organ are
+only cries of carnal desire, its very pleadings in the most sombre
+liturgical hymns are only addressed to God from the lips outward, for
+at
+bottom a woman only mourns the mediocre ideal of earthly pleasure to
+which she cannot attain. Thus I thoroughly understand that the Church
+has rejected woman from her offices, and that the musical robe of her
+sequences may not be contaminated she employs the voices of the boy and
+the man.</p>
+<p>"Yet in convents of women, that is changed; it is certain that
+prayer,
+communion, abstinence and vows purify the body and the soul, as well as
+the vocal odour which proceeds from them. The emanations from them give
+to the voices of the nuns, however crude, however ill-trained they may
+be, their chaste inflexions, their simple caresses of pure love, they
+recall to it the ingenuous sounds of childhood.</p>
+<p>"In certain orders, they seem even to prune it of the greater
+part of
+its branches, and concentrate the threads of sap which remain in a few
+twigs;" and he thought of a Carmelite convent to which he had gone from
+time to time, remembered their failing, almost expiring voices, where
+the little health that remained to them was concentrated in three
+notes,
+voices which had lost the musical colours of life, the tints of open
+air, keeping only in the cloister those of the costumes they seemed to
+reflect, white and brown, chaste and sombre tones.</p>
+<p>Ah! those Carmelites, he thought of them now, as he descended
+the Rue de
+la Glacière, and he called up the memory of a profession, the thought
+of
+which took entire possession of him every time he meditated on
+convents.
+He saw again in memory a morning in the little chapel in the Avenue de
+Saxe, a chapel, Spanish Gothic in style, with narrow windows glazed
+with
+panes so dark that the light which remained in their colours did not
+pass through them.</p>
+<p>At the end rose the high altar in shade, raised on six steps;
+on the
+left a large iron grating in an arch was covered with a black curtain,
+and on the same side, but almost at the base of the altar, a little
+arch
+traced on the plain wall, like a lancet window, with an aperture in the
+middle, a sort of square, a frame, without a panel, empty.</p>
+<p>That morning the chapel, cold and dark, sparkled, lighted by
+groves of
+candles; and the odour of incense, not adulterated as in other churches
+by spices and gums, filled it with a dull smoke; it was crammed with
+people. Crouched in a corner, Durtal had turned round, and like his
+neighbours looked at the backs of the thurifers and priests, who were
+going towards the entrance. The door opened suddenly, and he saw, in a
+burst of daylight, a red vision of the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris,
+passing up the nave, turning from side to side a horse-like head, in
+front of it a big spectacled nose, bending his tall form all on one
+side, blessing the congregation with a long twisted hand, like a crab's
+claw.</p>
+<p>He and his suite ascended the altar steps, and knelt at a
+prie-Dieu,
+then they took off his tippet, and vested him in a silk chasuble with a
+white cross embroidered in silver, and the mass began. Shortly before
+the communion, the black veil was gently withdrawn; behind the high
+grating, and in a blueish light like that of the moon, Durtal faintly
+saw white phantoms gliding and stars twinking in the air, and close to
+the grating a woman's form, kneeling motionless on the ground, she too
+holding a star at the end of a taper. The woman did not move but the
+star shook; then when the moment of communion was at hand, the woman
+rose, then disappeared, and her head, as if decapitated, filled the
+square of the wicket opened in the arch.</p>
+<p>Then as he leant forward he saw, for a second, a dead face,
+with closed
+lids, white, eyeless, like ancient marble statues. And all passed away,
+as the Cardinal bent above the grating, with the ciborium in his hand.</p>
+<p>All was so rapid that he asked himself if he were not
+dreaming; the mass
+was over. Behind the iron grating resounded mournful psalms, slow
+chants
+drawn out, weeping, always on the same notes, wandering lights and
+white
+forms passed in the azure fluid of the incense. Monseigneur Richard was
+sitting, mitre on head, interrogating the postulant who had returned to
+her place, and was kneeling before him behind the grating.</p>
+<p>He spoke in a low voice, and could not be heard. The whole
+congregation
+bent to listen to the novice as she pronounced her vows, but only a
+long
+murmur was heard. Durtal remembered that he had elbowed his way, and
+got
+near the choir, where, through the crossed bars of the grating, he saw
+the woman clad in white, prostrate on her face, in a square of flowers,
+while the whole convent filed past, bending over her, intoning the
+psalms for the dead, and sprinkling her with holy water, like a corpse.</p>
+<p>"It is admirable," he cried, moved in the street by the memory
+of the
+scene, and he thought of what a life was that of these women! To lie on
+an hair mattress without pillow or sheets, to fast seven months out of
+the twelve, except on Sundays and feasts; always to eat, standing,
+vegetables and abstinence fare; to have no fire in winter, to chant for
+hours on ice-cold tiles, to scourge the body, to become so humble as,
+however tenderly nurtured, to wash up dishes with joy, and attend to
+the
+meanest tasks, to pray from morning to midnight even to fainting, to
+pray there till death. They must indeed pity us, and set themselves to
+expiate the imbecility of a world which treats them as hysterical
+fools,
+for it cannot even understand the joy in suffering of souls like these.</p>
+<p>"We cannot be proud of ourselves, in thinking of the
+Carmelites, or even
+of those humble Franciscan Tertiaries, who are after all more vulgar.
+It
+is true they do not belong to a contemplative order, but all the same
+their rules are very strict, their existence is so hard that they too
+can atone by their prayers and good works for the crimes of the city
+they protect."</p>
+<p>He grew enthusiastic in thinking of the convents. Ah! to be
+earthed up
+among them, sheltered from the herd, not to know what books appear,
+what
+newspapers are printed, never to know what goes on outside one's cell,
+among men&#8212;to complete the beneficent silence of this cloistered life,
+nourishing ourselves with good actions, refreshing ourselves with plain
+song, saturating ourselves with the inexhaustible joys of the liturgies.</p>
+<p>Then, who knows? By force of good will, and by ardent prayer,
+to succeed
+in coming to Him, in entertaining Him, feeling Him near us, perhaps
+almost satisfied with His creature. And he called up before him the
+joys
+of those abbeys in which Jesus abode. He remembered that astonishing
+convent of Unterlinden, near Colmar, where in the thirteenth century
+not
+only one or two nuns, but the whole convent, rose distractedly before
+Christ with cries of joy, nuns were lifted above the ground, others
+heard the songs of seraphim, and their emaciated bodies secreted balm;
+others became transparent or were crowned with stars; all these
+phenomena of the contemplative life were visible in that cloister, a
+high school of Mysticism.</p>
+<p>Thus wrapped in thought, he found himself at his own door,
+without
+remembering the road he had taken, and as soon as he was in his room,
+his whole soul dilated and burst forth. He desired to thank, to call
+for mercy, to appeal to someone, he knew not whom, to complain of he
+knew not what. All at once the need of pouring himself forth, of going
+out of himself, took shape, and he fell on his knees saying to Our Lady,</p>
+<p>"Have pity on me, and hear me; I would rather anything than
+continue
+this shaken existence, these idle stages without an aim. Pardon me,
+Holy
+Virgin, unclean as I am, for I have no courage for the battle. Ah,
+wouldest thou grant my prayer! I know well that I am over bold in
+daring
+to ask, since I am not even resolved to turn out my soul, to empty it
+like a bucket of filth, to strike it on the bottom, that the lees may
+trickle out and the scales fall off, but ... but ... thou knowest I am
+so weak, so little sure of myself, that in truth I shrink.</p>
+<p>"Oh, all the same I would desire to flee away, a thousand
+miles from
+Paris, I know not where, into a cloister. My God! yet this is very
+madness that I speak, for I could not stay two days in a convent; nor
+indeed would they take me in."</p>
+<p>Then he thought,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Though this once I am less dry, less unclean than is my wont,
+I can
+find nothing to say to Our Lady but insanities and follies, when it
+would be so simple to ask her pardon, to beg her to have pity on my
+desolate life, to aid me to resist the demands of my vices, not to pay
+as I do the royalties on my nerves, the tax on my senses.</p>
+<p>"All the same," he said, rising, "enough of this, I will at
+least do
+what little I can; without more delay I will go to the abbé to-morrow.
+I
+will explain the struggle of my soul, and we will see what happens
+afterwards."</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER
+V.</h2>
+<p>He was really comforted when the servant said that Monsieur
+l'Abbé was
+at home. He entered a little drawing-room, and waited till the priest,
+whom he heard speaking to someone in the next chamber, was alone.</p>
+<p>He looked at the little room, and marked that nothing was
+changed since
+his last visit. It was still furnished with a velvet sofa, of which the
+red, once crimson, had become the faded rose colour of raspberry jam on
+bread. There were also two tall arm-chairs on either side of the
+chimney, which was ornamented by an Empire clock, and some china vases
+filled with sand, in which were stuck some dry stalks of reed. In a
+corner against the wall, under an old wooden crucifix, was a prie-dieu,
+marked by the knees, an oval table in the centre, some sacred
+engravings
+on the walls; and that was all.</p>
+<p>"It is like an hotel, or an old maid's lodging," thought
+Durtal. The
+commonness of the furniture, the curtains in faded damask, the panels
+hung with a paper covered with bouquets of poppies and field-flowers in
+false colours, were like lodgings by the month, but certain details,
+above all the scrupulous cleanliness of the room, the worked cushions
+on
+the sofa, the grass mats under the chairs, an hortensia like a painted
+cauliflower placed in a flower-pot covered with lace, looked on the
+other hand like the futile and icy room of a devout woman.</p>
+<p>"Nothing was wanting but a cage of canaries, photographs in
+plush
+frames, shell-work and crochet mats."</p>
+<p>Durtal had got so far in his reflections when the abbé came in
+with
+extended hand, gently finding fault with his long absence.</p>
+<p>Durtal made what excuses he could, unusual occupations, long
+weariness.</p>
+<p>"And our Blessed Lidwine, how do you get on with her?"</p>
+<p>"Ah, I have not even begun her life; I am not in a state of
+mind which
+allows me to engage in it."</p>
+<p>Durtal's accent of discouragement surprised the priest.</p>
+<p>"Come, what is the matter? Can I be of any use to you?"</p>
+<p>"I do not know, Monsieur l'Abbé. I am almost ashamed to talk
+to you
+about such troubles," and suddenly he burst out, telling his sorrows in
+any chance words, declaring the unreality of his conversion, his
+struggles with the flesh, his human respect, his neglect of religious
+practices, his aversion from the rites demanded of him, in fact from
+all
+yokes.</p>
+<p>The abbé listened without moving, his chin on his hand.</p>
+<p>"You are more than forty," he said, when Durtal was silent;
+"you have
+passed the age when without any impulse from thought, the awakening of
+the flesh excites temptations, you are now in that period when indecent
+thoughts first present themselves to the imagination, before the senses
+are agitated. We have then to fight less against your sleeping body
+than
+your mind, which stimulates and vexes it. On the other hand, you have
+arrears and prizes of affection to put out, you have no wife or
+children
+to receive them, so that your affections being driven back by celibacy,
+you will end by taking them there where at first they should have been
+placed; you try to appease your soul's hunger in chapels, and as you
+hesitate, as you have not the courage to come to a decision, to break
+once for all with your vices, you have arrived at this strange
+compromise; to reserve your tender feeling for the church and the
+manifestations of that feeling for women. That, if I do not mistake, is
+your correct balance-sheet. But, good heavens, you have not too much to
+complain of, for do you not see that the important thing is to care for
+woman only with your bodily senses? When Heaven has given you grace to
+be no longer taken captive by thought, all may be arranged with a
+little
+effort of will."</p>
+<p>"This is an indulgent priest," thought Durtal.</p>
+<p>"But," continued the abbé, "you cannot always sit between two
+stools,
+the moment will come when you must stick to the one, and push the other
+away."</p>
+<p>And looking at Durtal, who looked down without answering,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Do you pray? I do not ask if you say your morning prayers,
+for not all
+those, who end by entering on the divine way, after wandering for years
+where chance might take them, call on the Lord so soon as they awake.
+At break of day the soul thinks itself well, thinks itself firmer, and
+at once takes occasion of this fleeting energy to forget God. It is
+with
+the soul as with the body when it is sick. When night comes our
+sensations are stronger, pain which was quieted awakes, the fever which
+slept blazes up again, filth revives and wounds bleed anew, and then it
+thinks of the divine Miracle-worker, it thinks of Christ. Do you pray
+in
+the evening?"</p>
+<p>"Sometimes&#8212;and yet it is very difficult; the afternoon is
+tolerable,
+but you say truly when the daylight goes, evils spring up. A whole
+cavalcade of obscene ideas then pass through my brain; how can any one
+be recollected at such moments?"</p>
+<p>"If you do not feel able to resist in the street or at home,
+why do you
+not take refuge in the churches?"</p>
+<p>"But they are closed when one has most need of them; the
+clergy put
+Jesus to bed at nightfall."</p>
+<p>"I know it, but if most churches are closed, there are a few
+which
+remain partly open very late. Ah, St. Sulpice is among the number, and
+there is one which remains open every evening, and where those who
+visit
+it are always sure of prayers and Benediction: Notre Dame des
+Victoires,
+I think you know it."</p>
+<p>"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbé. It is ugly enough to cause tears, it is
+pretentious, it is in bad taste, and the singers churn up a margarine
+of
+rancid tones. I do not go there then as I go to St. Severin and St.
+Sulpice, to admire there the art of the old 'Praisers of God,' to
+listen, even if they are incorrectly given, to the broad, familiar
+melodies of plain chant. Notre Dame des Victoires is worthless from the
+ĉsthetic point of view, and yet I go there from time to time, because
+alone in Paris it has the irresistible attraction of true piety, it
+alone preserves intact the lost soul of the Time. At whatever hour one
+goes there people are praying there, prostrate in absolute silence; it
+is full as soon as it is open, and full at its closing, there is a
+constant coming and going of pilgrims from all parts of Paris, arriving
+from the depths of the provinces, and it seems that each one, by the
+prayers that he brings, adds fuel to the immense brazier of Faith whose
+flames break out again under the smoky arches like the thousands of
+tapers which constantly burn, and are renewed from morning till
+evening,
+before Our Lady.</p>
+<p>"Well, I who seek the most deserted corners and the darkest
+places in
+the chapels, I who hate mobs, mix almost willingly with those I find
+there; because there everyone is isolated, no one is concerned with his
+neighbour, you do not see the human bodies which throng you, but you
+feel the breath of souls around. However refractory, however damp you
+may be, you end by taking fire at this contact, and are astonished to
+find yourself all at once less vile; it seems to me that the prayers
+which elsewhere when they leave my lips fall back to the ground
+exhausted and chilled, spring upwards in that place, are borne on by
+others, grow warm and soar and live.</p>
+<p>"At St. Severin I have indeed experienced the sensation of a
+help
+spreading from the pillars and running through the arches, but, as I
+think, the aid is less strong. Perhaps since the Middle Ages that
+church
+makes use of, but cannot renew the celestial effluvia with which it is
+charged; while at Notre Dame the help which springs up from the very
+pavement is for ever vivified by the uninterrupted presence of an
+ardent
+crowd. In the one it is the impregnate stone, the church itself which
+brings consolation, in the other it is above all things the fervour of
+the crowds which fill it.</p>
+<p>"And then I have the strange impression that the Virgin,
+attracted and
+retained by so great faith, only spends a little while in other
+churches, goes there as a visitor, but has made her home, and really
+resides in Notre Dame."</p>
+<p>The abbé smiled.</p>
+<p>"Come, I see that you know and love it; and yet the church is
+not on our
+left bank, beyond which, you said to me one day, there is no sanctuary
+worth having."</p>
+<p>"Yes, and I am surprised at it, especially as it is placed in
+a
+thoroughly commercial quarter, two paces from the Exchange, whose
+ignoble shouts can be heard in it."</p>
+<p>"It was itself an Exchange," said the abbé.</p>
+<p>"In what way?"</p>
+<p>"After having been baptized by the monks, and having served as
+a chapel
+for the discalced Augustinians, it was horribly desecrated in the
+Revolution, and the Exchange was set up within its walls."</p>
+<p>"I was not aware of that detail," said Durtal.</p>
+<p>"But," continued the abbé, "it was with it, as with those holy
+women,
+who, if we believe their biographers, recovered by a life of prayer the
+virginity they had formerly lost. Our Lady washed it from its
+violation,
+and though it is comparatively modern, it is at the present day
+saturated with emanations, infused by effluences of angels, penetrated
+with divine drugs, it is for sick souls what certain thermal springs
+are
+for the body. People keep their season there, make their novenas, and
+obtain their cure.</p>
+<p>"Now to come back to our point; I tell you you will do wisely,
+if on
+your bad evenings you will attend Benediction in that church. I shall
+be
+surprised if you do not come out cleansed and at peace."</p>
+<p>"If he have only that to offer me, it is little enough,"
+thought Durtal.
+And after a disappointed silence he rejoined,</p>
+<p>"But, Monsieur l'Abbé, even were I to visit that sanctuary,
+and follow
+the offices in other churches, when temptations assail me, even were I
+to confess and draw near the Sacraments, how would that advantage me? I
+should meet as I came out the woman whose very sight inflames my
+senses,
+and it would be with me as after my leaving St. Severin all unnerved;
+the very feeling of tenderness which I had in the chapel would destroy
+me, and I should fall back into sin."</p>
+<p>"What do you know about it?" and the priest suddenly rose, and
+took long
+strides through the room.</p>
+<p>"You have no right to speak thus, for the virtue of the
+Sacrament is
+formal, the man who has communicated is no longer alone. He is armed
+against others and defended against himself," and crossing his arms
+before Durtal he exclaimed,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"To lose one's soul for the pleasure of momentary
+gratification! what
+madness. And since the time of your conversion, does not that disgust
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I am disgusted with myself, but only after my swinish
+desires are
+satisfied. If only I could gain true repentance."</p>
+<p>"Rest assured," said the abbé, who sat down again, "you will
+find it."</p>
+<p>And, seeing that Durtal shook his head,</p>
+<p>"Remember what Saint Teresa said: 'One trouble of those who
+are
+beginning is, that they cannot recognize whether they have true
+repentance for their faults; but they have it, and the proof is their
+sincere resolution to serve God.' Think of that sentence, for it
+applies
+to you; that repugnance to your sins which wearies you is witness to
+your regret, and you have a desire to serve the Lord, since you are in
+fact struggling to go to Him."</p>
+<p>There was a moment of silence.</p>
+<p>"Well, then, Monsieur l'Abbé, what is your advice?"</p>
+<p>"I advise you to pray in your own house, in church,
+everywhere, as much
+as you can. I do not prescribe any religious remedy, I simply invite
+you
+to profit by some precepts of pious hygiene, afterwards we will see."</p>
+<p>Durtal remained undecided, discontented, like those sick
+persons who
+find fault with doctors, who, to satisfy them, prescribe only
+colourless
+drugs.</p>
+<p>The priest laughed.</p>
+<p>"Confess," he said, looking him in the face, "confess that you
+are
+saying to yourself, 'It was not worth while to put myself out, for I am
+no further advanced, this good fellow, the priest, practises expectant
+medicine; instead of cutting short my crises with energetic remedies,
+he
+palters, advises me to go to bed early, not to catch cold&#8212;'"</p>
+<p>"Oh, Monsieur l'Abbé," protested Durtal.</p>
+<p>"Yet I do not wish to treat you like a child, or talk to you
+like a
+woman; now attend to me!</p>
+<p>"The way in which your conversion has worked leaves me in no
+doubt
+whatever. There has been what Mysticism calls the divine touch,
+only&#8212;note this&#8212;God has dispensed with human intervention, even with
+the interference of a priest, to bring you back into the road you have
+left for more than twenty years.</p>
+<p>"Now we cannot reasonably suppose that the Lord has acted
+lightly, and
+that He will now leave His work unaccomplished. He will carry it
+through
+if you put no obstacle in His way.</p>
+<p>"In fact you are at this moment like a block in His hands;
+what will He
+do with it? I do not know, but since He has kept to Himself the conduct
+of your soul, let Him act; be patient, He will explain His action;
+trust
+in Him, He will help you; be content to protest with the Psalmist:
+'Doce
+me facere voluntatem tuam, quia Deus meus es tu.'</p>
+<p>"I tell you again I believe in the preventive virtue, the
+formal power
+of the Sacraments. I quite understand the system of Père Milleriot, who
+obliged those persons to communicate whom he thought would afterwards
+fall again into sin. For their only penance he obliged them to
+communicate again and again, and he ended by purifying them with the
+Sacred Species, taken in large doses. It is a doctrine at once
+realistic
+and exalted.</p>
+<p>"But reassure yourself," continued the abbé, looking at
+Durtal, who
+seemed wearied, "I do not intend to experiment on you in this way; on
+the contrary, my advice is that in the state of ignorance in which we
+are of God's will, you abstain from the Sacraments.</p>
+<p>"For you should desire them, and it should come from you
+rather than
+from Him; be sure that sooner or later you will thirst for Penance,
+hunger for the Eucharist. Well, when unable to restrain yourself
+longer,
+you ask for pardon and entreat to be allowed to approach the Holy
+Table,
+we shall see, we will ask Him what way He will choose to take, in order
+to save you."</p>
+<p>"But there are not, I presume, several ways of confessing and
+communicating?"</p>
+<p>"Certainly not, that is just what I meant to say ... but ..."</p>
+<p>And the priest hesitated, at a loss for words.</p>
+<p>"It is quite certain," he began again, "that art has been the
+principal
+means which the Saviour has used to make you absorb the Faith. He has
+taken you on your weak side&#8212;or strong side, if you like that better. He
+has infused into your nature the chief mystical works; he has persuaded
+and converted you, less by the way of reason than the way of the
+senses;
+and indeed those are the special conditions you have to take into
+account.</p>
+<p>"On the other hand your soul is not humble and simple, you are
+a sort of
+'sensitive,' whom the least imprudence, the least stupidity of a
+confessor would at once repel.</p>
+<p>"Therefore that you may not be at the mercy of a troublesome
+impression,
+certain precautions must be taken. In the state of weakness and
+feebleness in which you are, a disagreeable face, an unlucky word,
+antipathetic surroundings, a mere nothing would be enough to rout
+you&#8212;is it not so?"</p>
+<p>"Alas!" sighed Durtal, "I am obliged to answer that you are
+right; but,
+Monsieur l'Abbé, I do not think I shall have to fear such disillusions
+if when the moment you predict has come you will allow me to make my
+confession to you."</p>
+<p>The priest was silent for a while; then said,</p>
+<p>"No doubt, since I have met you, I may probably be useful to
+you, but I
+have an idea that my part will be confined to pointing out the road to
+you; I shall be a connecting link, and nothing more, you will end as
+you
+have begun, without help, alone." The abbé remained in thought, then
+shook his head, and went on: "Let us leave the subject, however, for we
+cannot anticipate the designs of God; to sum up, try to stifle in
+prayer
+your attacks of the flesh, it is a less matter not to be overcome at
+the
+moment, than to direct all your efforts not to be so."</p>
+<p>Then the priest added gently to rouse the spirits of Durtal,
+whom he saw
+to be depressed,</p>
+<p>"If you fall do not despair, and throw the handle after the
+hatchet. Say
+to yourself, that, after all Lust is not the most unpardonable of
+faults, that it is one of two sins for which the human being pays cash,
+and which are consequently expiated in part at least before death. Say
+to yourself that wantonness and avarice refuse all credit and will not
+wait; and in fact, whoever unlawfully commits a fleshly act is almost
+always punished in his lifetime. For some there are bastards to provide
+for, sickly wives, low connections, broken careers, abominable
+deceptions on the part of those they have loved. On whichever side we
+turn when women are concerned we have to suffer, for she is the most
+powerful instrument of sorrow which God has given to man.</p>
+<p>"It is the same with the passion for gain. Every being who
+allows
+himself to be overcome by that hateful sin, pays for it as a rule
+before
+his death. Look at the Panama business. Cooks, housekeepers, small
+proprietors who till then had lived in peace, seeking no inordinate
+gains, no illicit profit, threw themselves like madmen into that
+business. They had one only thought, to gain money; the chastisement of
+their cupidity was, as you know, sudden."</p>
+<p>"Yes," said Durtal, laughing, "the de Lesseps were the agents
+of
+providence, when they stole the savings of fools, who had moreover got
+them probably by thieving."</p>
+<p>"In a word," said the abbé, "I repeat my last advice: do not
+be at all
+discouraged if you sink. Do not despise yourself too much; have the
+courage to enter a church afterwards; for the devil catches you by
+cowardice, the false shame, the false humility he suggests, nourish,
+maintain, solidify your wantonness in some measure.</p>
+<p>"Well! no good-bye; come and see me soon again."</p>
+<p>Durtal found himself in the street a little confused. "It is
+evident,"
+he murmured, as he stalked along, "that the Abbé Gévresin is a clever
+spiritual watchmaker. He has dexterously taken to pieces the movement
+of
+my passions, and made the hours of idleness and weariness strike, but,
+after all, his advice comes only to this: stew in your own juice and
+wait.</p>
+<p>"Indeed he is right; if I had come to the point I should not
+have gone
+to him to chatter, but really to confess. What is strange is that he
+does not at all seem to think he will have to put me through the
+wash-tub; and to whom does he mean me to go&#8212;to the first comer who will
+wind about me his spool of commonplaces, and stroke me with his big
+hands without seeing clearly?</p>
+<p>"Well, well ... what is the time?" He looked at his watch.
+"Six o'clock,
+and I do not care to go home. What shall I do till dinner?"</p>
+<p>He was near St. Sulpice. He went in and sat down, to clear his
+thoughts
+a little, taking a place in the Chapel of Our Lady, which at that hour
+was almost empty.</p>
+<p>He felt no wish to pray, and rested there, looking at the
+great arch of
+marble and gold, like a scene in a theatre, where the Virgin, the only
+figure in the light, advances towards the faithful, as from a decorated
+grotto, on plaster clouds.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile two Little Sisters of the Poor came and knelt not
+far from
+him, and meditated, their heads between their hands.</p>
+<p>He thought as he looked at them,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Those souls are to be envied who can thus be abstracted in
+prayer. How
+do they manage it? For, in fact, it is not easy, if one thinks of the
+sorrows of the world, to praise the vaunted mercy of God. It is all
+very
+fine to believe that He exists, to be certain that He is good; in fact,
+we do not know Him&#8212;we are ignorant of Him. He is, and, in fact, He can
+only be, immanent, permanent, and inaccessible. He is we know not what,
+and at most we know what He is not. Try to imagine Him, and the senses
+fail, for He is above, about, and in each one of us. He is three and He
+is one; He is each and He is all; He is without beginning, and He will
+be without end; He is above all and for ever incomprehensible. If we
+try
+to picture Him to ourselves and give Him a human wrappage, we come back
+to the simple conception of the early times, we represent Him under the
+features of an ancestor. Some old Italian model, some old Father
+Tourgéneff, with a long beard, and we cannot but smile, so childish is
+the likeness of God the Father.</p>
+<p>"He is, in fact, so absolutely above the imagination and the
+senses,
+that He comes only nominally into prayer, and the impulses of humanity
+ascend especially to the Son, Who only can be addressed, because He
+became man, and is to us somewhat of an elder brother, because, having
+wept in human form, we think He will hear us more readily, and be more
+compassionate to our sorrows.</p>
+<p>"As to the third Person, He is even more disconcerting than
+the first.
+He is especially the unknowable. How can we imagine this God formless
+and bodiless, this Substance equal to the two others, who, as it were,
+breathe Him forth? We think of Him as a brightness, a fluid, a breath;
+we cannot even lend to Him as to the Father the face of a man, since on
+the two occasions that He took to Himself a body, He showed Himself
+under the likenesses of a dove and of tongues of fire, and these two
+different aspects do not help to a suggestion of the new appearance He
+might assume.</p>
+<p>"Certainly the Trinity is terrible, and makes the brain reel.
+Ruysbröck
+has moreover said admirably, 'Let those who would know and study what
+God is, know that it is forbidden; they will go mad.'</p>
+<p>"So," he continued, looking at the two Little Sisters, who
+were now
+telling their beads, "these good women are right not to try to
+understand, and to confine themselves to praying with all their heart
+to
+the Mother and the Son.</p>
+<p>"Moreover, in all the lives of the saints which they have
+read, they
+have made certain that Jesus and Mary always appeared to the elect to
+console and strengthen them.</p>
+<p>"In fact, how stupid I am. To pray to the Son is to pray to
+the two
+others, for in praying to one among them I pray at the same time to the
+three, since the three make but one. And the Substances are, however,
+special, because if the divine Essence is one and simple, it is so in
+the threefold distinction of the Persons; but, again, what is the use
+of
+fathoming the Impenetrable?</p>
+<p>"Yet," he continued, remembering the interview he had just had
+with the
+priest, "how will all this end? If the abbé be right, I no longer
+belong to myself; I am about to enter the unknown, which frightens me.
+If only the sound of my vices consents to be silent, but I feel that
+they rise furiously within me. Ah, that Florence"&#8212;and he thought of a
+woman to whose vagaries he was riveted&#8212;"continues to walk about in my
+brain. I see her behind the lowered curtain of my eyes, and when I
+think
+of her I am a terrible coward."</p>
+<p>He endeavoured once more to put her away, but his will was
+overcome at
+the sight of her.</p>
+<p>He hated, despised, and even cursed her, but the madness of
+his
+illusions excited him; he left her disgusted with her and with himself;
+he swore he would never see her again, but did not keep his resolve.</p>
+<p>He saw her now in vision extend her hand to him.</p>
+<p>He recoiled, struggling to free himself; but his dream
+continued
+mingling her with the form of one of the sisters whose gentle profile
+he
+saw.</p>
+<p>Suddenly he started, returned to the real world, and saw that
+he was at
+St. Sulpice, in the chapel. "It is disgusting that I should come here
+to
+soil the church with my horrible dreams; I had better go."</p>
+<p>He went out in confusion, thinking, "Perhaps if I visit
+Florence once
+again, I may perhaps put an end to this haunting sense of her presence,
+seeing and knowing the reality."</p>
+<p>And he was obliged to answer himself that he was becoming
+idiotic, for
+he knew by experience that past desire grows in proportion as it is
+nourished. "No, the abbé was right; I have to become and to remain
+penitent. But how? Pray? How can I pray, when evil imaginations pursue
+me even in church? Evil dreams followed me to La Glacière; here they
+appear again, and smite me to the ground. How can I defend myself? for
+indeed it is frightful to be thus alone, to know nothing and have no
+proof, to feel the prayers which one tears out of oneself fall into the
+silence and the void without a gesture to answer, without a word of
+encouragement, without a sign. I do not even know if He be there, and
+if
+He listens. The abbé tells me to wait an indication, an order from on
+high; but, alas! they come to me from below."</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER
+VI.</h2>
+<p>Many months passed. Durtal continued his alternation of wanton
+and pious
+ideas. Without power to resist, he saw himself slipping. "All this is
+far from clear," he cried, one day, in a rage, when, less apathetic
+than
+usual, he forced himself to take stock. "Now, Monsieur l'Abbé, what
+does
+this mean? Whenever my sensual obsessions are weaker, so also are my
+religious impressions."</p>
+<p>"That means," said the priest, "that your adversary is holding
+out to
+you the most treacherous of his baits. He seeks to persuade you that
+you
+will never attain to anything unless you will give yourself up to the
+most repugnant excesses. He tries to convince you that satiety and
+disgust of these acts alone will bring you back to God; he incites you
+to commit them that they may, so to speak, bring about your
+deliverance;
+he leads you into sin under pretext of delivering you from it. Have a
+little energy, despise these sophistries and resist him."</p>
+<p>He went to see the Abbé Gévresin every week. He liked the
+patient
+discretion of the old priest, who let him talk when he was in a
+confidential humour, listened to him carefully, manifested no surprise
+at his frequent temptations and his falls. Only the abbé always
+returned
+to his first advice, insisted on regular prayer, and that Durtal should
+each day, if possible, visit a church. He also now said, "The hour is
+important for the success of these practices. If you wish that the
+chapels should be favourable to you, get up in time to be present at
+daybreak at the first mass, the servants' mass, and also be very often
+in the sanctuaries at nightfall."</p>
+<p>The priest had evidently formed a plan; Durtal did not yet
+wholly
+understand it, but he was bound to admit that this discipline of
+temporizing, this constant call to thought always directed to God, by
+his daily visits to the churches, acted upon him at last, and little by
+little softened his soul. One fact proved it: that he who for so long a
+time had been unable to meditate in the morning, now prayed as soon as
+he awoke. Even in the afternoon he found himself on some days seized
+with the need of speaking humbly with God, with an irresistible desire
+to ask His pardon and implore His help.</p>
+<p>It seemed then that the Lord knocked at his door with gentle
+touches,
+wishing so to recall his attention, and draw him to Him; but when,
+softened and troubled, Durtal would enter into himself to seek God, he
+wandered vaguely, not knowing what he said, and thinking of other
+things
+while speaking to Him.</p>
+<p>He complained of these wanderings and distractions to the
+priest, who
+answered,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"You are on the threshold of the probationary life; you cannot
+yet
+experience the sweet and familiar friendship of prayer. Do not sadden
+yourself because you cannot close behind you the gate of your senses.
+Watch and wait; pray badly if you can do nothing else, but pray all the
+same.</p>
+<p>"Be very sure too that every one has experienced the troubles
+which
+distress you; above all, believe that we do not walk blindfold, that
+Mysticism is an absolutely exact science. It can foretell the greater
+part of the phenomena which occur in that soul which the Lord intends
+for a perfect life; it follows also spiritual operations with the same
+clearness as physiology observes the different states of the body. For
+ages and ages it has disclosed the progress of grace and its effects,
+now impetuous and now slow; it has even pointed out the modifications
+of
+material organs which are transformed when the soul entirely loses
+itself in God.</p>
+<p>"Saint Denys the Areopagite, Saint Bonaventure, Hugh and
+Richard of
+Saint Victor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bernard, Ruysbröck, Angela of
+Foligno, the two Eckharts, Tauler, Suso, Denys the Carthusian, Saint
+Hildegarde, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint
+Magdalen of Pazzi, Saint Gertrude, and others have set forth in a
+masterly way the principles and theories of Mysticism, and it has found
+at last an admirable psychologist to sum up its rules and their
+exceptions; a Saint who has verified in her own person the supernatural
+phases she has described&#8212;a woman whose lucidity was more than
+human&#8212;Saint Teresa. You have read her life, and her 'Castles of the
+Soul'!"</p>
+<p>Durtal nodded assent.</p>
+<p>"Then you have your information; you ought to know that before
+reaching
+the shores of Blessedness, before arriving at the fifth dwelling of the
+interior castle, at that prayer of union wherein the soul is awakened
+in
+regard to God, and completely asleep to all things of earth and to
+herself, she must pass through lamentable states of dryness, and the
+most painful strainings. Take heart therefore; say to yourself that
+this
+dryness should be a source of humility, and not a cause of disquietude;
+do, in fact, as Saint Teresa would have you: carry your cross, and not
+drag it after you."</p>
+<p>"That magnificent and terrible Saint frightens me," sighed
+Durtal. "I
+have read her works, and, do you know, she gives me the idea of a
+stainless lily, but a metallic lily, forged of wrought iron; you will
+admit that those who suffer have scant consolations to expect from her."</p>
+<p>"Yes; in the sense that she does not think of the creature
+except in the
+way of Mysticism. She supposes the fields already ploughed, the soul
+already freed from its more vehement temptations, and sheltered from
+crises; her starting-point is as yet too high and too distant for you,
+for, in fact, she is addressing nuns, women of the cloister, beings who
+live apart from the world, and who are consequently already advanced on
+those ascetic ways wherein God is leading them.</p>
+<p>"But make an effort in the spirit to free yourself from this
+mud, cast
+away for a few moments the memory of your imperfections and your
+troubles, and follow her. See then how experienced she is in the domain
+of the supernatural, how, in spite of her repetitions and tediousness,
+she explains wisely and clearly the mechanism of the soul unfolding
+when
+God touches it. In subjects where words fail and phrases crumble away,
+she succeeds in making herself understood, in showing, making felt,
+almost making visible, the inconceivable sight of God buried in the
+soul, and taking His pleasure there.</p>
+<p>"And she goes still further into the mystery, even to the end;
+bounds
+with a final spring to the very gates of heaven, but then she faints on
+adoration, and being unable to express herself further, she soars,
+describing circles like a frightened bird, wandering beyond herself, in
+cries of love."</p>
+<p>"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbé, I recognize that Saint Teresa has
+explored deeper
+than any other the unknown regions of the soul; she is in some measure
+its geographer, has drawn the map of its poles, marked the latitudes of
+contemplation, the interior lands of the human sky. Other Saints have
+explored them before her, but they have not left us so methodical nor
+so
+exact a topography.</p>
+<p>"But in spite of this I prefer those mystical writers who have
+less
+self-analysis, and discuss less, who always do throughout their works
+what Saint Teresa did at the end of hers&#8212;that is, who are all on fire
+from the first page to the last, and are consumed and lost at the feet
+of Christ. Ruysbröck is among these. The little volume which Hello has
+translated is a very furnace; and, again, to quote a woman, take Saint
+Angela of Foligno, not so much in the book of her visions which may not
+be always effectual, as in the wonderful life which she dictated to
+Brother Armand, her confessor. She too explains, and much earlier than
+Saint Teresa, the principles and effects of Mysticism; but if she is
+less profound, less clever in defining shades, on the other hand she is
+wonderfully effusive and tender. She caresses the soul; she is a
+Bacchante of divine love, a Mĉnad of purity. Christ loves her, holds
+long conversations with her; the words she has retained surpass all
+literature, and are manifestly the most beautiful ever written. This is
+no longer the rough Christ, the Spanish Christ who begins by trampling
+on His creature to make him more supple; He is the merciful Christ of
+the Gospels, the gentle Christ of Saint Francis, and I like the Christ
+of the Franciscans better than the Christ of the Carmelites."</p>
+<p>"What will you say, then," said the abbé, with a smile, "of
+St. John of
+the Cross? You compared Saint Teresa just now to a flower in wrought
+iron; he too is such, but he is the lily of tortures, the royal flower
+which the executioners were wont of old time to stamp on the heraldic
+flesh of convicts. Like red-hot iron, he is at the same time burning
+and
+sombre. As you turn over the pages, Saint Teresa now and then bends
+over
+and sorrows and compassionates us; he remains impenetrable, buried in
+his internal abyss, occupied, above all things, in describing the
+sufferings of the soul which, after having crucified its desires,
+passes
+through the 'Night obscure,' that is to say, through the renunciation
+of
+all which comes from the sensible and the created.</p>
+<p>"He wills that we should extinguish our imagination&#8212;so
+lethargize it
+that it can no longer form images&#8212;imprison our senses, annihilate our
+faculties. He wills that he who desires to unite himself to God should
+place himself under an exhausted receiver, and make a vacuum within, so
+that, if he choose, the Pilgrim should descend therein, and purify
+himself, tearing out the remains of sins, extirpating the last relics
+of
+vice.</p>
+<p>"Then the sufferings which the soul endures overpass the
+bounds of the
+possible, it lies lost in utter darkness, falls under discouragement
+and
+fatigue, believes itself for ever abandoned by Him to whom it cries,
+who
+now hides Himself and answers not again, happy still when in that
+agony,
+the pangs of the flesh are not added, and that abominable spirit which
+Isaias calls the spirit of confusion, and which is none other than the
+disease of scrupulousness pushed to its extreme.</p>
+<p>"Saint John makes you shudder when he cries out that this
+night of the
+soul is bitter and terrible, and that the being who suffers it is
+plunged alive into hell. But when the old man is purged out, when he is
+scraped at every seam, raked over every face, light springs out, and
+God
+appears. Then the soul casts itself like a child into His arms, and the
+incomprehensible fusion takes place.</p>
+<p>"You see Saint John penetrates more deeply than others into
+the depths
+of mystical initiation. He also, like Saint Teresa and Ruysbröck,
+treats
+of the spiritual marriage, of the influx of grace, and its gifts; but
+he
+first dared to describe minutely the dolorous phases which till then
+had
+been but hinted at with trembling.</p>
+<p>"Then if he is an admirable theologian, he is also a rigorous
+and
+clear-sighted saint. He has not those weaknesses which are natural to a
+woman; he does not lose himself in digressions, nor return continually
+on his own steps; he walks straight forward, but you often see him at
+the end of the road, blood-stained and terrible, with dry eyes."</p>
+<p>"But, but," said Durtal, "surely not all souls whom Christ
+will lead in
+the ways of mysticism are tried thus?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, almost always, more or less."</p>
+<p>"I will confess that I thought the spiritual life was less
+arid and less
+complex. I imagined that by leading a pure life, praying one's best,
+and
+communicating, one would attain without much trouble, not indeed to
+taste the infinite joys reserved for the saints, but at last to possess
+the Lord, and live, at least, near Him, at rest.</p>
+<p>"And I should be quite content with this middle class joy. The
+price
+paid in advance for the exaltation described by Saint John disconcerts
+me."</p>
+<p>The abbé smiled, but made no answer.</p>
+<p>"But do you know that if it be so," replied Durtal, "we are
+very far
+from the Catholicism that is taught us? It is so practical, so benign,
+so gentle, in comparison with Mysticism."</p>
+<p>"It is made for lukewarm souls&#8212;that is to say, for almost all
+the pious
+souls which are about us; it lives in a moderate atmosphere, without
+too
+great suffering or too much joy; it only can be assimilated by the
+masses, and the priests are right to present it thus, since otherwise
+the faithful would cease to understand it, or would take flight in
+alarm."</p>
+<p>"But if God judge that a moderate religion is amply
+sufficient&#8212;for the
+masses believe that he demands the most painful efforts on the part of
+those whom he deigns to initiate into the supremely adorable mysteries
+of His Person&#8212;it is necessary and just that he should mortify them
+before allowing them to taste the essential intoxication of union with
+Him."</p>
+<p>"In fact, the end of Mysticism is to render visible, sensible,
+almost
+palpable, the God who remains silent and hidden from all."</p>
+<p>"And to throw us into His deep, into the silent abyss of joy!
+But in
+order to speak correctly, we must forget the ordinary use of
+expressions
+which have been degraded. In order to describe this mysterious love, we
+are obliged to draw our comparisons from human acts, and to inflict on
+the Lord the shame of our words. We have to employ such terms as
+'union,' 'marriage,' 'wedding feast'; but it is impossible to speak of
+the inexpressible, and with the baseness of our language declare the
+ineffable immersion of the soul in God."</p>
+<p>"The fact is," murmured Durtal ... "but to return to Saint
+Teresa...."</p>
+<p>"She too," interrupted the abbé, "has treated of this 'Night
+obscure'
+which terrifies you; but she only speaks of it in a few lines. She
+calls
+it the soul's agony&#8212;a sadness so bitter that she strove in vain to
+depict it."</p>
+<p>"No doubt, but I prefer her to Saint John of the Cross, for
+she is not
+so discouraging as that inflexible saint. Admit that he belongs too
+much
+to the land of those large Christs who bleed in caverns."</p>
+<p>"Of what nationality then was Saint Teresa?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, I know she was a Spaniard, but so complex, so strange,
+that race
+seems obliterated in her, less clearly defined.</p>
+<p>"It is clear she was an admirable psychologist, but also how
+strange is
+in her the mixture of an ardent mystic and a cool woman of business.
+For, in fact, she has a double nature; she is a contemplative outside
+the world, and at the same time a statesman, a female Colbert of the
+cloister. In fact, never was woman so consummate a skilled artisan and
+so powerful an organizer. When we consider that, in spite of incredible
+difficulties, she founded thirty-two nunneries, that she put them all
+under obedience to a rule which is a model of wisdom, a rule which
+foresees and rectifies the most ignored mistakes of the heart, it is
+astonishing to hear her treated by strong-minded people as an
+hysterical
+madwoman."</p>
+<p>"One of the distinctive marks of the mystics," answered the
+abbé, with a
+smile, "is just their absolute balance, their entire common sense."</p>
+<p>These conversations cheered Durtal; they planted on him seeds
+of
+reflection which sprang up when he was alone; they encouraged him to
+trust to the advice of this priest, and follow his counsels. He found
+himself all the better for this conduct, in that his visits to the
+churches, his prayers and readings occupied his objectless life, and he
+was no longer wearied.</p>
+<p>"I have at least gained peaceable evenings and quiet nights,"
+he said to
+himself.</p>
+<p>He knew the soothing help of a pious evening.</p>
+<p>He visited St. Sulpice at those times when, under the dull
+gleam of the
+lamps, the pillars opened out and threw long panels of darkness on the
+ground. The chapels which remained open were in shade, and in the nave
+before the high altar a single cluster of lamps, above in the darkness,
+shone out like a luminous bunch of red roses.</p>
+<p>In the stillness no sounds were heard but the dull thud of a
+door, the
+creaking of a chair, the short paces of a woman, the hurried stride of
+a
+man.</p>
+<p>Durtal was almost isolated in the obscure chapel which he had
+chosen; he
+kept himself there so far from all, so far from the city whose full
+pulse was beating only two paces from him. He knelt down and remained
+still, he prepared to speak, and had nothing to say, felt himself
+carried away by an impulse, but no words came. He ended by falling into
+a vague languor, experiencing that indolent ease, that dim sense of
+comfort, which the body feels in a medicated bath.</p>
+<p>He fell a-dreaming of the lot of the women who were round
+about him here
+and there, in chairs. Ah! those poor little black shawls, those
+miserable pleated caps, those wretched tippets, those doleful seed
+rosaries they fingered in the shade.</p>
+<p>Some in mourning, sobbed still inconsolable; others,
+overwhelmed, bent
+their backs and hung their heads on one side; others prayed, their
+shoulders shaking, their head in their hands.</p>
+<p>The task of the day was over; those wearied of their life came
+to ask
+for mercy. Everywhere misfortune was kneeling, for the rich, the
+healthy, the happy hardly pray; all around in the church were women,
+widowed or old, without love, women deserted, women whose home was a
+torture, praying that existence might become more merciful, that the
+dissoluteness of their husbands might cease, the vices of their sons
+amend, the health of those they loved grow stronger.</p>
+<p>A lamentable perfume went up like incense to Our Lady from a
+very sheaf
+of woes.</p>
+<p>Few men came to this hidden meeting-place of trouble; still
+fewer young
+people, for these have not yet suffered enough; there were only a few
+old men, and a few sick who dragged themselves along by the backs of
+the
+chairs, and a little hunchback, whom Durtal saw coming there every
+evening, an outcast who could only be loved by Her who does not even
+see
+the body.</p>
+<p>A burning pity seized on Durtal at the sight of those unhappy
+ones who
+came to beg from Heaven a little of the love refused them by men; and
+he who could not pray on his own account ended by joining himself to
+their pleadings, and praying for them.</p>
+<p>So indifferent in the afternoon, the churches were truly
+persuasive,
+truly sweet, in the evening; they seemed to bestir themselves at
+nightfall, and to compassionate in their solitude the sufferings of
+those sick creatures whose complaints they heard.</p>
+<p>And their first mass in the morning, the mass of working women
+and
+servant maids was no less touching; there were there no bigots nor
+curious persons, but poor women who came to seek in communion strength
+to live their hours of onerous tasks and servile needs. They knew as
+they left the church that they were the living custodians of a God, of
+Him who was ever while on earth the Poor Man, who took pleasure only in
+souls who had scarce where to lay their head; they knew themselves His
+chosen, and did not doubt that when He entrusted to them under the form
+of bread the memorial of His suffering, He demanded of them in exchange
+that they should live in sorrow and humility. And what harm then could
+do to them the cares of a day spent in the salutary shame of base
+occupations?</p>
+<p>"I now understand," thought Durtal, "why the abbé made such a
+point of
+my seeing the churches early or late; those are, in fact, the only
+times
+in which the soul expands."</p>
+<p>But he was too idle to be often present at early mass; he was
+content to
+take his relaxation after dinner in the chapels. He came out with a
+feeling of peace, even if he had prayed badly or not prayed at all. On
+other evenings, on the contrary, he felt tired of solitude, tired of
+silence, tired of darkness, and then he abandoned St. Sulpice and went
+to Notre Dame des Victoires.</p>
+<p>In this well-lighted sanctuary there was no longer that
+depression, that
+despair of poor wretches who dragged themselves to the nearest church
+and sat down in the shade. The pilgrims to Notre Dame des Victoires
+brought a surer confidence, and that faith softened their sorrows,
+whose
+bitterness was dissipated in the explosions of hope, the stammering
+adoration, which spouted up all around. There were two currents in that
+refuge, that of people who asked for favours, and that of those who,
+having gained them, were profuse in thankfulness and in acts of
+gratitude. Therefore, that church had its especial physiognomy, more
+joyous than sad, less melancholy, more ardent under all circumstances
+than that of other churches.</p>
+<p>It had, moreover, the peculiarity of being much frequented by
+men, but
+less by hypocrites, who will not look you in the face, or with upturned
+eyes, than by men of all classes whose features were not degraded by
+false piety. There alone were to be seen clear expressions and clean
+faces; there, above all, was not that horrible grimace of the working
+man of the Catholic clubs&#8212;that hideous creature in a blouse, whose
+breath belies the ill-defined unction of his features.</p>
+<p>In that church, covered with <i>ex votos</i>,
+plastered even above the arches
+with inscriptions on marble celebrating the joy for prayers granted and
+benefits received, before that altar of Our Lady where hundreds of
+tapers pierced the air blue with incense with the gilded blades of
+their
+lances, there were public prayers every evening at eight. A priest in
+the pulpit said the rosary, sometimes the Litany of Our Lady was sung
+to
+a singular air, a sort of musical cento, but it was impossible to say
+whence it was constructed, very rhythmical, and continually changing
+its
+tone, now fast, now slow, bringing with it, for a moment, a vague
+recollection of seventeenth-century airs, then turning sharply at a
+tangent, to a barrel-organ tune, a modern, almost vulgar, melody.</p>
+<p>Yet, after all, there was something taking in this singular
+confusion of
+sounds after the "Kyrie eleison" and the opening invocations. The
+Virgin
+came upon the scene to a dance measure like a ballet girl; but when
+certain of her attributes were paraded, and certain of her symbolical
+names declared, the music became singularly respectful; it became
+lower,
+halting and solemn, thrice repeating, on the same motive, some of her
+attributes, the "Refugium Peccatorum" among others; then it went on
+again, and began her graces again with a skip.</p>
+<p>When by chance there was no sermon, the Benediction took place
+immediately afterwards.</p>
+<p>Then with raspings of the choir, a bass with a cold, and two
+boys who
+snivelled began their liturgical chants: "Inviolata," that languishing
+and plaintive Sequence, with its clear and drawling tune so weak, so
+frail, that it would seem as if it should only be sung by voices in a
+hospital; then the "Parce Domine," that antiphon so suppliant and so
+sad; lastly, that scrap, detached from the "Panga Lingua," the "Tantum
+ergo," humble and thoughtful, attentive and slow.</p>
+<p>When the organ sounded out the first chords, and that plain
+chant melody
+began, the choir had only to cross their arms and hold their tongues.
+As
+tapers which are lighted by threads of fulminate attached one to the
+other, the faithful caught fire, and, accompanied by the organs, struck
+up for themselves the humble and glorious strains. They were then
+kneeling on the chairs, prostrate on the pavement, and when, after the
+exchange of antiphons and responses, after the "oremus," the priest
+ascended to the altar, his shoulders and hands enfolded in the white
+silk scarf, to take the monstrance, then, at the shrill and hurried
+sounds of the bells, a wind passed which at once bent every head like
+the mowing of grass.</p>
+<p>In these groups of souls on fire there was a fulness of
+devotion, a
+complete and absolute silence, till the bells again rang out, and
+invited human life which had been interrupted to wrap itself in a great
+sign of the Cross and resume its course.</p>
+<p>The "Laudate" was not ended when Durtal left the church,
+before the
+crowd began to move.</p>
+<p>"Verily," he said, as he entered his lodgings, "the fervour of
+that
+congregation, who do not come as in other churches from the districts,
+but are pilgrims from everywhere and one knows not where, is out of
+tune
+with the blackguardism of this foolish age."</p>
+<p>Then at Notre Dame at least one hears curious singing, and he
+bethought
+him of those strange litanies which he had heard nowhere else, and yet
+he had experienced all kinds, in churches. At St. Sulpice, for example,
+it was recited to two tunes. When the choir sang it was set to a plain
+chant melody, bellowed by the gong of a bass to which the sharp fife of
+the boys made answer; but during Rosary month, on every day except
+Thursday the task of singing it was entrusted to young ladies; then in
+the evening round a wheezy old harmonium, a troup of young and old
+geese, made Our Lady run round on her litanies as on hobby horses to
+the
+music of a fair.</p>
+<p>In other churches, at St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, where
+they were
+also dropped out by women, the litanies were sprinkled with powder and
+perfumed by bergamot and ambergris. They were, in fact, adapted to a
+minuet tune, and therefore did not disagree with the operatic
+architecture of the church, where they presented a Virgin walking with
+mincing steps, pinching her petticoat with two fingers, bending in
+beautiful curtseys, and recovering herself with a fine bow. This has
+evidently nothing to do with church music, but it was none the less
+disagreeable to hear. It would have made the whole performance complete
+if the harpsichord had been substituted for the organ.</p>
+<p>Far more interesting than this lay quavering was the plain
+chant, given
+more or less badly, as it was moreover given, but yet given, when there
+was no special ceremony at Notre Dame.</p>
+<p>It was not arranged there as at St. Sulpice and the other
+churches where
+the "Tantum ergo" is almost always dressed up in foolish flourishes,
+tunes for military ceremonials or public dinners.</p>
+<p>The Church has not allowed the actual text of Saint Thomas
+Aquinas to be
+altered, but she has let any and every choirmaster suppress the plain
+chant in which it has been wrapped from its birth, which has penetrated
+to its marrow, has clung to each of its phrases, and become with it one
+body and one soul.</p>
+<p>It was monstrous, and it must really be that these curés have
+lost, not
+the sense of art, for that they never had, but the most elementary
+sense
+of the liturgy, to accept such heresies, and tolerate such outrages in
+their churches.</p>
+<p>These thoughts enraged Durtal, but he returned little by
+little to Notre
+Dame des Victoires and grew calmer. It was well he should examine it
+under all aspects, but it remained none the less mysterious nor the
+less
+unique in Paris.</p>
+<p>At La Salette, at Lourdes, there have been apparitions.
+"Whether these
+have been authentic or controverted matters little," he thought. "For
+even supposing Our Lady were not there at the moment her coming was
+announced, she was attracted there, and dwells there now, retained
+there
+by the tide of prayer and the emanations cast up by the faith of
+crowds. Miracles have happened there; it is therefore not astonishing
+that pious crowds flock thither. But here at Notre Dame des Victoires
+has been no apparition; no Mélanie, no Bernadette, have seen and
+described the luminous appearance of a 'beautiful Lady.' There are no
+piscinas, no medical staff, no public cures, no mountain top, no
+grotto,
+nothing. One fine day in 1836 the curé of the parish, the Abbé Dufriche
+Des Genettes, declared that while he was celebrating mass Our Lady
+manifested to him her desire that the sanctuary should be specially
+consecrated to her, and that alone was enough. The church, then a
+desert, has never since been empty, and thousands of <i>ex votos</i>
+declare
+the graces which since that day the Madonna has accorded to the
+visitors."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but in fact," concluded Durtal, "all these suppliants
+are not
+specially extraordinary souls, for indeed the most part of them are
+like
+me, they come in their own interests, for themselves and not for Her."</p>
+<p>And he remembered the answer of the Abbé Gévresin, to whom he
+had
+already made the observation.</p>
+<p>"You must be singularly far advanced on the road to perfection
+if you go
+there for Her only."</p>
+<p>Suddenly, after so many hours spent in the chapels, there was
+a
+reaction; the flesh extinguished under the cinders of prayers took
+fire,
+and the conflagration, springing up from below, became terrible.</p>
+<p>Florence seemed present, to Durtal's imagination, at his
+lodgings, in
+the churches, in the street, everywhere, and he was constantly on the
+watch against her recurrent attractions.</p>
+<p>The weather was mixed up with it all; the heaven broke up, a
+stormy
+summer raged, shattering the nerves, enfeebling the will, letting the
+awakened troop of vices loose in their gloomy moisture. Durtal blenched
+before the dread of long evenings and the abominable melancholy of days
+that never ended. At eight o'clock in the evening the sun had not set,
+and at three in the morning it seemed to wake again; the week was only
+one uninterrupted day, and life was never arrested.</p>
+<p>Oppressed by the ignominy of this angry sunshine and these
+blue skies,
+disgusted at bathing in Niles of sweat, and feeling Niagaras run from
+his hat, he did not stir from home, and then, in his solitude, foul
+thoughts assailed him.</p>
+<p>It was an obsession by thought, by vision, in all ways, and
+the haunting
+was all the more terrible that it was so special, that it never turned
+aside, but concentrated itself always on the same point, the face and
+figure of Florence.</p>
+<p>Durtal resisted, then in distraction, took to flight, tried to
+tire
+himself out by long walks, and to divert his mind by excursions, but
+the
+ignoble desire followed him in his course, sat before him in the Café,
+came between his eyes and the newspaper he strove to read, becoming
+ever
+more definite. He ended, after hours of struggle, by giving way and
+going to see this woman; he left her overwhelmed, half dead with
+disgust
+and shame, almost in tears.</p>
+<p>Nor did he thus find any solace in his struggle, but the
+contrary; far
+from escaping it, the hateful charm took more violent and tenacious
+possession of him. Then Durtal thought of and accepted a strange
+compromise, to visit another woman he knew, and in her society to break
+this nervous state, to put an end to this possession, this weariness
+and
+remorse; and in doing so he strove to persuade himself that in thus
+acting he would be more pardonable, less sinful.</p>
+<p>The clearest result of this attempt was to bring back the
+memory of
+Florence, and her vicious charm.</p>
+<p>He continued therefore his intimacy with her, and then he had,
+during a
+few days, such a revolt from his slavery, that he extricated himself
+from the sewer, and stood on firm ground.</p>
+<p>He succeeded in recovering and pulling himself together, and
+he loathed
+himself. During this crisis he had somewhat neglected the Abbé
+Gévresin,
+to whom he dared not avow his foulness, but since certain indications
+warned him of new attacks, he took fright, and went to see him.</p>
+<p>He explained his crises in veiled words, and he felt so
+unnerved, so
+sad, that tears stood in his eyes.</p>
+<p>"Well, are you now certain that you have that repentance which
+you
+assure me you have not experienced up to this time?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, but what is the good of it, if one is so weak, that in
+spite of
+all efforts one is certain to be overthrown at the first assault?"</p>
+<p>"That is another question. Come, I see that at present you are
+in fact
+in a state of fatigue requiring help."</p>
+<p>"Comfort yourself therefore; go in peace and sin less, the
+greater part
+of your temptations will be remitted you; you can, if you choose, bear
+the remainder, only take care, if you fall henceforward, you will be
+without excuse, and I do not answer for it, that instead of mending,
+your condition will not be aggravated."</p>
+<p>And as Durtal, stupefied, stammered out: "You believe&#8212;"</p>
+<p>"I believe," said the priest, "in the mystical substitution of
+which I
+spoke to you; you will moreover experience it in yourself; the saints
+will enter into the lists to help you; they will take the overplus of
+the assaults which you cannot conquer; without even knowing your name,
+from their secluded province, nunneries of Carmelites and Poor Clares
+will pray for you, on receiving a letter from me."</p>
+<p>And in fact, from that very day the most acute attacks ceased.
+Did he
+owe that cessation, that truce, to the intercession of the cloistered
+Orders, or to a change in the weather, which then took place, to the
+less heat of the sun, which gave way to floods of rain? He could not
+tell, but one thing was certain, his temptations were less frequent,
+and
+he could bear them with impunity.</p>
+<p>This idea of convents in their compassion dragging him out of
+the mud in
+which he had stuck, and by their charity bringing him to the bank,
+excited him. He chose to go to the Avenue de Saxe, to pray in the home
+of the sisters of those who suffered for him.</p>
+<p>This time there were no lights, no crowds, as on the morning
+when he had
+been present at a Procession, no odour of wax or incense, no sweeping
+by
+of robes of scarlet and cope of gold, all was deserted and dark.</p>
+<p>He was there alone, in the sombre and dank chapel, smelling
+like
+stagnant water, and without saying rosaries mechanically, or repeating
+prayers by rote, he fell into a reverie, endeavouring to look somewhat
+clearly into his life, and take stock of himself. And while he thus
+pulled himself together, far-off voices came behind the grating, drew
+nearer and nearer, passed by the black sieve of the veil, and dropped
+round the altar, whose form rose dimly in the shadow.</p>
+<p>These voices of the Carmelites aided Durtal to probe his
+despair deeply.</p>
+<p>Seated in a chair, he said to himself: "When any one is as
+incapable as
+I am when I speak to Him, it is almost shameful to dare to pray, for
+indeed, if I think of Him, it is that I may ask for a little happiness;
+and that is foolish. In the immediate shipwreck of human reason,
+wishing
+to explain the terrible enigma of the meaning of life, one only idea
+comes to the surface, in the midst of the wreckage of thoughts which
+sink, the idea of an expiation felt rather than understood, the idea
+that the sole end assigned to life is sorrow.</p>
+<p>"Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay,
+and whoever
+does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is
+only
+lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in
+advance on a future succession of sorrows.</p>
+<p>"Who knows in that case whether anĉsthetics which suppress
+corporal pain
+do not bring into debt those who use them? Who knows whether chloroform
+is not a means of revolt, and if the shrinking of the creature from
+suffering is not seditious, a rebellion against the will of Heaven? If
+this be so, the arrears of torture, the balance of distress, the
+warrants of pain avoided must accumulate terrible interest above, and
+justify the war cry of Saint Teresa, 'Lord, let me always suffer, or
+die;' this explains why, in their trials, the saints rejoice, and pray
+the Lord not to spare them, for they know that the purifying amount of
+ills must be paid in order to be free from debt after death.</p>
+<p>"To be just, human nature would be too ignoble without pain,
+for it
+alone can raise the soul while purifying it, but all that is nothing
+less than consoling," he added. "What an accompaniment to these sad
+thoughts are the wailing voices of these nuns; it is truly frightful."</p>
+<p>He ended by fleeing, and taking refuge, to shake off his
+depression, in
+the neighbouring convent at the bottom of the alley de Saxe, in a
+suburban lane, full of little cottages with gardens in front, where
+serpentine paths of pebbles wound round tufts of pot-herbs.</p>
+<p>This was the convent of the Poor Clares of the Ave Maria, an
+Order
+still more strict than that of the Carmelites, poorer, less
+fashionable,
+more humble.</p>
+<p>This cloister was entered by a little door, partly ajar; you
+ascended to
+the second storey without meeting anyone, and found a little chapel,
+through whose windows trees were visible, rocking to the chirping of
+riotous sparrows.</p>
+<p>This too was a place of burial, but no longer, as though
+opposite a tomb
+at the bottom of a dark cavern, but rather a cemetery where birds sang
+in the sun among the branches, you might have thought yourself in the
+country, twenty miles from Paris.</p>
+<p>The decoration of this bright chapel tried, however, to be
+gloomy; it
+was like those wine shops whose walls are made to look like those of
+caves, with false stones painted in the imitation plaster. Only the
+height of the nave manifested the childishness of the imposture, and
+declared the vulgarity of the deception.</p>
+<p>At the end was an altar above a smooth waxed floor, and on
+either side
+of it a grating with a black veil. According to the rule of Saint
+Francis, all the ornaments, the crucifix, the candlesticks, the
+tabernacle, were of wood, no object was to be seen in metal, no flower,
+the only luxury in the chapel consisted of two modern stained windows,
+one of which represented Saint Francis, the other Saint Clare.</p>
+<p>Durtal thought the sanctuary airy and delightful, but he only
+stayed
+there a few minutes, for there was not here, as at the Carmelites, an
+absolute solitude, a sombre peace; here there were always two or three
+Poor Clares trotting about the chapel, who looked at him while they
+were
+arranging the chairs, and seemed surprised at his presence.</p>
+<p>They were annoying to him, and he feared he was the same to
+them, so
+much so that he went away; but this short stay was enough to efface, or
+at least to lessen the funereal impression of the neighbouring convent.</p>
+<p>Durtal returned home, at once much appeased and much
+disquieted&#8212;much
+appeased in regard to his temptations, much disquieted about what he
+should do next.</p>
+<p>He felt rising in him, and increasing ever more and more, the
+desire to
+have done with these strifes and fears, but he grew pale when he
+thought
+of reversing his life, once for all.</p>
+<p>But if he still had hesitation and fear, he had no longer the
+firm
+intention of resisting; he now accepted in principle the idea of a
+change of existence, only he tried to retard the day, and put off the
+hour; he tried to gain time.</p>
+<p>Then like people who grow angry at having to wait, on other
+days he
+wished to put off the inevitable moment no longer, and cried within
+himself that this must end; anything rather than remain as he was.</p>
+<p>Then as this desire did not seem heard, he grew discouraged,
+would no
+longer think of anything, regretted the time past, and deplored that he
+felt himself carried along by such a current.</p>
+<p>And when he was rather more cheerful, he tried again to
+examine himself.
+"In fact I do not at all know how I stand," he thought; "this flux and
+reflux of different wishes alarms me, but how have I come to this
+point,
+and what is the matter with me?" What he felt, since he became more
+lucid, was so intangible, so indefinite, and yet so continuous that he
+was obliged to give up understanding it. Indeed every time he tried to
+examine his soul, a curtain of mist arose, and hid from him the unseen
+and silent approach of he knew not what. The only impression which he
+carried with him as he rose, was that it was less that he advanced
+towards the unknown, but that this unknown invaded him, penetrated him,
+and little by little took possession of him.</p>
+<p>When he spoke to the abbé of this state, at once cowardly and
+resigned,
+imploring and fearful, the priest only smiled.</p>
+<p>"Busy yourself in prayer, and bow down your back," he said one
+day.</p>
+<p>"But I am tired of bending my back, and of trampling always on
+the same
+spot," cried Durtal. "I have had enough of feeling myself taken by the
+shoulders and led I know not where, it is really time that in one way
+or
+another this situation came to an end."</p>
+<p>"Plainly." And standing up, and looking him in the face, the
+abbé said,
+impressively,</p>
+<p>"This advance towards God which you find so obscure and so
+slow is, on
+the contrary, so luminous and so rapid that it astonishes me, only as
+you yourself do not move, you do not take account of the swiftness with
+which you are borne along.</p>
+<p>"Before long you will be ripe, and then without need to shake
+the tree
+you will fall off of yourself. The question we have now to answer is
+into what receptacle we must put you, when at last you fall away from
+your life."</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER
+VII.</h2>
+<p>"But ... but ..." thought Durtal, "we must at any rate come to
+an
+understanding; the abbé wearies me with his quiet assumptions, his
+receptacle in which he must place me. He does not, I suppose, think of
+making me a seminarist or a monk; the seminary, at my age, is devoid of
+interest, and as to the convent, it is attractive from the mystical
+point of view, and even enticing from the artistic standpoint, but I
+have not the physical aptitudes, still less the spiritual
+predispositions to shut myself up for ever in a cloister; but putting
+that aside, what does he mean?</p>
+<p>"On the other hand he has insisted on lending me the works of
+Saint John
+of the Cross, and has made me read them; he has then an aim, for he is
+not a man to feel his way as he walks, he knows what he wishes and
+where
+he is going; does he imagine that I am intended for the perfect life,
+and does he intend to put me on my guard by this course of reading
+against the disillusions which, according to him, beginners experience?
+His scent seems to fail him there. I have a very horror of bigotry, and
+pious polish, but though I admire, I do not feel at all drawn towards
+the phenomena of Mysticism. No, I am interested in seeing them in
+others, I like to see it all from my window, but will not go
+downstairs,
+I have no pretension to become a saint, all that I desire is to attain
+the intermediate state, between goody-goodiness and sanctity. This is a
+frightfully low ideal, perhaps, but in practice it is the only one I am
+capable of attaining, and yet!</p>
+<p>"Then these questions have to be faced! If I am mistaken and
+am obeying
+false impulses, I am, as I advance, on the verge of madness. How,
+except
+by a special grace, am I to know whether I am in the right way, or
+walking in the dark towards the abyss? Here, for instance, are those
+conversations between God and the soul so common in the mystical life;
+how can one be sure that this interior voice, these distinct words not
+heard with bodily ears, but perceived by the soul in a clearer fashion
+than if they came by the channels of sense, are true, how be sure that
+they emanate from God, not from our imagination or from the devil
+himself?</p>
+<p>"I know, indeed, that Saint Teresa treats this matter at
+length in her
+'Castles of the Soul,' and that she points out the signs by which we
+can
+recognize the origin of the words, but her proofs do not seem to me
+always as easy to discern as she thinks.</p>
+<p>"'If these expressions come from God,' she says, 'they are
+always
+accompanied by an effect, and bring with them an authority which
+nothing
+can resist; thus a soul is in affliction, and the Lord simply suggests
+the words "trouble not thyself," and at once the whirlwind passes, and
+joy revives. In the second place, these words leave an indissoluble
+peace of mind, they engrave themselves on the memory, and often cannot
+be effaced.'</p>
+<p>"'In the other case,' she continues, 'if these words proceed
+from
+imagination or from the demon, none of these effects are produced, a
+kind of uneasiness, anguish and doubt torments you, moreover the
+expressions evaporate in part, and fatigue the soul which endeavours in
+vain to recall them in their entirety.'</p>
+<p>"In spite of these tokens, we are, in fact, standing on
+shifting ground
+in which we may sink at every step, but in his turn Saint John of the
+Cross intervenes, and tells you not to move. What then is to be done?</p>
+<p>"'No one,' he says, 'ought to aspire to these supernatural
+communications and rest there, for two motives; first, humility, the
+perfect abnegation of refusing to believe in them; the second, that in
+acting thus, we deliver ourselves from the labour necessary to assure
+ourselves whether these vocal visions are true or false, and so we are
+dispensed from an examination which has no other profit for the soul
+than loss of time and anxiety.'</p>
+<p>"Good&#8212;but if these words are really pronounced by God, we
+rebel against
+His will if we remain deaf to them. And then, as Saint Teresa declares,
+it is not in our power not to listen to them, and the soul can only
+think of what it hears when Jesus speaks to it. Moreover, all the
+discussions on this subject are uncertain, for one does not enter of
+one's own will into the strait way, as the Church calls it, we are led,
+and even thrown into it often against the will, and resistance is
+impossible, phenomena occur, and nothing in the world has power to
+check
+them; witness Saint Teresa, who, resist as she would by humility, fell
+into ecstasy under the divine breath, and was raised from the ground.</p>
+<p>"No, these superhuman conditions alarm me, and I do not hold
+to knowing
+them by experience. As to Saint John of the Cross, the abbé is not
+wrong
+in calling him unique, but though he sounds the lowest strata of the
+soul, and reaches where human auger has never penetrated, he wearies me
+all the same in my admiration, for his work is full of nightmares which
+repel me; I am not certain that his hell is correct, and some of his
+assertions do not convince me. What he calls the 'night obscure' is
+incomprehensible; 'The sufferings of that darkness surpass what is
+possible,' he cries on each page. Here I lose foothold. I can imagine,
+though I have not experienced them, the moral and terrible pangs, of
+the
+deaths of friends and relations, love betrayed, hopes which failed,
+spiritual sorrows of all kinds, but such a martyrdom as he proclaims as
+superior to all others, is beyond me, for it is outside our human
+interests, beyond our affections; he moves in an inaccessible sphere,
+in
+an unknown world very far off.</p>
+<p>"I am certainly afraid that this terrible saint, a true man of
+the
+south, abuses metaphor, and is full of Spanish affectation.</p>
+<p>"Moreover I am astonished at the abbé on another point. He,
+who is so
+gentle, shows a certain leaning to the dry bread of Mysticism; the
+effusions of Ruysbröck, of Saint Angela, of Saint Catherine of Genoa,
+touch him less than the arguments of saints who are hard reasoners; yet
+by the side of these he has advised me to read Marie d'Agreda, whom he
+ought not to fancy, for she has none of those qualities which are
+admired in the works of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross.</p>
+<p>"Ah! he may flatter himself that he has inflicted on me a
+complete
+disillusion, by lending me her 'Cité Mystique.'</p>
+<p>"From the renown of this Spanish woman, I expected the breath
+of
+prophecy, wide outlooks, extraordinary visions. Not at all; her book is
+simply strange and pompous, wearisome and cold. Then the phraseology of
+her book is intolerable. All the expressions which swarm in those
+ponderous volumes, 'my divine princess,' 'my great queen,' when she
+addresses Our Lady, who in her turn speaks to her as 'my dearest,' just
+as Christ calls her 'my spouse,' 'my well-beloved,' and speaks of her
+continually as 'the object of my pleasure and delight,' the way in
+which
+she speaks of the angels as 'the courtiers of the great King,' set my
+nerves on edge and weary me.</p>
+<p>"They smell of perriwigs and ruffles, bows and dances like
+Versailles, a
+sort of court mysticism in which Christ pontificates, attired in the
+costume of Louis XIV.</p>
+<p>"Moreover Marie d'Agreda enters into most extravagant details.
+She tells
+us of the milk of Our Lady which cannot grow sour, of female complaints
+from which she was exempt, she explains the mystery of the conception
+by
+three drops of blood which fell from the heart into the womb of Mary,
+and which the Holy Ghost used to form the child; lastly, she declares
+that Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel played the part of midwives, and
+stood living, under human forms, at the lying-in of the Virgin.</p>
+<p>"This is too strong. I know well that the abbé would say that
+we need
+not concern ourselves with these singularities and these errors, but
+that the 'Cité Mystique' is to be read in relation to the inner life of
+the Blessed Virgin. Yes, but then the book of M. Ollier, which treats
+of
+the same subject, seems to me curious and trustworthy in quite a
+different way."</p>
+<p>Was the priest forcing the note, playing a part? Durtal asked
+himself
+this, when he saw how determined he was not to avoid the same questions
+during a certain time. He tried now and then, in order to see how the
+matter was, to turn the conversation, but the abbé smiled, and brought
+it back to the point he wished.</p>
+<p>When he thought that he had saturated Durtal with mystical
+works, he
+spoke of them less, and seemed to attach himself mainly to the
+religious
+Orders, and especially to that of Saint Benedict. He very cleverly
+induced Durtal to become interested in this institution, and to ask him
+about it, and when once he had entered on this ground, he did not
+depart
+from it.</p>
+<p>It began one day when Durtal was talking with him about plain
+chant.</p>
+<p>"You have reason to like it," said the abbé, "for even
+independently of
+the liturgy and of art, this chant, if I may believe Saint Justin,
+appeases the desires and concupiscences of the flesh, 'affectiones et
+concupiscentias carnis sedat,' but let me assure you, you only know it
+by hearsay, there is no longer any true plain chant in the churches,
+these are like the products of therapeutics, only more or less
+audacious
+adulterations presented to you.</p>
+<p>"None of the chants which are to some extent respected by
+choirs, the
+'Tantum ergo,' for example, are now exact. It is given almost
+faithfully
+till the verse 'Prĉstet fides,' and then it runs off the rails, taking
+no account of the shades, which are, however, quite perceptible, that
+the Gregorian melody introduces when the text declares the impotence of
+reason and the powerful aid of Faith; these adulterations are still
+more
+apparent, if you listen to the 'Salve Regina' after Compline. This is
+abridged more than half, is enervated, blanched, half its pauses are
+taken away, it is reduced to a mere stump of ignoble music, if you had
+even heard this magnificent chant among the Trappists, you would weep
+with disgust at hearing it bawled in the churches at Paris.</p>
+<p>"But besides the textual alteration of the melody as we now
+have it, the
+way in which the plain chant is bellowed is everywhere absurd. One of
+the first conditions for rendering it well, is that the voices should
+go
+together, that they should all chant in the same time syllable for
+syllable and note for note, in one word it must be in unison.</p>
+<p>"Now, you can verify it yourself, the Gregorian melody is not
+thus
+treated; every voice takes its own part, and is isolated. Next, plain
+music allows no accompaniment, it must be chanted alone, without organ,
+it bears at most that the instrument should give the intonation and
+accompany it very softly, just enough if need be to sustain the pitch
+taken by the voices; it is not so that you will hear it given in the
+churches."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I know it well," said Durtal. "When I hear it at St.
+Sulpice, St.
+Severin, or Notre Dame des Victoires, I am aware that it is
+sophisticated, but you must admit that it is even then superb. I do not
+defend the tricks, the addition of fiorituri, the falseness of the
+musical pauses, the felonious accompaniment, the concert-room tone
+inflicted on you at Saint Sulpice, but what can I do? in default of the
+original I must be content with a more or less worthless copy, and I
+repeat, even executed in that fashion the music is so admirable that I
+am enchanted by it."</p>
+<p>"But," said the abbé quietly, "nothing obliges you to listen
+to the
+false plain chant, when you can hear the true, for saving your
+presence,
+there exists, even in Paris, a chapel where it is intact, and given
+according to the rules of which I have spoken."</p>
+<p>"Indeed, and where is that?"</p>
+<p>"At the Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament in the Rue
+Monsieur."</p>
+<p>"And can anyone enter the convent and be present at the
+offices?"</p>
+<p>"Anyone. Every day in the week, Vespers are sung at three
+o'clock, and
+on Sundays High Mass is said at nine."</p>
+<p>"Ah, had I but known this chapel earlier," said Durtal, the
+first time
+he came out.</p>
+<p>In fact it combined all the conditions he could wish. Situated
+in a
+solitary street, it had the completest privacy. The architect who built
+it had introduced no innovations or pretentiousness, had built a Gothic
+church, and introduced no fancies of his own.</p>
+<p>It was cruciform, but one of the arms was scarcely the full
+length, for
+want of room, while the other was prolonged into a hall, separated from
+the choir by an iron grating above which the Blessed Sacrament was
+adored by two kneeling angels, whose lilac wings were folded over thin
+rose-coloured backs. Except these two figures, of which the execution
+was truly sinful, the rest was at least veiled by shadow, and was not
+too afflicting to the eyes. The chapel was dim, and always at the time
+of the offices, a young sacristan-sister, tall and pale, and rather
+bent, entered like a shadow, and each time that she passed before the
+altar she fell on one knee and bowed her head profoundly.</p>
+<p>She seemed strange and scarcely human, gliding noiselessly
+over the
+pavement, her head bowed, with a band as low as her eyebrows, and she
+seemed to fly like a large bat when standing before the tabernacle she
+turned her back, moving her large black sleeves as she lighted the
+tapers. Durtal one day saw her features, sickly but charming, her
+eyelids dark, her eyes of a tired blue, and he guessed that her body
+was
+wasted by prayers, under her black robe drawn together by a leathern
+girdle ornamented by a little medal of the Blessed Sacrament of gilt
+metal, under the trimming, near her heart.</p>
+<p>The grating of the enclosure, on the left of the altar, was
+large, and
+well lighted from behind, so that even when the curtains were drawn it
+was possible to see the whole chapter drawn up in file in their oaken
+stalls surmounted at the end by a higher stall in which the abbess sat.
+A lighted taper stood in the middle of the hall, and before it a nun
+prayed day and night, a cord round her neck, to expiate the insults
+offered to Jesus under His Eucharistic form.</p>
+<p>The first time Durtal had visited the chapel, he had gone
+there on
+Sunday a little before the time of Mass, and he had been thus able to
+be
+present at the entry of the Benedictine nuns, behind the iron screen.
+They advanced two and two, stopped in the middle of the grating, turned
+to the altar and genuflected, then each bowed to her neighbour, and so
+to the end of this procession of women in black, only brightened by the
+whiteness of the head-band and the collar, and the gilt spot of the
+little monstrance on the breast. The novices came last, to be
+recognized
+by the white veils which covered their heads.</p>
+<p>And when an old priest, assisted by a sacristan, began the
+mass softly
+at the end of the chapter, a small organ gave the tone to the voices.</p>
+<p>Then Durtal might well wonder, for he had never before heard a
+sole and
+only voice made up of perhaps some thirty, of a tone so strange, a
+superterrestrial voice, which burnt upon itself, in the air, and
+intertwined its soft cooings.</p>
+<p>This bore no resemblance to the icy and obstinate lament of
+the
+Carmelites, nor was it like the unsexed tone, the child's voice,
+squeaking, rounded off at the end of the Franciscan nuns, but quite
+another thing.</p>
+<p>At La Glacière in fact those raw voices, though softened and
+watered by
+prayers, kept somewhat of the drawling, almost vulgar, inflexion of the
+people from whom they came; they were greatly purified, but remained
+none the less human. Here the tenderness of tones was rendered angelic,
+that voice with no defined origin long bolted through the divine sieve,
+patiently modelled for the liturgical chant, caught fire as it
+unfolded,
+blazed in virginal clusters of white sound, died down, flowered out
+again in pale pleadings, distant, seraphic at the end of certain chants.</p>
+<p>Thus interpreted the Mass gave a special accent to the sense
+of the
+sequences.</p>
+<p>Standing, behind the grating, the convent answered the priest.</p>
+<p>Durtal had then heard, after a mournful and solemn "Kyrie
+Eleison,"
+sharp and almost tragic, the decided cry, so loving and so grave, of
+the
+"Gloria in Excelsis," to the true plain chant; he had listened to the
+Credo, slow and bare, solemn and pensive, and he was able to affirm
+that
+these chants were totally different from those which were sung
+everywhere in the churches. St. Severin and St. Sulpice now seemed to
+him profane; in the place of their gentle warmth, their curls and their
+fringes, the angles of their polished melodies, their modern endings,
+their incoherent accompaniments arranged for the organ, he found
+himself
+in the presence of a chant, thin, sharp and nervous, like the work of
+an
+early master, and saw the ascetic severity of its lines, its sonorous
+colouring, the brightness of its metal hammered out with the rude yet
+charming art of Gothic jewels, he heard under the woven robe of sound,
+the beating of a simple heart, the ingenuous love of ages, and he
+noticed that curious shade in Benedictine music; it ended all cries of
+adoration, all tender cooings in a timid murmur, cut short, as though
+shrinking in humility, effacing itself modestly as though asking pardon
+of God for daring to love Him.</p>
+<p>"Ah, you were very right to send me there," said Durtal to the
+abbé when
+next he saw him.</p>
+<p>"I had no choice," answered the priest, smiling, "for the
+plain chant is
+respected only in convents under the Benedictine rule. That grand Order
+has restored it. Dom Pothier has done for it what Dom Guéranger has
+done
+for the liturgy.</p>
+<p>"Moreover, beyond the authenticity of the vocal text, and the
+manner of
+rendering it, there are still two essential conditions for restoring
+the
+special life of these melodies, and they are hardly found except in
+cloisters, first Faith, and next the understanding the meaning of the
+words sung."</p>
+<p>"But," interrupted Durtal, "I do not suppose that the
+Benedictine nuns
+know Latin."</p>
+<p>"I beg your pardon, among the nuns of Saint Benedict, and even
+among the
+cloistered sisters of other Orders there are a certain number who study
+the language enough to understand the Breviary and the Psalms. That is
+a
+serious advantage which they have over the choirs, composed for the
+most
+part of artisans without instruction and without piety, only simple
+workers with their voices.</p>
+<p>"Now without wishing to abate your enthusiasm for the musical
+honesty of
+these nuns, I am bound to say, that in order to understand this
+magnificent chant in its height and breadth, you must hear it, not
+winnowed by the mouths of virgins, even if unsexed, but as it issues,
+unsmoothed, untrimmed from the lips of men. Unfortunately, though there
+are at Paris, in the Rue Monsieur and the Rue Tournefort, two
+communities of Benedictine nuns, there is not on the other hand a
+single
+monastery of Benedictine monks."</p>
+<p>"At the Rue Monsieur do they absolutely follow the rule of
+Saint
+Benedict?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; but over and above the usual vows of poverty, chastity,
+remaining
+in the cloister, obedience, they make a further vow of separation and
+adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, as formulated by Saint Mechtilde.</p>
+<p>"And so they lead the most austere existence of any nuns. They
+scarcely
+taste flesh; they rise at two in the morning to sing Matins and Lauds,
+night and day, summer and winter, they take turns before the taper of
+reparation, and before the altar. It need not be said," continued the
+abbé after a pause, "that woman is stronger and braver than man; no
+male
+ascetic could live and lead such a life, especially in the enervating
+atmosphere of Paris."</p>
+<p>"What perhaps astounds me still more," said Durtal, "is the
+kind of
+obedience exacted of them. How can a creature endowed with free will
+annihilate herself to such an extent?"</p>
+<p>"Oh," said the abbé, "the obedience is the same in all the
+great
+Orders, absolute, without reserve; its formula is well summed up by
+Saint Augustine. Listen to this sentence which I remember to have read
+in a commentary on his rule:</p>
+<p>"'We must enter into the feelings of a beast of burthen, and
+allow
+ourselves to be led like a horse or a mule, which have no
+understanding;
+or rather, that obedience may be still more perfect, since these
+animals
+kick against the spur, we must be in the hands of a superior like a
+block, or the stock of a tree, which has neither life, nor movement,
+nor
+action, nor will, nor judgment.' Is that clear?"</p>
+<p>"It is most frightful! I quite admit," said Durtal, "that in
+exchange
+for such abnegation, the nuns must be powerfully aided from on high,
+but
+are there not some moments of falling away, some cases of despair, some
+instants in which they pine for a natural life in the open air, in
+which
+they lament that death in life which they have made for themselves; are
+there not days in which their senses wake and cry aloud?"</p>
+<p>"No doubt; in the cloistered life the age of twenty-nine is
+terrible to
+pass, then a passionate crisis arises; if a woman doubles that cape,
+and
+she almost always does so, she is safe.</p>
+<p>"But carnal emotions are not, to speak correctly, the most
+troublesome
+assault they have to undergo. The real punishment they endure in those
+hours of sorrow is the ardent, wild regret for that maternity of which
+they are ignorant; the desolate womb of woman revolts, and full of God
+though she be, her heart is breaking. The child Jesus whom they have
+loved so well then appears so far off and so inaccessible, and His very
+sight would hardly satisfy them, for they have dreamed of holding Him
+in
+their arms, of swathing and rocking Him, of giving Him suck, in one
+word, of being mothers.</p>
+<p>"Other nuns undergo no precise attack, no assault to which a
+name can be
+given, but without any definite reason they languish and die suddenly,
+like a taper, blown out. The torpor of the cloister kills them."</p>
+<p>"But indeed, Monsieur l'abbé, these details are far from
+encouraging."</p>
+<p>The priest shrugged his shoulders. "It is the poor reverse of
+a splendid
+stuff," he said, "wonderful recompenses are granted, even in this
+world, to souls in convents."</p>
+<p>"Nor do I suppose that if a nun fall, stricken in the flesh,
+she is
+abandoned. What does the Mother abbess in such a case?"</p>
+<p>"She acts according to the bodily temperament and state of the
+soul of
+the sick person. Note that she has been able to follow her during the
+years of her probation, that she has necessarily gained an influence
+over her; at such times therefore she will watch her daughter very
+closely, endeavour to turn the course of her ideas, breaking her by
+hard
+work, and by occupying her mind; she must not leave her alone, must
+diminish her prayers, if need be, restrict her hours of office, lessen
+her fasts, give her, if the case demands it, better food. In other
+cases, on the contrary, she will have recourse to more frequent
+communions, lessen her food or cause her to be blooded, mix cooling
+meats with her diet, and above all things she and all the community
+must
+pray for her.</p>
+<p>"An old Benedictine abbess, whom I knew at Saint-Omer, an
+incomparable
+guide of souls, limited before all things the length of confessions.
+The
+moment she saw the least symptoms arise she gave two minutes, watch in
+hand, to the penitent, and when the time was up she sent her back from
+the confessional, to mix with her companions."</p>
+<p>"Why so?"</p>
+<p>"Because in convents, even for souls which are well,
+confession is a
+most dangerous relaxation, it is as it were too long and too warm a
+bath. In it nuns go to excess, open their hearts uselessly, dwell upon
+their troubles, accentuate them, and revel in them; they come out more
+weakened and more ill than before. Two minutes ought indeed to be
+enough
+for a nun in which to tell her little sins.</p>
+<p>"Yet ... yet ... I must admit it, the confessor is a danger
+for a
+convent, not that I suspect his honour, that is not at all what I mean,
+but as he is generally chosen from among the bishop's favourites, there
+are many chances that he may be a man who knows nothing, and quite
+ignorant of how to deal with such souls, ends by unsettling them while
+he consoles them. Again, if demoniac attacks, so common in nunneries,
+occur, the poor man can only gape, gives all sorts of confused counsel,
+and hinders the energy of the abbess, who in such matters knows far
+better than he."</p>
+<p>"And," said Durtal, who chose his words carefully, "tell me, I
+suppose
+that tales like those which Diderot gives in his foolish volume 'La
+Religieuse' are incorrect?"</p>
+<p>"Unless a community is rotted by a superior given over to
+Satanism,
+which, thank God, is rare, the filthy stories told by that writer are
+false, and there is moreover a good reason why it should be so, for
+there is a sin which is the very antidote of the other, the sin of
+zeal."</p>
+<p>"What?"</p>
+<p>"Yes: the sin of zeal which causes the denunciation of our
+neighbour,
+gives scope to jealousy, creates spying to satisfy hate, that is the
+real sin of the cloister. Well, I assure you that if two sisters became
+quite shameless they would be denounced at once."</p>
+<p>"But I thought, Monsieur l'Abbé, that tale-bearing was allowed
+by the
+rules of most orders?"</p>
+<p>"It is, but perhaps there is a temptation to carry it somewhat
+to
+excess, especially in convents of women; for you can imagine that if
+nunneries contain pure mystics, real saints, they have in them also
+some
+nuns less advanced in the way of perfection, and who even still retain
+some faults...."</p>
+<p>"Come, since we are in the chapter of minute details, dare I
+ask if
+cleanliness is not just a little neglected by these good women?"</p>
+<p>"I cannot say; all that I know is, that in the Benedictine
+abbeys I have
+known, each nun was free to act as seemed good to her; in certain
+Augustinian constitutions, the case was provided for in contrary
+fashion, it was forbidden to wash the body, except once a month. On the
+other hand, amongst the Carmelites cleanliness is exacted. Saint Teresa
+hated dirt, and loved white linen, her daughters have even, I think, a
+right to have a flask of Eau de Cologne in their cells. You see this
+depends on the order, and probably also, when the rule does not
+expressly mention it, on the ideas which the superior may have on the
+subject. I will add that this question must not be looked at only from
+the worldly point of view, for corporal dirt is for certain souls an
+additional suffering and mortification which they impose on themselves,
+as Benedict Labre."</p>
+<p>"He who picked up vermin which left him, and put them piously
+in his
+sleeve. I prefer mortifications of another kind."</p>
+<p>"There are harder ones, believe me, and I think they would
+suit you
+better. Would you like to imitate Suso, who, to subdue his passions,
+bore on his naked shoulders, for eighteen years, an enormous cross set
+with nails, whose points pierced his flesh? More than that, he
+imprisoned his hands in leather gloves which also bristled with nails,
+lest he should be tempted to dress his wounds. Saint Rose of Lima
+treated herself no better, she bound a chain so tightly round her body
+that it penetrated the skin, and hid itself under the bleeding pad of
+flesh, she wore also a horsehair girdle set with pins, and lay on
+shards
+of glass; but all these trials are nothing in comparison of those
+inflicted on herself by a Capuchin nun, the venerable Mother Pasidée of
+Siena.</p>
+<p>"She scourged herself with branches of juniper and holly, then
+poured
+vinegar into her wounds, and sprinkled them with salt, she slept in
+winter on the snow, in summer on bunches of nettles, or pebbles, or
+brushes, put drops of hot lead in her shoes, knelt upon thistles,
+thorns
+and sticks. In January she broke the ice in a cask and plunged into it,
+and she even half-stifled herself by hanging head downwards in a
+chimney
+in which damp straw was lighted, but that is enough; indeed," said the
+abbé laughing, "if you had to choose, you would like best the
+mortifications which Benedict Labre imposed on himself."</p>
+<p>"I would rather have none at all," answered Durtal.</p>
+<p>There was a moment's pause.</p>
+<p>Durtal's thoughts went back to the Benedictine nuns: "But,"
+said he,
+"why do they put in the 'Semaine religieuse,' after their title
+Benedictine Nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, this further name, 'Convent
+of Saint Louis du Temple?'"</p>
+<p>"Because," said the abbé, "their first convent was founded on
+the actual
+ruins of the Temple prison, given them by royal warrant, when Louis
+XVIII. returned to France.</p>
+<p>"Their foundress and superior was Louise Adélaïde de Bourbon
+Condé, an
+unfortunate princess of many wanderings, almost the whole of whose life
+was spent in exile. Expelled from France by the Revolution and the
+Empire, hunted in almost every country in Europe, she wandered by
+chance among convents seeking shelter, now among the nuns of the
+Annunciation at Turin and the Capuchins in Piedmont, now among the
+Trappistines in Switzerland and the Sisters of the Visitation at
+Vienna,
+now among the Benedictines of Lithuania and Poland. At last she found
+shelter among the Benedictines in Norfolk, till she could again enter
+France.</p>
+<p>"She was a woman singularly trained in monastic science and
+experienced
+in the direction of souls.</p>
+<p>"She desired that in her abbey every sister should offer
+herself to
+heaven in reparation for crimes committed; and that she should accept
+the most painful privations to make up for those which might be
+committed; she instituted there the perpetual adoration, and introduced
+the plain chant, in all its purity, to the exclusion of all others.</p>
+<p>"It is, as you have been able to hear, there preserved intact;
+it is
+true that since her time, her nuns have had lessons from Dom Schmitt,
+one of the most learned monks in that matter.</p>
+<p>"Then, after the death of the princess, which took place, I
+think, in
+1824, it was perceived that her body exhaled the odour of sanctity, and
+though she has not been canonized her intercession is invoked by her
+daughters in certain cases. Thus, for example, the Benedictine nuns of
+the Rue Monsieur ask her assistance when they lose anything, and their
+experience shows that their prayer is never in vain, since the object
+lost is found almost at once.</p>
+<p>"But," continued the abbé, "since you like the convent so
+well, go
+there, especially when it is lighted up."</p>
+<p>The priest rose and took up a "Semaine religieuse," which lay
+upon the
+table.</p>
+<p>He turned over the leaves. "See," he said, and read, "'Sunday
+3 o'clock,
+Vespers chanted; ceremony of clothing, presided over by the Very
+Reverend Father Dom Etienne, abbot of the Grande Trappe, and
+Benediction.'"</p>
+<p>"That is a ceremony which interests me much."</p>
+<p>"I too shall probably be there."</p>
+<p>"Then we can meet in the chapel?"</p>
+<p>"Just so."</p>
+<p>"These ceremonies of clothing have not now the gaiety they had
+in the
+eighteenth century in certain Benedictine institutions, amongst others
+the Abbey de Bourbourg in Flanders," said the abbé smiling, after a
+silence.</p>
+<p>And since Durtal looked at him questioningly&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Yes, there was no sadness about it, or at least it had a
+special
+sadness of its own; you shall judge. On the eve of the day that the
+postulant was to take the habit, she was presented to the abbess of
+Bourbourg by the governor of the town. Bread and wine were offered to
+her, and she tasted them in the church itself. On the morrow she
+appeared, magnificently dressed, at a ball which was attended by the
+whole community of nuns, where she danced, then she asked her parents'
+blessing, and was conducted, with violins playing, to the chapel, where
+the abbess took possession of her. She had for the last time seen, at
+the ball, the joys of the world, for she was immediately shut up, for
+the rest of her days in the cloister."</p>
+<p>"The joy of the Dance of Death," said Durtal, "monastic
+customs and
+congregations were strange in old days."</p>
+<p>"No doubt, but they are lost in the night of time. I remember,
+however,
+that in the fifteenth century there existed under the rule of Saint
+Augustine an order strange indeed, called the Order of the Daughters of
+Saint Magloire, whose convent was in the Rue Saint Denys at Paris. The
+conditions of admission were the reverse of those of all other
+charters.
+The postulant had to swear on the holy Gospels that she had been
+unchaste, and no one believed her oath; she was examined, and if her
+oath were false, she was declared unworthy to be received. Nor might
+she
+have brought about this condition expressly in order to enter the
+convent, she must have well and truly given herself over to sin, before
+she came to ask the shelter of the cloister.</p>
+<p>"They were in fact a troop of penitent girls, and the rule of
+their
+subjection was savage. They were whipped, locked up, subjected to the
+most rigid fasts, made their confessions thrice in the week, rose at
+midnight, were under the most unremitting surveillance, were even
+attended in their most secret retirement; their mortifications were
+incessant and their closure absolute. I need hardly add that this
+nunnery is dead."</p>
+<p>"Nor likely to revive," cried Durtal. "Well then, Monsieur
+l'Abbé, we
+meet on Sunday in the Rue Monsieur?"</p>
+<p>And on the assent of the abbé, Durtal went his way, with the
+strangest
+ideas in his head about the monastic orders. The thing would be, he
+thought, to found an abbey where one could work at ease in a good
+library, there should be several monks, with decent meals, plenty of
+tobacco, and permission to take a turn on the quays now and then. And
+he
+laughed; but then that would not be a monastery! or only a Dominican
+monastery, with monks who dine out, and have, at least, the amusement
+of
+preaching.</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>I.</h2>
+<p>On Sunday morning, on his way to the Rue Monsieur, Durtal
+chewed the cud
+of his reflections on the Monasteries. "It is certain," he thought,
+"that in the accumulated filth of ages, they alone have remained clean,
+are truly in relation with heaven, and serve as interpreters between it
+and earth. But we must thoroughly understand and specify that we are
+speaking only of the cloistered orders, which have remained, as far as
+possible, poor...."</p>
+<p>And thinking of the communities of women, he murmured as he
+hastened his
+steps: "Here is a surprising fact, which proves once more, the
+incomparable genius with which the Church is endowed; she has been able
+to bring into common life women who do not assassinate each other, and
+obey without recalcitrancy the orders of another woman&#8212;wonderful!</p>
+<p>"Well, here I am"&#8212;and Durtal, who knew he was late, hastened
+into the
+court of the Benedictine nunnery, took the steps of the little church
+four at a time, and pushed the door open. He paused in hesitation on
+the
+threshold, dazzled by the blaze of the lighted chapel. Lamps were lit
+everywhere, and overhead the altar flamed with a forest of tapers
+against which stood out as on a gold ground, the ruddy face of a bishop
+all in white.</p>
+<p>Durtal glided among the crowd, elbowing his way till he saw
+the Abbé
+Gévresin beckoning to him. He joined him, and sat down on the chair the
+priest had kept for him, and examined the abbot of Grande Trappe,
+surrounded by priests in chasubles, and choir boys some in red and
+others in blue, followed by a Trappist with shaven crown, surrounded by
+a fringe of hair, holding a wooden cross, on the reverse of which was
+carved the small figure of a monk.</p>
+<p>Clad in a white cowl, with long sleeves and a gold button on
+his hood,
+his abbot's cross on his breast, his head covered with an old French
+mitre of low form, Dom Etienne, with his broad shoulders, his greyish
+beard, his ruddy colour, had a look of an old Burgundian, tanned by the
+sun while working at his vines; he seemed, moreover, a good sort of
+man,
+uneasy under his mitre, oppressed by his honours.</p>
+<p>A sharp perfume which burnt the nose as a spice burns the
+tongue, the
+perfume of myrrh, floated in the air, the crowds surged; behind the
+grating from which the curtain was withdrawn, the nuns standing sang
+the
+hymn of Saint Ambrose, "Jesu corona virginum," while the bells of the
+abbey rang a peal; in the short aisle leading from the porch to the
+choir, a bending line of women on either side, a cross-bearer and
+torch-bearers entered, and behind them appeared the novice dressed as a
+bride.</p>
+<p>She was dark, slight, and very short, and came forward shyly
+with
+downcast eyes, between her mother and sister. At first sight Durtal
+thought her insignificant, scarcely pretty, a mere nobody; and he
+looked
+instinctively for the other party, put out in his sense of fitness, by
+the absence of a man in the marriage procession.</p>
+<p>Striving against her agitation the postulant walked up the
+nave into the
+choir, and knelt on the left before a large taper, her mother and
+sister
+on either side as bridesmaids.</p>
+<p>Dom Etienne genuflected to the altar, mounted the steps, and
+sat down in
+a red velvet arm-chair, placed on the highest step.</p>
+<p>Then one of the priests conducted the girl, who knelt alone,
+before the
+monk.</p>
+<p>Dom Etienne was motionless as a figure of Buddha; with the
+same gesture,
+he lifted one finger, and said gently to the novice,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"What is it you ask?"</p>
+<p>She spoke so low as scarcely to be heard.</p>
+<p>"Father, feeling in myself an ardent desire to sacrifice
+myself to God,
+as a victim in union with our Lord Jesus Christ, immolated on our
+altars, and to spend my life in perpetual adoration of His divine
+Sacrament, under the observance of the rule of our glorious Father
+Saint
+Benedict, I humbly ask of you the grace of the holy habit."</p>
+<p>"I will give it you willingly if you believe you can conform
+your life
+to that of a victim devoted to the Holy Sacrament."</p>
+<p>And she answered in a firmer tone,</p>
+<p>"I trust so, leaning on the infinite goodness of my Saviour
+Jesus
+Christ."</p>
+<p>"God give you perseverance, my daughter," said the prelate; he
+rose,
+turned to the altar, genuflected, and with uncovered head began the
+chant "Veni Creator," taken up by the voices of the nuns behind the
+light screen of iron.</p>
+<p>Then he replaced his mitre, and prayed, while the chanted
+psalms rose
+under the arches. The novice, who in the meantime had been reconducted
+to her place at the prie-Dieu, rose, genuflected to the altar, and then
+knelt between her two bridesmaids before the abbot of La Trappe, who
+had
+reseated himself.</p>
+<p>Her two companions lifted the veil of the bride, took off her
+wreath of
+orange flowers, unrolled the coils of her hair, while a priest spread a
+napkin on the knees of the prelate, and the deacon presented a pair of
+long scissors on a salver.</p>
+<p>Then before the gesture of this monk, making himself ready,
+like an
+executioner, to shear the condemned person, whose hour of expiation was
+at hand, the terrible beauty of innocence becoming like crime, in
+substitution for sins of which she was ignorant, which she could not
+even understand, was evident to the public who had come to the chapel
+out of curiosity, and in consternation at the superhuman denial of
+justice, it trembled when the bishop seized the entire handful of her
+hair, and drew it towards him over her brow.</p>
+<p>Then there was as it were a flash of steel in a dark shower.</p>
+<p>In the death-like silence of the church the grinding of the
+scissors was
+heard in the mass of hair which fell under the blades, and then all was
+silent. Dom Etienne opened his hand, and the rain fell on his knees in
+long black threads.</p>
+<p>There was a sigh of relief when the priests and bridesmaids
+led away the
+bride, looking strange in her train, with her head discrowned and her
+neck bare.</p>
+<p>The procession returned almost immediately. There was no
+longer a bride
+in a white skirt, but a nun in a black robe.</p>
+<p>She bowed before the Trappist, and again knelt between her
+mother and
+sister.</p>
+<p>Then, while the abbot prayed the Lord to bless his handmaid,
+the master
+of the ceremonies and the deacon took, from a credence near the altar,
+a
+basket, wherein under loose rose leaves were folded a girdle of
+untanned
+leather, emblem of the end of that luxury which the Fathers of the
+Church placed in the region of the reins, a scapular, symbol of a life
+crucified to the world, a veil, which signifies the solitude of the
+life
+hidden in God, and the prelate explained the sense of these emblems to
+the novice, then taking the lighted taper from the candlestick before
+her, he gave it to her, declaring in one phrase the meaning of his
+action: "Accipe, charissima soror, lumen Christi."</p>
+<p>Then Dom Etienne took the sprinkler which a priest handed him
+with an
+inclination, and as in the general absolution of the dead, he sprinkled
+the girl with holy water in the form of a cross, then he sat down and
+spoke gently and quietly without using a single gesture.</p>
+<p>He spoke to the postulant alone, praising the august and
+humble life of
+the cloister. "Look not back," he said, "have no regrets, for by my
+voice Jesus repeats to you the promise once made to the Magdalen,
+'yours
+is the better part, which shall not be taken away from you.' Say also
+to
+yourself, my daughter, that, henceforward, taken away from the eternal
+trifling of labours in vain, you will accomplish a useful work upon
+earth, you will practise charity in its highest form, you will make
+expiation for others, you will pray for those who never pray, you will
+aid, so far as your strength permits, to make amends for the hate the
+world bears to the Saviour.</p>
+<p>"Suffer and you will be happy; love your spouse, and you will
+see how
+tender He is to His elect. Believe me, His love is such that He will
+not
+even wait till you are purified by death to recompense you for your
+miserable mortifications, your poor sufferings. Even before your hour
+is
+come, He will heap His graces upon you, and you will beg Him to let you
+die, so greatly will the excess of these joys exceed your strength."</p>
+<p>Little by little the old monk grew warm, and returned to the
+words of
+Christ to the Magdalen, showing how in reference to her Jesus set
+forward the excellence of the contemplative over the other Orders, and
+gave brief advice, dwelling on the necessity of humility and poverty,
+which are, as Saint Clare says, the two great walls of cloistered life.
+Then he blessed the novice, who kissed his hand, and when she had
+returned to her place, he prayed to the Lord, lifting his eyes to
+heaven, that He would accept this nun, who offered herself as a victim
+for the sins of the world. Then, standing, he intoned the "Te Deum."</p>
+<p>Every one rose, and preceded by the cross and torch bearers,
+the
+procession passed out of the church, and was massed in the court.</p>
+<p>Then Durtal might have believed himself carried back far from
+Paris,
+into the heart of the Middle Ages.</p>
+<p>The court, surrounded by buildings, was closed opposite the
+entrance-gate by a high wall, in the midst of which was a folding-door;
+on each side six thin pines rocked to and fro, and chanting was heard
+behind the wall.</p>
+<p>The postulant, in front, alone, near the closed door, held her
+torch,
+with her head bent. The abbot of La Trappe, leaning on his crosier,
+waited, unmoving, a few paces from her.</p>
+<p>Durtal examined their faces, the girl, so commonplace in her
+bridal
+costume, had become charming, her body was now full of a timid grace,
+the lines, somewhat too marked under her worldly dress, were softened,
+under her religious shroud her outline was only a simple sketch, it was
+as though the years had rolled back, and as though there was a return
+to
+the forms only prophesied in childhood.</p>
+<p>Durtal drew near to examine her better, he tried to look at
+her face,
+but under the chill bandage of her head-dress, she remained mute, and
+as
+if absent from life, with her eyes closed, and as though she lived only
+in the smile of her happy lips.</p>
+<p>Seen nearer, the monk who had seemed so stout and ruddy in the
+chapel,
+seemed also changed, his frame remained robust, and his complexion
+bright, but his eyes of a light blue, like chalk water, water without
+reflections or waves, eyes wonderfully pure, changed the common
+expression of his features, and took away from him that look of a
+vine-dresser which he had at a distance.</p>
+<p>"It is clear," thought Durtal, "that the soul is everything in
+these
+people, and their faces are modelled by it. There is a holy clearness
+in
+their eyes, and their lips, in those only apertures through which the
+soul comes to look out of the body, and almost shows itself."</p>
+<p>The chants behind the wall suddenly ceased, the girl made a
+step
+forward, and knocked with her closed fingers at the door, and then with
+a failing voice she sang,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Aperite mihi portas justitiae: Ingressa in eas, confitebor
+Domino."</p>
+<p>The door opened. Another large court, paved with pebbles was
+seen,
+bounded at the end by a building, and all the community, in a sort of
+semicircle, with black books in their hands, cried,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Haec porta Domini: Justi intrabunt in eam."</p>
+<p>The novice made another step to the sill and answered in her
+far-away
+voice,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Ingrediar in locum tabernaculi admirabilis: usque ad domum
+Dei."</p>
+<p>And the choir of nuns, unmoving, answered,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Haec est domus Domini firmiter aedificata: Bene fundata est
+supra
+firmam petram."</p>
+<p>Durtal hastily looked at those faces which could only be seen
+for a few
+minutes and on the occasion of such a ceremony. It was a row of dead
+bodies standing in black shrouds. All were bloodless, with white
+cheeks,
+lilac eyelids and grey lips, the voices of all were exhausted and fined
+down by prayer, and most of them, even the young, were bent. "Their
+poor
+bodies are worn with austere fatigue," thought Durtal.</p>
+<p>But his reflections were cut short, the bride, now kneeling on
+the
+threshold, turned to Dom Etienne and chanted in a low voice,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi: Hic habitabo quoniam
+elegi eam."</p>
+<p>The monk laid aside his mitre and crosier and said,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Confirma hoc Deus, quod operatus es in nobis."</p>
+<p>And the postulant murmured,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"A templo sacro tuo quod est in Jerusalem."</p>
+<p>Then before re-covering his head and resuming his crosier, the
+prelate
+prayed God Almighty to pour the dew of His blessing on His handmaid;
+then directing the girl towards a nun who left the group of sisters and
+advanced to the threshold, he said to her,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Into your hands, Madame, we commit this new bride of the
+Lord, sustain
+her in the holy resolution she has so solemnly taken upon her, in
+asking
+to sacrifice herself to God as a victim, and to dedicate her life in
+honour of our Lord Jesus Christ, sacrificed on our altars. Lead her in
+the way of the divine Commandments, in the practice of the counsels of
+the Holy Gospel, and in the observance of the monastic rule. Prepare
+her
+for the eternal union to which the heavenly Spouse invites her, and
+from
+this blessed increase of the flock committed to your charge draw a new
+motive for maternal care. The peace of the Lord rest upon you."</p>
+<p>This was all: the nuns one by one turned and disappeared
+behind the
+wall, while the girl followed them like a poor dog, who with drooping
+head accompanies at a distance a new master.</p>
+<p>The folding doors closed.</p>
+<p>Durtal remained stupefied, looking at the outline of the white
+bishop,
+the backs of the priests who were mounting the steps to give
+Benediction
+in the church, while behind them came in tears, their faces in their
+handkerchiefs, the mother and sister of the novice.</p>
+<p>"Well?" said the abbé, passing his arm through Durtal's.</p>
+<p>"Well, this scene is to my mind the most touching alibi of
+death that it
+is possible to see, this living woman, who buries herself in the most
+frightful of tombs&#8212;for in it the flesh continues to suffer&#8212;is
+wonderful.</p>
+<p>"I remember that you have yourself told me of the pressure of
+this
+observance, and I shivered in thinking of perpetual Adoration, in those
+winter nights, when a child like this is awakened out of her first
+sleep, and cast into the darkness of a chapel where unless she faints
+from weakness or terror, she must pray alone, through the freezing
+hours
+on her knees on the pavement.</p>
+<p>"What passes in that conversation with the unknown, that
+interview with
+the Shadow? Does she succeed in escaping from self, and in leaving the
+earth, in gaining, on the threshold of Eternity, the inconceivable
+Spouse, or does the soul, powerless to spring on high, remain riveted
+to
+the soil?</p>
+<p>"We figure her to ourselves, her face bent forward, her hands
+joined,
+making appeal to herself, concentrating herself, in order to pour
+herself forth the better, and we imagine her thus sickly, with no
+strength left, trying to set her soul on fire in a shivering frame. But
+who can tell if on certain nights she attains to it?</p>
+<p>"Ah! those poor lamps of exhausted oil, of flames almost dead,
+which
+tremble in the obscurity of the sanctuary, what will God make of them?</p>
+<p>"Then there was the family present at the taking the habit,
+and if the
+daughter filled me with enthusiasm I could not restrain myself from
+pitying the mother. Think if the daughter died, the mother would
+embrace
+her, would perhaps speak to her, or if she did not recognize her, it
+would at least not be with her own good will; but in this case it is
+not
+the body, but the very soul of her child that dies before her eyes. Of
+her own accord her child knows her no longer, it is the contemptuous
+end
+of an affection. You will admit that for a mother this is very hard."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but this so-called ingratitude, gained at the price of
+God knows
+what struggles, is it not, even apart from the divine vocation, the
+most
+equitable repartition of human love? Think that this elect creature
+becomes the scapegoat of sins committed, and like a lamentable daughter
+of Danaus she will unceasingly pour the offering of her mortifications
+and prayers, of her vigils and fastings, into the bottomless vessel of
+offences and crimes. Ah! if you knew what it was to repair the sins of
+the world. In regard to this I remember that one day the abbess of the
+Benedictines in the Rue Tournefort said to me: 'Since our tears are not
+holy enough, nor our souls pure enough, God makes trial of us in our
+bodies.' Here are long illnesses which cannot be cured, illnesses which
+doctors fail to understand, and we make thus much expiation for others.</p>
+<p>"But if you will think over the ceremony which is just ended,
+you need
+not be affected beyond measure or compare it to the well-known
+ceremonies of a funeral; the postulant whom you saw has not yet
+pronounced her final vows, she can if she choose leave the convent, and
+return to her own home. At present she is in regard to her mother, a
+child in a foreign country, a child at school, but she is not a dead
+child.</p>
+<p>"You may say what you please, but there is a tragedy in that
+door which
+closed upon her."</p>
+<p>"Therefore in the Benedictine convent in the Rue Tournefort,
+the scene
+takes place in the interior of the convent, and the family is not
+present, the mother is spared, but mitigated thus, the ceremony is but
+a
+mere form, almost a foolish rule in the seclusion wherein the Faith is
+hidden."</p>
+<p>"Those nuns are also Benedictines of the perpetual Adoration,
+are they
+not?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, do you know their convent?"</p>
+<p>And as Durtal shook his head, the abbé continued,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"It is older, but less interesting than that in the Rue
+Monsieur, the
+chapel is mean, full of plaster statuettes, cotton flowers, bunches of
+grapes and ears of corn in gold paper, but the old building of the
+nunnery is curious. It contains, what shall I call it? a school
+dining-room, and a retreatant's drawing-room, and so gives at once the
+impression of old age and childhood."</p>
+<p>"I know that class of convents," said Durtal. "I used often to
+see one,
+when I used to visit an old aunt at Versailles. It always used to
+impress me as a Maison Vauquer, brought to devotional uses, it had the
+air at once of a <i>table d'hôte</i> in the Rue de la Clef
+and the sacristy
+of a country church."</p>
+<p>"Just so," and the abbé went on with a smile,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"I had many interviews with the abbess in the Rue Tournefort;
+you guess
+at rather than see her, for you are separated from her by a screen of
+black wood, behind which is stretched a black curtain which she draws
+aside."</p>
+<p>"I can see it," thought Durtal, who, remembering the
+Benedictine custom,
+saw in a second a little face confused in neutral tinted light, and
+lower, at the top of her habit, the gleam of a medal of the Blessed
+Sacrament in red enamelled in white.</p>
+<p>He laughed and said to the abbé,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"I laugh, because having had some business to transact with my
+nun aunt
+of whom I was speaking, only visible like your abbess through a
+trellis,
+I found out how to read her thoughts a little."</p>
+<p>"Ah! how was that?"</p>
+<p>"In this way. Since I could not see her face, which was hidden
+behind
+the lattice of her cage, and disappeared behind her veil, and if she
+should answer me, having nothing to guide me but the inflexions of her
+voice, always circumspect and always calm, I ended by trusting only to
+her great glasses, round, with buff frames, which almost all nuns wear.
+Well, all the repressed vivacity of this woman burst out there;
+suddenly
+in a corner of her glasses, there was a glimmer, and I then understood
+that her eye had lighted up, and gave the lie to the indifference of
+her
+voice, the determined quietness of her tone."</p>
+<p>The abbé in his turn began to laugh.</p>
+<p>"Do you know the Superior of the Benedictines, in the Rue
+Monsieur?"
+said Durtal.</p>
+<p>"I have spoken with her once or twice; there the parlour is
+monastic,
+there is not the provincial and middle-class side of the Rue
+Tournefort,
+it is composed of a sombre room, of which all the breadth at the end is
+taken up by an iron grating, and behind the grating are again wooden
+bars, and a shutter painted black. You are quite in the dark, and the
+abbess, scarcely in the light, appears to you like a phantom."</p>
+<p>"The abbess is, I suppose, the nun, elderly, fragile and very
+short, to
+whom Dom Etienne committed the novice?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. She is a remarkable shepherdess of souls, and what is
+more, a very
+well educated woman of most distinguished manners."</p>
+<p>"Oh," thought Durtal: "I can imagine that these abbesses are
+charming,
+but also terrible women. Saint Teresa was goodness itself, but when she
+speaks in her 'Way of Perfection' of nuns who band themselves together
+to discuss the will of their mother, she shows herself inexorable, for
+she declares that perpetual imprisonment should be inflicted on them as
+soon as possible and without flinching, and in fact she is right, for
+every disorderly sister infects the flock, and gives the rot to souls."</p>
+<p>Thus talking they had reached the end of the Rue de Sèvres,
+and the abbé
+stopped to rest.</p>
+<p>"Ah," he said, as if speaking to himself, "had I not had all
+my life
+heavy expenses, first a brother, then nephews to maintain, I should
+many
+years ago have become a member of Saint Benedict's family. I have
+always had an attraction towards that grand Order, which is, in fact,
+the intellectual Order of the Church. Therefore, when I was stronger
+and
+younger, I always went for my retreats to one of their monasteries,
+sometimes to the black monks of Solesmes, or of Ligugé, who have
+preserved the wise traditions of Saint Maurus, sometimes to the
+Cistercians, or the white monks of La Trappe."</p>
+<p>"True," said Durtal, "La Trappe is one of the great branches
+of the tree
+of Saint Benedict, but how is it that its ordinances do not differ from
+those which the Patriarch left?"</p>
+<p>"That is to say that the Trappists interpret the rule of Saint
+Benedict,
+which is very broad and supple, less in its spirit than in its letter,
+while the Benedictines do the contrary.</p>
+<p>"In fact, La Trappe is an offshoot of Citeaux, and is much
+more the
+daughter of Saint Bernard, who was during forty years the very sap of
+that branch, than the descendant of Saint Benedict."</p>
+<p>"But, so far as I remember, the Trappists are themselves
+divided, and do
+not live under a uniform discipline."</p>
+<p>"They do so now, since a pontifical brief dated March 17th,
+1893,
+sanctioned the decisions of the general Chapter of the Trappists
+assembled in Rome, and ordered the fusion into one sole order, and
+under
+the direction of a sole superior, of the three observances of the
+Trappists, who were in fact ruled by discordant constitutions."</p>
+<p>And seeing that Durtal was listening attentively, the abbé
+continued,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Among these three observances, one only, that of the
+Cistercian
+Trappists, to which belonged the abbey of which I was a guest, followed
+in their integrity the rules of the twelfth century, and led the
+monastic life of Saint Bernard's day. This alone recognized the rule of
+Saint Benedict, taken in its strictest application, and completed by
+the
+Charte de Charité, and the use and customs of Citeaux; the two others
+had adopted the same rule, but revised and modified in the seventeenth
+century by the Abbé de Rancé, and again one of them, the Belgian
+congregation, had changed the statutes imposed by that abbot.</p>
+<p>"At the present day, as I have just said, all the Trappists
+form only
+one and the same institute under the name, Order of Reformed
+Cistercians
+of the Blessed Virgin Mary of La Trappe, and all resume the rules of
+Citeaux, and live again the life of the cenobites of the Middle Ages."</p>
+<p>"But if you have visited these ascetics," said Durtal, "you
+must know
+Dom Etienne?"</p>
+<p>"No, I have never stayed at La Grande Trappe, I prefer the
+poor and
+small monasteries where one is mixed up with the monks, to those
+imposing convents where they isolate you in a guest-house, and in a word
+keep you separate.</p>
+<p>"There is one in which I make my retreats, Notre Dame de
+l'Atre, a small
+Trappist monastery a few leagues from Paris, which is quite the most
+seductive of shelters. Besides that the Lord really abides there, for
+it
+has true saints among its children, it is delightful also with its
+ponds, its immemorial trees, its distant solitude, far in the woods."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but," observed Durtal, "the life there must be
+unbending, for La
+Trappe is the most rigid order which has been imposed on men."</p>
+<p>For his only answer the abbé let go Durtal's arm, and took
+both his
+hands.</p>
+<p>"Do you know," he said, looking him in the face, "it is there
+you must
+go for your conversion?"</p>
+<p>"Are you serious, Monsieur l'Abbé?"</p>
+<p>And as the priest pressed his hands more strongly Durtal
+cried,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Ah, no indeed, first I have not the stoutness of soul, and if
+that be
+possible I have still less the bodily health needed for such a course,
+I
+should fall ill on my arrival, and then ... and then...."</p>
+<p>"And then, what? I am not proposing to you to shut you up for
+ever in a
+cloister."</p>
+<p>"So I suppose," said Durtal, in a somewhat piqued tone.</p>
+<p>"But just to remain a week, just the necessary time for a
+cure. Now a
+week is soon over, then do you think that if you make such a resolution
+God will not sustain you?"</p>
+<p>"That is all very fine, but ..."</p>
+<p>"Let us speak on the health question, then;" and the abbé
+smiled a smile
+of pity that was a little contemptuous.</p>
+<p>"I can promise you at once that as a retreatant, you will not
+be bound
+to lead the life of a Trappist in its austerest sense. You need not get
+up at two in the morning for Matins, but at three, or even at four
+o'clock, according to the day."</p>
+<p>And smiling at the face Durtal made, the abbé went on,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"As to your food it will be better than that of the monks;
+naturally you
+will have no fish nor meat, but you may certainly have an egg for
+dinner, if vegetables are not enough for you."</p>
+<p>"And the vegetables, I suppose, are cooked with salt and
+water, and no
+seasoning?"</p>
+<p>"No, they are dressed with salt and water only on fasting
+days; at other
+times you will have them cooked in milk and water, or in oil."</p>
+<p>"Many thanks," said Durtal.</p>
+<p>"But all that is excellent for your health," continued the
+priest, "you
+complain of pains in the stomach, sick headaches, diarrh&#339;a, well,
+this diet, in the country, in the air, will cure you better than all
+the
+drugs you take.</p>
+<p>"Now let us leave, if you like, your body out of the question,
+for in
+such a case, it is God's part to act against your weakness. I tell you,
+you will not be ill at La Trappe, that were absurd; it would be to send
+the penitent sinner away, and Jesus would not then be the Christ; but
+let us talk of your soul. Have the courage to take its measure, to look
+it well in the face. Do you see that?" said the abbé after a silence.</p>
+<p>Durtal did not answer.</p>
+<p>"Admit," said the priest, "that you are horrified at it."</p>
+<p>They took a few steps in the street, and the abbé continued,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"You declare that you are sustained by the crowds of Notre
+Dame des
+Victoires and the emanations of St. Severin. What will it be then, in
+the humble chapel, when you will be on the ground huddled together with
+the saints? I guarantee you in the name of the Lord an assistance such
+as you have never had;" and he went on with a laugh, "I may add that
+the
+Church will take pleasure in receiving you, she will bring out her
+ornaments which she has now left off: the authentic liturgies of the
+Middle Ages, true plain chant, without solos or organs."</p>
+<p>"Listen, your propositions astound me," said Durtal with an
+effort. "No:
+I assure you I am not at all disposed to imprison myself in such a
+place. I know well that at Paris I shall never come to any good. I
+swear
+to you that I am not proud of my life, nor satisfied with my soul, but
+from thence ... to ... where I cannot tell; I want at least a mitigated
+asylum, a quiet convent. There must be, on those conditions, somewhere,
+hospitals for souls."</p>
+<p>"I could only send you to the Jesuits, who make a specialty of
+retreats
+for men: but knowing you as I think I know you, I feel sure you would
+not stay there two days. You would find yourself among amiable and very
+clever priests, but they would overwhelm you with sermons, would wish
+to
+interfere with your life, mix themselves up with your art, they would
+examine your thoughts with a magnifying glass, and then you would be
+under treatment with good young people, whose unintelligent piety would
+horrify you, and you would flee in exasperation.</p>
+<p>"At La Trappe it is the contrary. You would certainly be the
+sole
+retreatant there, and no one will have the least idea of troubling
+himself about you; you will be free, you can if you choose leave the
+monastery just as you entered it, without having confessed or
+approached
+the Sacraments, your will will be respected there, and no monk will
+attempt to sound it without your authority. To you only it will
+appertain to decide whether you will be converted or no.</p>
+<p>"And you will like me to be frank to the last, will you not?
+You are, as
+indeed I have already said to you, a sensitive and distrustful man;
+well, the priest as you see him in Paris, even the religious not
+cloistered, seem to you, how shall I express it? second rate souls, not
+to go further...."</p>
+<p>Durtal protested vaguely, with a gesture.</p>
+<p>"Let me go on. An afterthought will come to you in regard to
+the
+ecclesiastic to whom will fall the task of cleansing you, you will be
+quite certain that he is not a saint; this is not very theological, for
+were he even the worst of priests his absolution would have just the
+same value, if you merit it, but indeed here is a question of sentiment
+which I respect, you will think of him in a word: he lives as I do, he
+is not more self-denying than I am, nothing shows that his conscience
+is
+very superior to mine, and thence to losing all confidence, and
+throwing up the whole thing there is but a step. At La Trappe, I will
+defy you to reason in this way, and not to become humble. When you see
+men, who after having abandoned everything to serve God, lead a life of
+privations and penance such as no government would dare to inflict on
+its convicts, you will indeed be obliged to admit that you are no great
+thing by their side."</p>
+<p>Durtal was silent. After the astonishment he had felt at the
+suggestion
+of such an issue, he became dully irritated against this friend, who
+hitherto so discreet, had suddenly rushed upon his soul and opened it
+by
+force. There came out the disgusting vision of an existence stripped,
+used up, reduced to a state of dust, a condition of rags. And Durtal
+shrank from himself, convinced that the abbé was right, that he must at
+any rate stanch the discharge of his senses, and expiate their
+inappeasable desires, their abominable covetousness, their rotten
+tastes, and he was seized with a terror irrational and intense. He had
+the giddy fear of the cloister, a terror which attracted him to the
+abyss over which Gévresin made him lean.</p>
+<p>Enervated by the ceremony of taking the habit, stunned by the
+blow with
+which the priest had assailed him as they left the church, he now felt
+an anguish almost physical, in which everything ended in confusion. He
+did not know to what reflections he should give himself, and only saw,
+swimming on this whirlpool of troubled ideas, one clear thought, that
+the moment had come so dreaded by him in which he must make a
+resolution.</p>
+<p>The abbé looked at him, saw that he was really suffering, and
+was full
+of pity for a soul so unable to support a struggle.</p>
+<p>He took Durtal's arm, and said gently,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"My son, believe me that the day you go yourself to the house
+of God,
+the day you knock at its door, it will open wide, and the angels will
+draw aside to let you pass. The Gospel cannot lie, and it declares that
+there is more joy over one sinner that repents than over ninety and
+nine
+just persons who need no repentance. You will be much better welcomed
+than you expect, and be sufficiently my friend to think that the old
+priest you leave here will not remain inactive, and that he and the
+convents he can influence will pray their best for you."</p>
+<p>"I will see," said Durtal, really moved by the affectionate
+tone of the
+priest, "I will see. I cannot decide thus, unexpectedly; I will think.
+Ah! it is not simple."</p>
+<p>"Above all things pray," said the priest, who had reached his
+door. "I
+have on my side sought the Lord much that He would enlighten me, and I
+declare to you that the solution of La Trappe is the only one He has
+given me. Ask Him humbly, in your turn, and you will be guided. I shall
+soon see you again, shall I not?"</p>
+<p>He pressed Durtal's hand, who, left alone, recovered himself
+at last.
+Then he recalled the strategic smiles, the ambiguous phrases, the
+dreamy
+silences of the Abbé Gévresin, he understood the kindness of his
+counsels, the patience of his plans; and a little put out at having
+been, without knowing it, led so wisely, he exclaimed in spite of
+himself, "This, then, was the design the priest was ripening, with his
+air of not concerning himself with it at all."</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER
+IX.</h2>
+<p>He experienced that painful awakening of a sick man whom a
+doctor
+deceives for months, who learns some fine morning that he is to be
+taken
+at once to an hospital to undergo an urgent surgical operation. "But
+that is not the way things should be done," cried Durtal, "people
+should
+be prepared, little by little, accustomed by words of warning, to the
+idea that they are to be cut up on a table, they are not struck down
+thus unexpectedly!</p>
+<p>"Yes, but what does that matter? since I know very well, in
+the depths
+of my soul, that this priest is right; I must leave Paris if I wish to
+amend; but all the same, the treatment he inflicts is hard indeed to
+follow; I know not what to do."</p>
+<p>And from this moment his days were haunted by Trappists. He
+turned over
+the thought of his departure, and examined it on all sides, chewed the
+cud of for and against, and ended by saying to himself, "That he would
+take stock of his reflections and open an account, and this with a
+debit
+and credit side, that he might know himself the better.</p>
+<p>"The debit is terrible. To gather up his life, and cast it
+into the
+stove of a cloister; and again, he ought to know if his body were in a
+state to bear such a remedy; mine is frail and soft, accustomed to rise
+late; it becomes weak if not nourished by flesh meat, and is subject to
+neuralgia at any change of the hour of meals. I should never be able to
+hold out down there with vegetables cooked in warm oil or in milk;
+first
+I detest oily cookery, and I hate milk still more, which I cannot
+digest.</p>
+<p>"Then I think I see myself on my knees, on the floor for
+hours, I who
+suffered so much at La Glacière in remaining in that posture, on a
+step,
+for scarce a quarter of an hour.</p>
+<p>"Again, I am so accustomed to cigarettes that it is absolutely
+impossible to give them up, and it is pretty certain they will not let
+me smoke in a monastery.</p>
+<p>"No, indeed, from the bodily point of view, this plan is
+madness; in my
+state of health there is no doctor who would not dissuade me from
+undertaking such a risk.</p>
+<p>"If I place myself in a spiritual point of view I must then
+again
+recognize that it is terrible to enter La Trappe.</p>
+<p>"I am afraid indeed that my dryness of soul, my want of love
+will
+remain, and then what would become of me in such surroundings? then it
+is equally probable, that in that solitude and absolute silence, I
+should be wearied to death, and if it be so, what a miserable existence
+is it to stalk about a cell and count the hours. No, for that one needs
+to be firmly fixed on God, to be dwelt in wholly by Him.</p>
+<p>"Moreover, there are two formidable questions which I have
+never
+properly weighed, because it has been painful to think of them, but now
+that they come before me, and stop the road, I must face them, the
+questions of Confession and Holy Communion.</p>
+<p>"Confession? Yes, I will consent to it, I am so tired of
+myself, so
+disgusted with my wretched existence that this expiation appears to me
+as deserved, even necessary. I desire to humble myself, I would ask
+pardon with all my heart, but again this penance must be assigned me
+under possible conditions. At La Trappe, if I believe the abbé, no one
+will trouble himself about me, in other words no one will encourage me,
+and aid me to submit to this sorrowful extraction of my shames. I shall
+be somewhat like a sick man operated on in hospital, far from his
+friends and relatives.</p>
+<p>"Confession," he went on, "is an admirable discovery, for it
+is the most
+sensitive touchstone of souls, the most intolerable act which the
+Church
+has ever imposed on the vanity of men.</p>
+<p>"Is this strange? We speak easily of our lapses, of our
+grosser actions,
+even, indeed, to a priest in conversation, that does not seem to lead
+to
+any consequences, and perhaps a little bragging enters into our
+admission of easy sins, but to tell the same thing on one's knees,
+accusing oneself, after prayer, is different, that which was only
+rather
+amusing becomes a very painful humiliation, for the soul is not the
+dupe
+of this false seeming, it knows so well in its inner tribunal that all
+is changed, it feels so well the terrible power of the Sacrament, that
+he who but now smiled, now trembles at the very thought.</p>
+<p>"Now, were I to find myself face to face with an old monk who
+emerges
+from an eternity of silence to listen to me, a monk who will not aid
+me,
+perhaps cannot even understand me, this will be terrible. I shall never
+get to the end of my troubles if he does not hold out a staff to me, if
+he lets me stifle and gives no air to my soul, nor brings me help.</p>
+<p>"The Eucharist also seems terrible. To dare to come forward,
+to offer
+Him as a tabernacle the sewer of self scarce purified by repentance, a
+sewer drained by absolution, but still hardly dry, is monstrous. I am
+quite without such courage as to offer Christ this last insult, and so
+there is no good in fleeing to a monastery.</p>
+<p>"No; the more I think of it, the more I am obliged to conclude
+that I
+should be mad if I ventured into a Trappist house.</p>
+<p>"Now for the Credit side. The only proper work of my life
+would be to
+make a parcel of my life, and take it to a cloister to disinfect it,
+and
+if that cost me nothing, where is the merit?</p>
+<p>"Nothing shows me, on the other hand, that my body, however
+weakened,
+cannot support the regimen of La Trappe. Without believing or
+pretending
+to believe with the Abbé Gévresin that that kind of food will be even
+helpful to me, I ought to count on Divine consolations, to admit the
+principle that, if I am sent there, it is not that I may take at once
+to
+my bed, or be obliged to leave again as soon as I arrive&#8212;at least,
+unless that is the chastisement prepared me, the expiation demanded,
+and
+again no, for that would be to ascribe to God pitiless tricks, and
+would
+be absurd!</p>
+<p>"As to the cookery, it matters little that it is uncivilized,
+if my
+stomach can digest it; to have bad food, and get up in the middle of
+the
+night is nothing, provided the body can stand it, and no doubt I shall
+find some means of smoking cigarettes by stealth in the woods.</p>
+<p>"After all, a week is soon over, and I am not even obliged, if
+I feel
+poorly, to remain a week.</p>
+<p>"From the spiritual point of view, I must again count on the
+mercy of
+God, believe that it will not abandon me, will dress my wounds, and
+change the very foundation of my soul. I know well that these arguments
+do not rest on any earthly certainty, but yet if I have proofs that
+Providence has already taken part in my affairs, I have no reason to
+suppose that these arguments are weaker than the purely physical
+motives
+which served to support my other thesis. Now I must recall that
+conversion, so outside my will; I must take account of a fact which
+should encourage me, the weakness of the temptations which I now
+experience.</p>
+<p>"It is difficult to have been more rapidly and more completely
+heard.
+Whether I owe this grace to my own prayers or to those of the convents
+which have shielded me without knowing me, it is the case that for some
+time past my brain has been silent and my flesh calm. That monster
+Florence appears to me still at certain times, but she does not
+approach
+me, she remains in the shade, and the end of the Lord's Prayer, the 'ne
+nos inducas in tentationem,' puts her to flight.</p>
+<p>"That is an unaccustomed fact, and yet a precise one. Why
+should I
+doubt, then, that I shall be better upheld at La Trappe than I am in
+Paris itself?</p>
+<p>"There remain confession and communion.</p>
+<p>"Confession? It will be what the Lord chooses it should be. He
+will
+choose the monk for me; I shall only be able to make use of him; and
+then the more disagreeable it is, the better worth it will be; and if I
+suffer much, I shall think myself less unworthy to communicate.</p>
+<p>"That is," he went on, "the most painful point! Communicate!
+But let us
+consider, it is certain that I shall be base in proposing to Christ
+that
+He should descend like a scavenger into my ditch; but if I wait till it
+is empty, I shall never be in a state to receive Him, for my bulkheads
+are not closed, and sins would filter through the fissures.</p>
+<p>"All this well considered, the abbé spoke truth when he
+answered me one
+day: 'But I too am not worthy to approach Him; thank God, I have not
+those sewers of which you speak, but in the morning, when I go to say
+my
+mass, and think of all the dust of the evening, do you not think that I
+am ashamed? It is always necessary, you see, to go back to the Gospels,
+and say to yourself that He came for the weak and the sick, the
+publicans and lepers; and, in fact, you must convince yourself that the
+Eucharist is a lookout post, a help, that it is given, as it is written
+in the ordinary of the Mass "ad tutamentum mentis et corporis et ad
+medelam percipiendam." It is, if I may say so, a spiritual medicine;
+you
+go to the Saviour just as you go to a doctor, you take your soul to Him
+to care for it, and He does so!'</p>
+<p>"I stand before the unknown," pursued Durtal, "I complain that
+I am
+arid, and have wandered from the right way, but who will declare to me
+that, if I determine to communicate, I shall remain in the same mind;
+for indeed, if I have Faith, I ought to believe in the occult work of
+Christ in the Sacrament. Lastly, I am afraid of being wearied by
+solitude; I am not much amused here as it is, but at La Trappe I shall
+no longer have those vacillations at every minute, those constant
+fears;
+I shall at least have the advantage of having my time to myself; and
+then ... and then ... how well I know solitude. Have I not lived apart
+since the deaths of des Hermies and Carhaix? Indeed, whom do I see? A
+few publishers, a few literary men, and my relations with these people
+are not interesting. As to silence, it is a blessing. I shall not hear
+any foolish sayings at La Trappe; I shall not listen to pitiable
+homilies and poor sermons; but I ought to rejoice on being at last
+isolated, far from Paris, far from men."</p>
+<p>He was silent, and made, as it were, a return in upon himself;
+and said
+to himself, in a melancholy manner: "These strifes are useless, these
+reflections vain. I need not try to take account of my soul, to make
+out
+the debit and credit; I know, without knowing how, that I must go; I am
+thrust out of myself by an impulse which rises from the very depths of
+my being, to which I am quite certain I have to yield."</p>
+<p>At that moment Durtal had decided, but ten minutes afterwards
+the
+attempt at resolution vanished. He felt his cowardice gain on him once
+more, he chewed once more the cud of arguments against his moving; came
+to the conclusion that his reasons for remaining in Paris were
+palpable,
+human, certain, while the others were intangible, extra-natural, and
+consequently subject to illusions, perhaps false.</p>
+<p>And he invented for himself the fear of not obtaining the
+thing he
+feared, said to himself that La Trappe would not receive him, or
+certainly that it would refuse him communion; and then he suggested to
+himself a middle term: to confess at Paris and communicate at La
+Trappe.</p>
+<p>But then there passed in him an incomprehensible fact: his
+whole soul
+revolted at this idea, and the formal order not to deceive himself was
+truly breathed into him, and he said to himself: "No, the bitter
+draught
+must be drained to the last drop, it is all or nothing; if I confess to
+the abbé it will be in disobedience to absolute and secret directions;
+I
+should be capable of not going afterwards to Notre Dame de l'Atre.</p>
+<p>"What shall I do?" And he accused himself of distrust, called
+to his aid
+once more the memory of benefits received, how scales had fallen from
+his eyes, his insensible progress towards Faith, his encounter with
+that
+singular priest, perhaps the only one who could understand him, and
+treat him in a way so benign and so elastic; but he tried in vain to
+reassure himself, then he called up the dream of the monastic life, the
+sovereign beauty of the cloister; he imagined the joy of renunciation,
+the peace of exalted prayers, the interior intoxication of the spirit,
+the delight of not being at home any longer in his own body. Some words
+of the abbé about La Trappe served as a spring-board for his dreams,
+and
+he perceived an old abbey, grey and warm, immense avenues of trees,
+clouds flying confusedly amid the song of waters, silent strolls in the
+woods at nightfall; he called up the solemn liturgies of Saint
+Benedict's time; he saw the white pith of monastic chants rise under
+the
+scarcely pruned bark of sound. He succeeded in his decision, and cried:
+"You have dreamed for years of the cloisters, now rejoice that you will
+know them at last," and he wished to go at once and live there; then
+suddenly he fell down into reality, and said to himself: "It is easy to
+wish to live in a monastery, to tell God that you would desire to take
+shelter therein, when life in Paris weighs you down, but when it comes
+to the real point of emigration, it is quite another matter."</p>
+<p>He turned over these thoughts everywhere, in the street, at
+home, in the
+chapels. He hurried like a shuttle from one church to another, hoping
+to
+solace his fears by changing his place, but they persisted, and
+rendered
+every place intolerable.</p>
+<p>Then in the sacred places came always that dryness of soul,
+the broken
+spring of impulse, a sudden silence within, when he desired consolation
+in speaking to Him. His best moments, his pauses in the hurly-burly,
+were a few minutes of absolute torpor, which rested like snow on the
+soul and he heard nothing.</p>
+<p>But this drowsiness of thought lasted but a while, the
+whirlwind blew
+once more, and the prayers which were wont to appease it refused to
+leave his lips, he tried religious music, the despairing sequences of
+the psalms, pictures of the Crucifixion by the Early Masters, to excite
+him, but his prayers ran on and became confused on his lips, were
+divested of all sense, mere words, empty shells.</p>
+<p>At Notre Dame des Victoires, where he dragged himself that he
+might thaw
+a little under the warmth of his neighbours' prayers, he did in fact
+feel less chilly, and seemed to break up a little, fell drop by drop
+into sorrows which he could not formulate, and were all summed up in
+the
+cry of a sick child, in which he said to Our Lady, in low tones: "My
+soul is sorrowful."</p>
+<p>Thence he returned to St. Severin, sat down under those arches
+browned
+by the rust of prayers, and, haunted by his fixed idea, he pleaded for
+himself extenuating circumstances, exaggerated the austerities of La
+Trappe, tried almost to exasperate his fear to excuse his weakness in a
+vague appeal to Our Lady.</p>
+<p>"But I must go and see the Abbé Gévresin," he murmured, but
+his courage
+still failed him to pronounce the "Yes" which the priest would surely
+require from him. He ended by discovering a reason for his visit,
+without thinking himself obliged to promise just yet.</p>
+<p>"After all," he thought, "I have no precise information about
+this
+monastery; I do not even know whether it may not be necessary to take a
+long and expensive journey to get there; the abbé indeed declares that
+it is not far from Paris, but it is impossible to decide on this simple
+declaration; it will be useful also to know the habits of these
+cenobites before going to stay with them."</p>
+<p>The abbé smiled when Durtal mentioned these objections.</p>
+<p>"The journey is short," he said. "You start from the Gare du
+Nord at
+eight o'clock in the morning for Saint Landry, where you arrive at a
+quarter to twelve; you lunch at an inn close to the station, and while
+you are drinking your coffee they get you a carriage, and after a drive
+of four hours you arrive at Notre Dame de l'Atre for dinner. There is
+no
+difficulty there.</p>
+<p>"Then the cost is moderate. As far as I remember the railway
+fare is
+about fifteen francs, add two or three francs for lunch, and six or
+seven for the carriage ..."</p>
+<p>And as Durtal was silent, the abbé went on: "Well?"</p>
+<p>"Ah yes, yes ... if you knew ... I am in a pitiable state, I
+will and
+will not, I know well that I ought to take refuge there, but in spite
+of
+myself, I wish to gain time and put off the hour of departure."</p>
+<p>And he continued: "My soul is out of gear, when I would pray,
+my senses
+go all astray, I cannot recollect myself, and if I succeed in pulling
+myself together, five minutes do not pass but I am all astray again;
+no,
+I have neither fervour nor true contrition, I do not love God enough,
+if
+it must be said.</p>
+<p>"And, indeed, during the last two days, a frightful certainty
+has grown
+up in me; I am sure that, in spite of my good intentions, if I found
+myself in the presence of a certain person, whose sight troubles me, I
+should send religion to the devil, I should return eagerly to my vomit;
+I only hold on because I am not tempted, I am no better than when I was
+sinning. You will admit that I am in a wretched state to enter a
+Trappist monastery."</p>
+<p>"Your reasons are at least weak," answered the abbé. "You say
+first that
+your prayers are distracted, that you are unable to concentrate your
+attention; but in fact you are just like everybody else. Even Saint
+Teresa declares that often she was unable to recite the Credo without
+distraction, it is a weakness in which we must just take our portion
+humbly: above all things it is necessary not to lay too much stress on
+these evils, for the fear of seeing them return ensures their
+assiduity;
+you are distracted in prayer by the very fear of distraction, and by
+regret for it; go forth more boldly, look at things more widely, pray
+as
+best you can, and do not trouble yourself.</p>
+<p>"Again, you declare that if you meet a certain person whose
+attraction
+is a trouble to you, you will succumb. How do you know that? why should
+you take care about seductions which God does not yet inflict upon you,
+and which He will perhaps spare you? Why doubt His mercy? Why not
+believe, on the contrary, that if He judge the temptation useful, He
+will aid you enough to prevent your sinking under it?</p>
+<p>"In any case you ought not, by anticipation, to fear disgust
+at your
+weakness; the Imitation declares 'There is nothing more foolish and
+vain, than to afflict ourselves about future things which may perhaps
+never happen.' No, it is enough to occupy ourselves with the present,
+for 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,'&#8212;'sufficit diei
+malitia sua.'</p>
+<p>"Finally you say you do not love God; again I answer, what do
+you know
+about it? You have this love by the very token that you desire to have
+it, and that you regret you have it not; you love our Lord by the very
+fact that you desire to love Him."</p>
+<p>"That is special pleading," murmured Durtal. "But indeed," he
+went on,
+"suppose at La Trappe, the monk revolted at the long outrage of my
+sins,
+refused me absolution, and forbade me to communicate."</p>
+<p>The abbé burst out laughing.</p>
+<p>"You are mad! What is your notion of Christ?"</p>
+<p>"Not of Christ, but of His intermediary the human being who
+replaces
+Him."</p>
+<p>"You can only chance upon a man pointed out beforehand from
+above to
+judge you; moreover, at Notre Dame de l'Atre you have every chance of
+kneeling at the feet of a saint, therefore God will inspire him, will
+be
+present, you have nothing to fear.</p>
+<p>"As to the Communion, the prospect of being rejected terrifies
+you, but
+is not that one proof the more that, contrary to your opinion, God does
+not leave you insensible?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, but the idea of communicating alarms me none the less."</p>
+<p>"I say to you again: if Jesus were indifferent to you, it
+would be just
+the same to you, to consume or not to consume the sacred species."</p>
+<p>"All that does not convince me," sighed Durtal. "I do not know
+where I
+am; I am afraid of a confessor, of others, of myself; it is foolish,
+but
+it is stronger than I. I cannot gain the upper hand."</p>
+<p>"You are afraid of the water; imitate Gribouille, throw
+yourself in
+boldly; look, suppose I write to La Trappe this very day to say you are
+coming; when?"</p>
+<p>"Oh!" cried Durtal, "wait a while."</p>
+<p>"To get an answer, we need two days each way; will you go
+there five
+days hence?"</p>
+<p>And, as Durtal was astounded and silent,</p>
+<p>"Is that settled?"</p>
+<p>Then, at that moment, Durtal had a strange experience, as
+often at St.
+Severin, a sort of caressing touch and gentle push; he felt a will
+insinuate itself into his own, and he drew back disquieted at seeing he
+had a double self, to find he was no longer alone in the depth of his
+being; then he was inexplicably reassured, and gave himself up, and as
+soon as he had said "Yes" he felt immensely relieved; then passing from
+one extreme to the other, he was troubled at the idea that his
+departure
+could not take place at once, and was sorry that he had still to pass
+five days in Paris.</p>
+<p>The abbé laughed. "But the Trappists must have notice, it is a
+simple
+formality, for with a word from me, you will be received at once, but
+wait at least until I have sent this word; I will post it this evening,
+so have no anxiety, and sleep in peace."</p>
+<p>Durtal in his turn laughed at his own impatience. "You must
+think me
+very ridiculous," he said.</p>
+<p>The priest shrugged his shoulders. "Come, you asked me about
+my little
+monastery; I must try to satisfy you. It is very small, if compared
+with
+the grande Trappe at Soligny, or the establishments at Sept Fonds,
+Meilleray or Aiguebelle, for there are only about ten choir fathers,
+and
+about thirty lay brothers or 'conversi.' There are also a certain
+number
+of peasants who work with them, and help them to till their land, and
+make their chocolate."</p>
+<p>"They make chocolate!"</p>
+<p>"That surprises you. How do you think they live? Ah! I warn
+you, you are
+not going into a sumptuous monastery."</p>
+<p>"I like it so. But in regard to the stories of La Trappe, I
+suppose the
+monks do not greet each other with 'Brother, we must die,' and that
+they
+do not dig their graves every morning?"</p>
+<p>"All that is false. They take no trouble about their graves,
+and they
+salute each other silently, since they are forbidden to speak."</p>
+<p>"Then what am I to do if I need anything?"</p>
+<p>"The abbot, the confessor, and the guest-master have the right
+of
+conversing with the guests, you will have to do with them alone; the
+others will bow when you meet them, but if you speak to them they will
+not answer."</p>
+<p>"It is well to know that. What is their dress?"</p>
+<p>"Before the foundation of Citeaux, the Benedictines wore, or
+so it is
+supposed, the black habit of Saint Benedict; the Benedictines properly
+so-called wear it still, but at Citeaux the colour was changed, and the
+Trappists, who are a twig of this branch, have adopted the white robe
+of
+Saint Bernard."</p>
+<p>"Pray pardon all these questions, which must seem childish,
+but since I
+am about to visit these monks, I ought to be in some measure acquainted
+with the customs of their order."</p>
+<p>"I am wholly at your disposition," replied the abbé.</p>
+<p>Durtal asked him about the situation of the abbey itself, and
+he
+replied,</p>
+<p>"The present monastery dates from the eighteenth century, but
+you will
+see in the gardens the ruins of the old cloister, which was built in
+the
+time of Saint Bernard. In the Middle Ages there was a succession of
+Blessed in this convent; it is a truly sanctified land, fit for
+meditation and regret.</p>
+<p>"The abbey is situated at the bottom of a valley, according to
+the
+orders of Saint Bernard; for you know that if Saint Benedict loved the
+hills, Saint Bernard sought the low and moist plains wherein to found
+his convents. An old Latin line has preserved the different tastes of
+these two saints:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"'Bernardus valles, colles Benedictus amabat.'" </p>
+</div>
+<p>"Was it on account of his own personal liking, or for a pious
+end, that
+Saint Bernard built his hermitages in unwholesome and flat places?"</p>
+<p>"In order that his monks, whose health was enfeebled by the
+fogs, might
+have constantly before their eyes the salutary image of death."</p>
+<p>"The deuce he did!"</p>
+<p>"I may add at once that the valley in which Notre Dame de
+l'Atre rises
+is now drained, and the air is very pure. You will stroll by delightful
+ponds, and I may recommend you, on the borders of the enclosure, an
+avenue of secular chestnuts, where you may take some refreshing walks
+at daybreak."</p>
+<p>And after a silence the Abbé Gévresin continued,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Walk there a good deal, traverse the woods in all directions;
+the
+forests will tell you more about your soul than books: 'Aliquid amplius
+invenies in sylvis quam in libris,' wrote Saint Bernard&#8212;'pray and your
+days will seem short.'"</p>
+<p>Durtal went away from the priest's house comforted, almost
+joyful; he
+felt at least the solace of a fixed decision, a resolution taken at
+last. He said to himself that the only thing now to be done was to
+prepare himself as best he could for the retreat, and he prayed and
+went
+to bed for the first time for months with his mind at rest.</p>
+<p>But next day, when he woke, his mood changed, all his
+preconceived
+ideas, all his fears returned; he asked himself if his conversion were
+ripe enough to allow him to cut it separate, and carry it to La Trappe;
+the fear of a confessor, the dread of the unknown, assailed him afresh.
+"I was wrong to have answered so soon," and he asked himself, "Why did
+I
+say 'yes'?" The recollection of this word pronounced by his lips,
+conceived by a will which was still his own and yet other than his,
+came
+back to his mind. "It is not the first time that such a thing happened
+to me," he thought, "I have already experienced when alone in the
+churches unexpected counsels, silent orders, and it must be admitted
+that it is terrifying to feel this infusion into self of an invisible
+being, and to know that he can, if he choose, almost turn you out of
+the
+domain of your personality.</p>
+<p>"But no, it is not that, there is no substitution of an
+exterior will to
+one's own, for one's free will is absolutely intact; neither is it one
+of those irresistible impulses endured by certain sick persons, for
+nothing is more easy than to resist it; it is still less a suggestion,
+since, in this case, there are no magnetic passes, no somnambulism
+induced, no hypnotism; no, it is the irresistible entrance into oneself
+of a strange will, the sudden intrusion of a precise and discreet
+desire, a pressure on the soul at once firm and gentle. Ah! again I am
+incorrect, and play the fool, but nothing can describe that close
+pressure, which vanishes at the least movement of impatience&#8212;it is felt
+but cannot be expressed.</p>
+<p>"Its introduction is always attended by surprise, almost with
+anguish,
+since it does not make use of even an interior voice to make itself
+heard, and is formulated without the aid of words, all is blotted out,
+the breath which has thrilled you disappears. You would wish that this
+incitement should be confirmed, that the phenomenon should be repeated
+in order to be more closely observed, to try to analyze it and
+understand it, when lo! it is gone; you remain alone with yourself, are
+free not to obey, your will is unfettered and you know it, but you know
+also that if you reject these invitations you take on yourself
+unspeakable risks for the future.</p>
+<p>"In fact," pursued Durtal, "it is an angelic influx, a divine
+touch,
+something analogous to the interior voice so well known by the mystics,
+but it is less complete, less precise, and yet it is quite as certain."</p>
+<p>He ended his dreams concluding, "I am consumed and collared by
+myself,
+before being able to answer this priest, whose arguments would scarce
+persuade me, unless I had had this help, this unexpected succour.</p>
+<p>"But then, since I am thus led by the hand, what have I to
+fear?"</p>
+<p>He feared all the same, and could not be at peace with
+himself; then if
+he profited by the comfort of a decision, he was consumed for the
+moment
+by the expectation of his departure.</p>
+<p>He tried to kill time in reading, but he had to admit once
+more that he
+could not expect consolation from any book. None came even distantly
+into relation with his state of mind. High Mysticism was so little
+human, soared at such heights far from our mire, that no sovereign aid
+could be expected from it. He ended by falling back on the "Imitation,"
+in which Mysticism, placed within the reach of the crowd, was like a
+trembling and plaintive friend who stanched your wounds within the
+cells
+of its chapters, prayed and wept with you, and in any case
+compassionated the desolate widowhood of souls.</p>
+<p>Unfortunately, Durtal had read so much, and was so saturated
+with the
+Gospels, that he had temporarily exhausted their sedative and soothing
+virtues. Tired of reading, he again began his courses in the churches.
+"And suppose the Trappists will not have me," he thought, "what will
+become of me?"</p>
+<p>"But I tell you that they will receive you," said the abbé,
+whom he went
+to see. He was not easy till the day the priest handed him the answer
+from La Trappe.</p>
+<p>He read:&#8212;</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"We will receive with pleasure, for a week, in our guest-house
+the
+retreatant whom you wish to commend to us, and I do not see at the
+moment any reason why the retreat should not begin next Tuesday.</p>
+<p>"In the hope, Monsieur l'Abbé, that we shall also have the
+pleasure
+of seeing you again in our solitude, I beg to assure you that I am
+yours most respectfully, </p>
+<p class="quotsig">
+"<span class="smcap">F. M. Etienne,</span><br />
+"<i>Guestmaster.</i>"</p>
+</div>
+<p>He read and re-read it, at once delighted and terrified.
+"There is no
+further doubt; it is irrevocable," he said, and he went at once in
+haste
+to St. Severin, having less need of prayer than of going near to Our
+Lady; of showing himself to her, paying her, as it were, a visit of
+thankfulness, and expressing his gratitude by his very presence.</p>
+<p>He was taken by the charms of that church, its silence, the
+shadow which
+fell on the apse, from the height of its palm trees of stone, and he
+ended by caring for nothing and sinking on a chair, filled with one
+sole
+desire, not to enter again on the life of the streets, never to leave
+his refuge, never to move.</p>
+<p>The next day, which was a Sunday, he went to the Benedictine
+nuns to
+hear High Mass. A black monk celebrated; he recognized a Benedictine
+when the priest chanted "Dominous vobiscoum," for the Abbé Gévresin had
+told him that the Benedictines pronounced Latin like Italian.</p>
+<p>Though he was not inclined to like that pronunciation which
+took away
+from Latin the sonorous tones of its words, and turned after a fashion
+the phrases of that tongue into a ring of bells with their clappers
+muffled or their vases stuffed with tow, he let himself go, taken hold
+of by the unction, by the humble piety of the monk, who almost trembled
+with reverence and joy when he kissed the altar, and he had a deep
+voice, to which, behind the grating, answered the clear high voices of
+the nuns.</p>
+<p>Durtal panted, listening to the fluid pictures of the Early
+Masters
+sketch and form and paint themselves on the air; he was affected to his
+very marrow, as he had formerly been during High Mass at St. Severin.
+He
+had lost that emotion now in that church, where the flower of melody
+had
+faded for him since he knew the Benedictine plain song, and he now
+found
+it again, or rather he took it with him from St. Severin to this chapel.</p>
+<p>And for the first time he had a wild desire, a desire so
+violent that it
+seemed to melt his heart.</p>
+<p>It was at the moment of the Communion. The monk, elevating the
+Host,
+uttered the "Domine non sum dignus." Pale, with drawn features,
+sorrowful eyes, and serious mouth, he seemed to have escaped from a
+monastery of the Middle Ages, cut out of one of those Flemish pictures
+where the monks are standing in the background, while, before them,
+nuns
+are praying on their knees with joined hands, near the donors, to the
+child Jesus on whom the Virgin smiles, while lowering her long lashes
+under her arching brow.</p>
+<p>And while he descended the steps and communicated two women,
+Durtal
+trembled, and his desires went forth towards the ciborium.</p>
+<p>It seemed to him that if he were nourished on that Bread,
+there would be
+an end of all his dryness and all his fears; it would seem to him that
+the wall of his sins, higher and higher from year to year, and now
+barring his view, would roll away, and at last he would see. And he was
+in haste to set off for La Trappe, that he too might receive the Sacred
+Body from the hands of a monk.</p>
+<p>That mass gave him new strength like a tonic, he came out of
+the chapel
+joyful and firmer, and when the impression grew somewhat feebler in the
+course of hours, he remained perhaps less affected, but still resolute,
+joking in the evening with a gentle melancholy about his condition:
+"There are many people who go to Barèges or Vichy to cure their bodies,
+and why should not I go and cure my soul in a Trappist monastery?"</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER
+X.</h2>
+<p>"I shall make myself a prisoner in two days," sighed Durtal;
+"it is time
+to think about packing. What books shall I take to help me to live down
+there?"</p>
+<p>He searched his library, and turned over the mystical books,
+which had,
+by degrees, replaced profane works on the shelves.</p>
+<p>"I will not talk of Saint Teresa," he thought; "neither she,
+nor Saint
+John of the Cross, would be indulgent enough to me in solitude; I have
+need of more pardon and consolation."</p>
+<p>"Saint Denys the Areopagite, or the apocryphal book known
+under that
+name? He is the first of the Mystics, and perhaps has gone the furthest
+in his theological definitions. He lives in the rarefied air of the
+mountain tops, above the gulfs, on the threshold of the other world
+which he sees in part by flashes of grace, and he remains lucid,
+undazzled in the blaze of light around him.</p>
+<p>"It seems that in his 'Celestial Hierarchies,' in which he
+brings out in
+procession the armies of heaven, and shows the meaning of angelic
+attributes and symbols, he has already passed the limits assigned to
+man, and yet in his 'Divine Names' he ventures even a step further, and
+then he raises himself into the super-essence of metaphysics at once
+calm and stern.</p>
+<p>"He over-heats the human word to give it greater force, but
+when after
+all his efforts he endeavours to define the Indescribable, to
+distinguish those never to be confounded Persons of the Trinity who in
+their plurality never lose their unity, words fail on his lips, and his
+tongue is paralyzed under his pen; then tranquilly and without any
+astonishment he makes himself again a child, comes down from those
+heights among us, and in order to try and explain to us what he
+understands, he has recourse to comparisons with domestic life; and
+that
+he may explain the Trinity in Unity he notices how, if many torches be
+lighted in one hall, lights, though distinct, mingle in one, and are in
+fact no more than one.</p>
+<p>"Saint Denys," thought Durtal, "is one of the boldest
+explorers of the
+eternal regions, but he would be dry reading at La Trappe."</p>
+<p>"Ruysbröck?" he thought&#8212;"perhaps, and yet I hardly am sure&#8212;I
+might put
+him in my bag as well as for a cordial the little collection distilled
+by Hello; as for the Spiritual Marriages, so well translated by
+Maeterlinck, they are disconnected and obscure, they stifle me, this
+Ruysbröck oppresses me less. This hermit is singular, all the same, for
+he does not enter into us, but rather goes round about us; he
+endeavours, like Saint Denys, to arrive at God, rather in heaven than
+in
+the soul, but in wishing to take such a flight, he strains his wings,
+and stammers incomprehensibly when he comes down.</p>
+<p>"We will leave him behind, then. Now let us see. Saint
+Catherine of
+Genoa? Her discussions between the soul, the body, and self-love are
+unmeaning and confused, and when in her 'Dialogues,' she treats of the
+operations of the interior life, she is greatly below Saint Teresa and
+Saint Angela. On the other hand her Treatise on Purgatory is clear. It
+declares that she alone has penetrated into the spaces of unknown
+sorrows, and that she has disentangled and taken hold of the joys; she
+has in fact succeeded in reconciling two contraries which seemed
+eternally repugnant; the suffering of the soul in its purification from
+sin, and the joy of the same soul, which at the very moment it is
+enduring frightful torment experiences immense happiness, for little by
+little it draws near to God, and feels His rays attract it more and
+more, and His love inundate it with such excess, that it would seem the
+Saviour desires nought but only it.</p>
+<p>"Saint Catherine sets forth also that Jesus forbids heaven to
+none, that
+it is the soul herself who, deeming herself unworthy to attain it,
+flings herself by her own motion into Purgatory there to cleanse
+herself, for she has only one end, to re-establish herself in her
+primitive purity, only one desire, to attain her last end, by
+destroying herself, annihilating herself, losing herself in God.</p>
+<p>"This is a conclusive study," murmured Durtal, "but not that
+which would
+lead to La Trappe. We must try again."</p>
+<p>He touched other volumes in the book-cases.</p>
+<p>"Here, for instance, is one which obviously I should use," he
+went on,
+as he took down the "Seraphic Theology" of Saint Bonaventure, "for he
+condenses the means of self-examination, of meditation for communion,
+of
+thoughts on death, then in these 'Selections' is a treatise on the
+Contempt of the World, whose terse phrases are admirable; it is the
+true
+essence of the Holy Spirit, a jelly of unction firm set&#8212;we will put
+that on one side.</p>
+<p>"I shall hardly find a better help to remedy the probable
+weariness of
+solitude," murmured Durtal, turning over new ranks of volumes. He
+looked
+at the titles. "The Life of the Blessed Virgin," by M. Olier.</p>
+<p>He hesitated, saying to himself, "Under a style which is like
+water with
+scarcely the chill off, there are some interesting observations, some
+tasteful comments. M. Olier has in a way traversed the mysterious
+territory of hidden designs, and has there discovered the unimaginable
+truths which the Lord is sometimes pleased to reveal to His saints. He
+has made himself the liege-man of Our Lady, and living near her has
+made
+himself also the herald of her attributes, the legate of her graces.
+His
+Life of Mary is certainly the only one which seems really inspired and
+is possible to read. Where the abbess of Agreda wanders, he alone
+remains vigorous and clear. He shows us the Virgin existing from all
+eternity in God, conceiving without ceasing to be immaculate, like the
+crystal which receives and reflects the rays of the sun, yet loses
+nothing of its lustre, and indeed shines with greater brightness,
+bringing forth without pain, but suffering at the death of her Son the
+pangs she would have borne at His birth. Then he gives us learned
+dissertations on Her whom he calls the Treasure-house of all good, the
+Mediatrix of love and impetration. Yes, but to converse with Her
+nothing
+is so good as the 'Officium parvum beatĉ Virginis,' and that,"
+concluded
+Durtal, "I will put in my bag with my Prayer-book; we will not disturb
+M. Olier's volume."</p>
+<p>"My stock begins to give out," he continued. "Angela of
+Foligno?
+Certainly she is a brasier at which one may warm one's soul. I will
+take
+her with me. What more&#8212;Tauler's Sermons? I am tempted to do so, for
+never has any treated better than this monk the most abstruse subjects
+with a more perfectly lucid mind. By aid of familiar images, humble
+analogies, he has rendered accessible the highest speculations of
+Mysticism. He is homely and deep, then he borrows a little from
+quietism, and, perhaps, it will be no bad thing to absorb, down there,
+a
+few drops of that mixture. Yet on the whole, no; I have rather need of
+nerve tonics. As to Suso, he is a remedy far inferior to Saint
+Bonaventure, or Saint Angela. I put aside also Saint Bridget of Sweden,
+for in her conversations with heaven she seems aided by a God morose
+and
+tired, who reveals to her nothing unexpected, nothing new.</p>
+<p>"There is also Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, that voluble Carmelite
+whose
+work is a series of apostrophes. An exclamatory person, clever at
+analogies, expert in coincidences, a saint infatuated with metaphors
+and
+hyperboles. She talks directly with God the Father, and stammers out in
+ecstasy explanations of the mysteries revealed to her by the Ancient of
+days. Her books contain one sovereign page on the Circumcision, another
+magnificent one, entirely made up of antitheses, on the Holy Spirit,
+others, very strange, on the deification of the human soul, on its
+union
+with heaven, and on the part assigned in this operation to the wounds
+of
+the Word.</p>
+<p>"These are inhabited nests; the eagle which is the symbol of
+Faith
+resides in the eyrie of the left foot; in the hole of the right foot
+resides the melancholy sweetness of the turtle-doves; in the wound of
+the left hand the dove ensconces herself, the symbol of surrender, and
+in the cavity of the right hand reposes the pelican, the emblem of love.</p>
+<p>"These birds leave their nests and come to seek the soul that
+they may
+lead it to the nuptial chamber of the wound which bleeds in the side of
+Christ.</p>
+<p>"Was it not also that Carmelite nun who, ravished by the power
+of grace,
+despised so greatly the certitude acquired by the way of the senses, as
+to say to the Lord: 'If I saw Thee with mine eyes, I should have Faith
+no more, because Faith ceases where evidence comes in'?</p>
+<p>"All things considered," he said; "Magdalen of Pazzi, with her
+dialogues
+and contemplations, opens eloquent horizons, but the soul, snared in
+the
+bird-lime of its sins, cannot follow her. No; this saint cannot
+reassure
+me in the cloister.</p>
+<p>"Ah!" he went on, shaking the dust from a volume in a grey
+cover; "ah!
+it is true I have The Precious Blood, of Father Faber." And he began to
+dream as he turned over its pages where he stood.</p>
+<p>He remembered the impression, till now forgotten, produced on
+him when
+he read it. The work of this Oratorian was at least strange. The pages
+boiled over, ran forth tumultuously, carrying with them grandiose
+visions, such as Hugo conceived, developing historical perspectives
+such
+as Michelet loved to paint. In this volume was seen advancing the
+solemn
+procession of the Precious Blood, starting from the confines of
+humanity, from the origin of the ages, and it broke the bounds of the
+worlds, overwhelmed the nations, submerged history.</p>
+<p>Father Faber was less a mystic, properly so-called, than a
+visionary and
+a poet; in spite of the abuse of rhetoric transferred from the pulpit
+to
+a book, he tore up souls by roots, carried them away on the rush of the
+stream, but when one regained footing, and sought to remember what had
+been heard and seen, one could recall nothing; on reflection one
+recognized that the theme of the work was very thin, too slender to
+have
+been executed by so noisy an orchestra, and there remained of that
+reading something distracting and feverish which made you uneasy, and
+made you think that this kind of book had only very distant relation to
+the heavenly fulness of the great mystics.</p>
+<p>"No, not that," thought Durtal. "Now what have we selected? I
+keep the
+little collection of Ruysbröck, the Life of Angela of Foligno, and
+Saint
+Bonaventure, and the best of all for my state of soul," he said,
+striking his forehead. He went back to his book-case, and seized a
+little book, which lay alone in a corner.</p>
+<p>He sat down, and turned it over, saying, "Here is the tonic,
+the
+stimulant in weakness, the strychnine for failure of Faith, the goad
+which drives you in tears to the feet of Christ, the 'Dolorous Passion'
+of Sister Emmerich."</p>
+<p>She was no chemist of the spiritual being, like Saint Teresa;
+she had
+nothing to do with our interior life; in her book she forgot herself,
+and left us on one side, for she saw only Jesus crucified, and wished
+only to show the stages of His agony, and to leave marked on her pages,
+as on the veil of Veronica, the imprint of the Holy Face.</p>
+<p>Though she was of our time, for Catherine Emmerich died in
+1824, this
+great work dates from the Middle Ages. It is a picture which seems to
+belong to the early schools of Franconia and Swabia. This woman was the
+sister of the Zeitbloms and the Grünewalds, she had their clear
+visions,
+their vivid colouring, their wild scent; but she seemed to bring back
+also, by her care for exact detail, by her precise indication of
+places,
+the old Flemish Masters, Roger Van der Weyden and Bouts; she united in
+herself two currents, springing one from Germany, the other from
+Flanders, and this painting brushed in with blood, and varnished with
+tears, was transposed by her into a prose style which has no relation
+to
+any known literature, of which we can only find by analogy the ancestry
+in the panels of the fifteenth century.</p>
+<p>Moreover, she was quite illiterate, had never read a book, nor
+seen a
+painting; she told quite plainly what she saw in her ecstasies.</p>
+<p>The pictures of the Passion unfolded themselves before her
+while she was
+bed-ridden, crushed by suffering, bleeding from the wounds of her
+stigmata; she mourned and wept, brought to nothingness by love and
+pity,
+before the torments of Christ.</p>
+<p>According to her words, which a scribe took down, Calvary
+rose, and the
+whole rascaldom of the soldiers rushed at the Saviour and spat on Him;
+frightful episodes took place where Jesus, chained to a pillar,
+twisting
+like a worm, under the lashes of the scourgers, then falling, looking
+with His failing eyes, at the fallen women who held Him by the hand,
+and
+turned away in disgust from His lacerated body, from His face covered
+with threads of blood as with a red net.</p>
+<p>Then slowly, patiently, only stopping to sob, and cry for
+mercy, she
+described the soldiers tearing away the stuff which had stuck to the
+wounds, the Virgin weeping; her face livid and her lips blue, she
+related the agony of His bearing His Cross, how He fell on His knees,
+grew weaker and more worn when death came.</p>
+<p>It was a frightful spectacle, told in its every particular,
+forming a
+sublime and frightful whole. The Redeemer was extended on a cross laid
+on the ground, one of the executioners placed a knee against His side,
+while another spread His fingers abroad, and a third hammered in a
+flat-headed nail as broad as a crown, and so long that the point came
+out behind the wood. And when the right hand was riveted the torturers
+saw that the left would not reach to the place they intended to pierce,
+therefore they attached a rope to the arm, pulled it with all their
+force, dislocated the shoulder, and the cries of the Saviour were heard
+above the blows of the hammer, His breast was seen heaving, while His
+body was anguished and furrowed by terrible shuddering.</p>
+<p>The same scene was repeated to fix His feet. They also did not
+reach the
+place which the executioners had marked. The body had to be tied and
+the
+arms bound so as not to tear the hands from the wood, and then it was
+necessary to hang on the legs so as to lengthen them as far as the
+bracket on which they were to rest; all at once the entire body
+yielded,
+the ribs moved under the skin; the shock was so fearful, that the
+executioners believed that the bones would start, and burst the flesh,
+wherefore they made haste to rest the left foot on the right, but their
+difficulties began again, the feet turned over, and it was necessary to
+bore them with an auger to fasten them.</p>
+<p>This continued till Jesus died, when Sister Emmerich fainted
+from
+terror, her stigmata bled afresh, and her wounded head rained blood.</p>
+<p>In this book the whole pack of Jewish hounds was seen in full
+cry, the
+imprecations and shouts of the crowd were heard, the Virgin was shown
+trembling with fever, the Magdalen, beyond herself, was terrible by her
+cries, and towering above this lamentable group, Christ appeared, pale
+and swollen, His legs entangled in His robe, when He mounted to
+Golgotha
+clenching His broken nails on the cross as it slipped from His grasp.</p>
+<p>This extraordinary visionary, Catherine Emmerich, also
+described the
+surroundings of these scenes, the landscapes of Judĉa, which she had
+never visited, but have since been recognized as exact; without knowing
+it, without willing it, this illiterate woman became an unique and
+powerful artist.</p>
+<p>"Wonderful visionary, wonderful painter," cried Durtal, "and
+also
+wonderful saint," he added, running over the life of this nun, placed
+as
+a preface to the book.</p>
+<p>She was born in 1774, in the diocese of Münster, the child of
+poor
+peasants. From her infancy she had conversations with the Virgin, and
+possessed the gift which also was given to Saint Sibylline of Pavia,
+Ida
+of Louvain, and more recently to Louise Lateau, of discerning, when she
+looked at, or touched them, objects which had been blessed from those
+which had not. She entered, as a novice, the Augustinian convent at
+Dulmen, made her profession when she was twenty-nine; her health failed
+and incessant pain tortured her, which she increased, for, like Blessed
+Lidwine, she obtained from Heaven permission to suffer for others, and
+succour the sick by taking their maladies. In 1811, under the
+government
+of Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, the convent was suppressed and
+the nuns dispersed. Infirm and penniless, she was carried to a room in
+an inn where she had to bear every sort of curiosity and insult. Christ
+added to her martyrdom in giving her the stigmata for which she asked;
+she could neither rise, nor walk, nor sit, could take no food but the
+juice of a cherry, but she was transported by long ecstasies. In these
+she visited Palestine, following the Saviour step by step, dictated
+with
+groans this fond book, then said with her death-rattle, "Let me die in
+shame with Jesus on the Cross," and died overwhelmed with joy, thanking
+Heaven for the life of suffering she had endured.</p>
+<p>"Ah, yes; I will take the 'Dolorous Passion!'" cried Durtal to
+himself.</p>
+<p>"Take the Gospels also," said the abbé, who came in meanwhile;
+"they are
+the heavenly phials from which you will draw the oil you need to dress
+your wounds."</p>
+<p>"It will be equally useful, and truly in accordance with the
+atmosphere
+of La Trappe, to be able to read in the abbey itself the works of Saint
+Bernard, but they consist of unmanageable folios, and the abridgments
+and extracts in volumes of a more convenient form are so ill-chosen,
+that I have never had the courage to buy them."</p>
+<p>"They have Saint Bernard at La Trappe, and will lend you the
+volumes if
+you ask them; but where are you from the spiritual point of view? How
+are you getting on?"</p>
+<p>"I am melancholy, badly prepared and resigned. I cannot tell
+if
+weariness has come from my turning always on the same round, like a
+circus horse, but at this moment I am not suffering. I am persuaded
+that
+this change of place is necessary, and that it would be useless to
+hesitate. All the same," he said, after a silence, "it is very odd that
+I am going to imprison myself in a monastery, and in truth, in spite of
+myself, that astonishes me."</p>
+<p>"I will admit," said the abbé, laughing, "that when I first
+met you at
+Tocane's, I never thought I was pointed out to direct you to a
+monastery; ah, you see I must evidently belong to that category of
+people whom I may call mere bridges, involuntary brokers of souls who
+are imposed on you for a certain end which you do not suspect, and of
+which even themselves are ignorant."</p>
+<p>"Rather, if any one were a mere bridge in this matter,"
+answered Durtal,
+"it was Tocane, for it was he who brought us together, and we kick him
+away as soon as he has finished his unconscious task; it was evidently
+designed that we should know each other."</p>
+<p>"That is true," said the abbé, with a smile; "now I do not
+suppose I
+shall see you again before you start, for I go to-morrow to Mâcon,
+where
+I shall stay five days, time to see my nephews and to sign some law
+papers: at any rate keep up your courage, and do not forget to send me
+news of yourself. Write to me without much delay, that I may find your
+letter when I return to Paris."</p>
+<p>And as Durtal thanked him for his constant kindness, he took
+his hand
+and held it in his own.</p>
+<p>"Say nothing about that," he said; "you have only to thank
+Him, whose
+fatherly impatience has broken the obstinate slumber of your Faith; you
+owe thanks to God only.</p>
+<p>"Thank Him in getting rid of your nature as soon as possible,
+and
+leaving the house of your conscience empty for Him. The more you die to
+yourself the better will He live in you. Prayer is the most powerful
+ascetic means by which you can renounce yourself, empty yourself and
+render yourself humble in this matter; pray therefore without ceasing
+at
+La Trappe. Implore our Lady especially, for like myrrh which consumes
+the proud flesh of wounds, she heals the ulcers of the soul; I on my
+side will pray for you as best I can; you can thus in your weakness
+lean, so as not to fall, on that firm and protecting pillar of prayer
+of
+which Saint Teresa speaks. Once again, a safe journey to you; we shall
+meet soon again, my son, good-bye."</p>
+<p>Durtal remained much disturbed. "It is most tiresome," he
+thought, "that
+this priest is leaving Paris before me, for indeed if I have need of
+spiritual help or counsel, to whom shall I go? It is clearly written
+that I must end as I have begun, alone, but ... but ... solitude under
+these conditions is alarming. I am no spoilt child, whatever the abbé
+may say."</p>
+<p>Next morning Durtal awoke ill; furious neuralgia bored his
+temples like
+a gimlet; he tried to stop it with antipyrine, but this medicine in a
+large dose put his stomach out of order without abating the strokes of
+the machine which penetrated his skull. He wandered about his rooms,
+changing from one seat to another, coiling himself up in an arm-chair,
+getting up to lie down again, jumping from his bed in fits of sickness,
+upsetting his furniture from time to time.</p>
+<p>He could assign no precise cause for this attack; he had slept
+his fill,
+and had not exceeded in any way the night before.</p>
+<p>He thought, with his head in his hands, "There are still two
+days
+counting to-day before I leave Paris, and very fit I am for it! I shall
+not be in a state to travel by train, and if I travel, the food at La
+Trappe will finish me."</p>
+<p>He had a minute's comfort from the idea that through no fault
+of his own
+he might perhaps avoid his painful duty, and remain at home; but the
+reaction was immediate; he understood that if he did not go, he was
+lost; the vacillation of his soul had become chronic, the crisis of
+disgust of self, the acute regret of an effort consented to with pain,
+and suddenly missed, the certainty that it would only be postponed for
+a
+time, that he would have to pass again through alternations of revolt
+and terror, and begin again to fight with himself for conviction.</p>
+<p>"Admitting that I am not in a state to travel, I have always
+the
+resource of making my confession to the abbé when he returns, and of
+communicating in Paris," he thought, but he shook his head, saying to
+himself once more that he felt and knew that was not his duty. "But
+then," he said to God: "since Thou dost implant this idea in me so
+violently that I cannot even discuss it, in spite of its entire common
+sense&#8212;for after all it is not necessary to immure myself in a Trappist
+monastery in order to reconcile myself to Thee&#8212;then let me go!"</p>
+<p>And he spoke to God quietly.</p>
+<p>"My soul is an evil place, sordid and infamous; till now it
+has loved
+only perverse ways; it has exacted from my wretched body the tithe of
+illicit pleasures and unholy joys, it is worth little, it is worth
+nothing, and yet down there near Thee, if Thou wilt succour me, I think
+that I shall subdue it, but if my body be sick, I cannot force it to
+obey me; this is worse than all, I am disarmed if Thou do not come to
+my
+aid.</p>
+<p>"Take count of this, O Lord; I know by experience that when I
+am
+ill-fed, I have neuralgia; humanly, logically speaking, I am certain to
+be horribly ill at Notre Dame de l'Atre; nevertheless, if I can get
+about at all, the day after to-morrow, I will go all the same.</p>
+<p>"In default of love, this is the sole proof I can give that I
+truly
+desire Thee, that truly I hope and believe in Thee, but then, O Lord,
+aid me."</p>
+<p>He added sadly, "Ah! indeed I am no Lidwine or Catherine
+Emmerich, who
+when Thou didst strike them cried out, More, more!&#8212;Thou dost scarce
+touch me, and I protest; but what wouldest Thou? Thou dost know better
+than I; physical suffering breaks me down, drives me to despair."</p>
+<p>He went to sleep at last to kill the day in bed; slumbering to
+wake
+again suddenly from frightful nightmares.</p>
+<p>The next day his head seemed empty and his heart feeble, but
+his
+neuralgia was less violent. He rose, saying to himself that he must
+eat,
+though he was not hungry, for fear his pain should return. He went out
+and wandered in the Luxembourg, saying to himself that he must arrange
+his time, that after breakfast he would visit St. Severin, then he
+would
+go home and pack, and afterwards finish the day at Notre Dame des
+Victoires.</p>
+<p>The walk did him good, his head was lighter, and his heart
+free. He went
+into a restaurant, where because of the early hour nothing was ready;
+he
+spent the time before a newspaper, on a bench. How often he had held
+papers thus without reading them, how many evenings he had waited in
+cafés with his nose in an article, thinking of other matters, at those
+times especially when he was striving with his vices; when Florence
+appeared to him, still keeping the clear smile of a little girl on her
+way to school, her eyes cast down, her hands in the pockets of her
+apron.</p>
+<p>Suddenly the child changed into a ghoul who whirled round him
+wildly,
+and made him silently understand the horror of his desires....</p>
+<p>All that was now far distant; almost in one day the charm was
+broken,
+without any real strife or true effort, without inward struggles; he
+had
+abstained from seeing her, and now when she roused his memory again she
+was no more in fact than a recollection odious and sweet.</p>
+<p>"After all," thought Durtal, as he cut up his beefsteak, "I
+wonder what
+she thinks of me; she must certainly suppose me dead or lost; happily I
+have never met her, and she does not know my address.</p>
+<p>"Well," he went on, "there is no use in stirring the mud, it
+will be
+time to cleanse it when I am at La Trappe," and he shuddered, for the
+idea of the confessor again took root in him, and he was obliged to
+tell
+himself for the twentieth time that the expected never happens, and to
+declare that he should find some good fellow of a monk who would listen
+to him; then he was afraid again, putting things at their worst, and
+fancying himself turned out, like a mangy dog.</p>
+<p>He finished his breakfast, and went to St. Severin; there the
+crisis
+declared itself, the overcharged soul gave way, struck down by a
+congestion of sadness.</p>
+<p>He lay on a chair in such a state of depression that he could
+think no
+more, he remained inert without the power of suffering, till little by
+little the soul, recovered from its torpor, came to itself in a flood
+of
+tears.</p>
+<p>These tears gave him solace; he wept over his lot, thought
+himself so
+unhappy, so worthy of pity, that he hoped still more for help, yet he
+dare not address himself to Christ, whom he thought less accessible,
+but
+he spoke in low tones to the Virgin, murmuring that prayer in which
+Saint Bernard reminds the Mother of Christ that never in human memory
+was it heard that she abandoned any of those who sought her aid.</p>
+<p>He left St. Severin, consoled and more resolved, and, when
+once at home,
+was taken up with preparations for departure. Afraid that he would find
+nothing he wanted down there, he determined to stuff his portmanteau
+full; he crammed into the corners sugar, packets of chocolate, that he
+might try to deceive if needful the anguish of a fasting stomach, took
+towels thinking there would be few at La Trappe, prepared a stock of
+tobacco and matches; then besides books, paper, pencils, ink, packets
+of
+antipyrine, a phial of laudanum, which he wrapped in handkerchiefs and
+wedged into his slippers.</p>
+<p>When he had strapped his portmanteau, he said to himself,
+looking at the
+clock: "To-morrow at this time I shall be jolting in a cab, and my
+seclusion will be near at hand; never mind, I shall do well, in
+anticipation of bodily ailment, to ask for the confessor as soon as I
+get there, and suppose that turns out badly, I shall have time to make
+arrangements and take the train back at once.</p>
+<p>"All the same this will not prevent my having a wretched
+moment this
+evening when I enter Notre Dame des Victoires," but his anxieties and
+emotions vanished when the hour of Benediction came. He was seized by
+the giddy infection of the church, and he wrapped, steeped, and lost
+himself in the prayer which arose from all those souls, in the chant
+which went up from every mouth, and when the monstrance was brought
+forward to make its sign in the air, he felt a vast peace descend upon
+him.</p>
+<p>At evening as he undressed he sighed: "To-morrow I shall lie
+down in a
+cell, amazing when I think of it! I should have considered anyone mad,
+who, a few years ago, had prophesied that I should take refuge in a
+Trappist monastery; yet now I am going there of my own accord, and yet
+no, I am going driven by an unknown power, I am going as a whipped cur.</p>
+<p>"After all, what a symptom of the time it is! Society must
+indeed be
+unclean, if God has no longer the right to be hard, and is reduced to
+pick up what He finds, and to content Himself with gathering to Himself
+people like me!"</p>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<h2>SECOND PART.</h2>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_I" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER
+I.</h2>
+<p>Durtal awoke, gay and brisk, astonished at not hearing himself
+groan,
+when the moment had come in which he should set off for La Trappe; he
+was wonderfully reassured. He tried to recollect himself, and to pray,
+but he felt his thoughts more scattered and wandering than usual; he
+remained indifferent and unmoved. Surprised at this result, he tried to
+examine himself, and touched the void; he was slack that morning, in
+one
+of those sudden dispositions in which a man becomes a child again,
+incapable of attention, in which the wrong side of things disappears,
+and everything distracts.</p>
+<p>He dressed hastily, got into a cab, was too early at the
+station; and
+there experienced a perfectly childish attack of vanity. Looking at the
+people who hurried through the waiting rooms, thronged the ticket
+offices, or resignedly followed their luggage, he was not far from
+admiring himself. "If these travellers who think only of their
+pleasures
+or their business, knew where I am going," he thought.</p>
+<p>Then he reproached himself for the stupidity of these
+reflections, and
+as soon as he was settled in his compartment, in which he chanced to be
+alone, he lighted a cigarette, saying to himself, "Let us profit at
+least by the time there is still for smoking," and he began to wander,
+to dream about the position of the monastery, and rove about the
+neighbourhood of La Trappe.</p>
+<p>He remembered that a review had recently estimated the number
+of nuns
+and monks in France at two hundred thousand.</p>
+<p>"Two hundred thousand persons, who, in such an epoch, have
+understood
+the wickedness of the struggle for life, the filth of sexual relations,
+the horror of lyings-in, those are they who save the honour of the
+country," he thought.</p>
+<p>Then, passing at a bound from cloistered souls to the
+treatises he had
+put in his portmanteau, he went on: "It is, all the same, curious how
+completely the temperament of French art rebels against Mysticism!</p>
+<p>"All exalted writers are foreigners. Saint Denys the
+Areopagite was a
+Greek; Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Sister Emmerich, were Germans; Ruysbröck
+came from Flanders; Saint Teresa, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Marie
+d'Agreda, were Spaniards; Father Faber was English; Saint Bonaventure,
+Angela of Foligno, Magdalen of Pazzi, Catherine of Genoa, Jacopo de
+Voragine, were Italians....</p>
+<p>"Ah!" he said, struck by the last name he had cited, "I ought
+to have
+brought his Golden Legend in my bag; how was it I did not remember it,
+for that book is, in fact, the very crowning work of the Middle Ages,
+the stimulant for hours rendered languid by the prolonged uneasiness of
+fasting, the simple aid of pious vigils? For the most incredulous souls
+of our time, the Golden Legend at least still seems like one of those
+pure parchments, on which simple illuminators painted the faces of
+saints with gum water, or white of egg on golden backgrounds. Jacopo de
+Voragine is the Jehan Fouquet, the André Beaunevue, of literary
+miniature, of mystic prose!</p>
+<p>"It is quite absurd to have forgotten that book, for it would
+have made
+me pass precious days, like those of old, in La Trappe.</p>
+<p>"Yes, it is strange," he thought, returning on his thoughts,
+and coming
+back to his first idea; "France can count religious authors, more or
+less celebrated, but very few mystical writers, properly so-called, and
+it is just the same also in painting. The true Early Masters are
+Flemish, German or Italian, none are French, for our Burgundian School
+descended from the Flemish.</p>
+<p>"No, it cannot be denied, the genius of our race cannot easily
+follow
+and explain how God acts when He works in the central depths of the
+soul, which is the ovary of thought, the very source of conception; it
+is refractory at explaining, by the expressive power of words, the
+crash
+or the silence of grace; bursting forth in the domain which is wasted
+by
+sin, it is inapt at extracting from that secret world, works of
+psychology like those of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross,
+works
+of art, like those of Voragine or Sister Emmerich.</p>
+<p>"Besides that our field is scarcely arable, and our soil
+harsh, where
+shall we now find the labourer who sows and harrows it, who prepares
+not
+even a mystical harvest, but even any spiritual fruit, capable of
+assuaging the hunger of the few who stray and are lost, and fall from
+inanition in the icy desert of our time?</p>
+<p>"He who should be the cultivator of that land, the farmer of
+souls, the
+priest, has not strength to clear the ground.</p>
+<p>"The seminary has made him arbitrary and puerile, life outside
+has made
+him lukewarm. Therefore it seems that God has withdrawn Himself from
+him, and the proof of this is that He has taken away all ability from
+the priesthood. There are no priests now who have talent, either in the
+pulpit or in books; the laity have inherited that grace which was so
+common in the Church of the Middle Ages. Another example proves it
+still
+more, priests make so few conversions. In these days the being who
+pleases Heaven does without them, the Saviour Himself strikes him down,
+handles him, works directly on him.</p>
+<p>"The ignorance of the clergy, their want of education, their
+unintelligence of their surroundings, their dislike for Mysticism,
+their
+incomprehension of art, have taken away all their influence on the
+aristocracy of souls. Their only action is now on the childish brains
+of
+bigots and pretenders; and this is no doubt providential; it is better
+so, for if the priest became the master, if he succeeded in raising and
+vivifying the wearisome tribe he manages, it would be like a waterspout
+of clerical stupidity beating down on a country, would be the end of
+all
+literature and all art in France.</p>
+<p>"To save the Church there remains the monk, whom the priest
+detests, for
+the life of the cloister is a constant reproach to his own existence,"
+continued Durtal; "always supposing that my illusions are not again
+destroyed when I see a monastery ... but no, I am lucky; I have
+discovered in Paris one of those few abbés who is neither indifferent
+nor a pedant; why should I not, in an abbey, come into contact with
+authentic monks?"</p>
+<p>He lighted a cigarette, and looked at the landscape from the
+carriage
+window; the train was passing through fields in front of which the
+telegraph wires danced in puffs of steam; the landscape was flat and
+uninteresting. Durtal fell back sulkily in his corner.</p>
+<p>"The arrival at the convent disturbs me," he murmured; "since
+there are
+no useless words to proffer, I shall confine myself to giving his
+letter
+to the Father Guestmaster; ah! and then all will arrange itself."</p>
+<p>He felt, in fact, a perfect calm, and was astonished at not
+finding in
+himself any disgust or fear, at being almost in high spirits: "Well, my
+good priest was right in declaring that I was creating monsters in
+advance;" and he thought of the Abbé Gévresin, was surprised that long
+as he had visited him, he knew nothing whatever of his antecedents,
+that
+he was no more intimate with him than on the very first day; "In fact,
+it only rested with me to question him discreetly, but the idea never
+entered my head: it is true that our intercourse has been strictly
+limited to matters of religion and art; this perpetual reserve does not
+create very thrilling friendships, but it institutes a sort of
+Jansenism
+of the affections which is not without charm.</p>
+<p>"In any case that ecclesiastic is a holy man; he has not even
+that
+manner at once caressing and reserved of other priests. Apart from
+certain gestures, his habit of rolling his arms in his cincture, of
+wrapping his hands in his sleeves, of liking to walk backwards when in
+conversation; apart from his innocent mania of interlarding his phrases
+with Latin, he does not recall either the attitude or the unfashionable
+speech of his brethren. He loves mysticism and plain song; he is
+exceptional, and therefore he must have been also carefully chosen for
+me in heaven.</p>
+<p>"Ah well! we must be getting near," he sighed, looking at his
+watch, "I
+am beginning to feel hungry; come, that is all right, we shall be at
+Saint Landry in a quarter of an hour."</p>
+<p>He strummed on the windows of the carriage, saw the fields and
+woods fly
+past, smoked a cigarette or two, took his bag from the rack, at last
+arrived at the station and got out.</p>
+<p>Close to the tiny station he recognized the inn of which the
+abbé had
+told him. He found a good woman in the kitchen who said, "All right,
+sir, sit down, they will put the horse to while you breakfast."</p>
+<p>He fed himself on uneatable things, they brought him a calf's
+head
+forgotten in a tub, some cutlets that were high, vegetables blackened
+with gravy from the stove.</p>
+<p>In his present mood he was amused at this infamous meal, fell
+back upon
+a thin wine which rasped his throat, and resignedly drank coffee which
+left a sediment of peat at the bottom of the cup.</p>
+<p>Then he climbed into a jolting car driven by a young man, and
+the horse
+went off at a smart pace through the village and into the country.</p>
+<p>On the way he asked the driver for some information about La
+Trappe, but
+the peasant knew nothing. "I often go there," he said, "but never
+enter,
+the carriage stays at the gate, so you see I can tell you nothing."</p>
+<p>They went for an hour rapidly through the lanes, and the
+peasant saluted
+a roadmaker with his whip, and said to Durtal,</p>
+<p>"They say that the eminets eat their bellies."</p>
+<p>And as Durtal asked what he meant,</p>
+<p>"They are idle dogs, they lie all the summer on their bellies
+in the
+shade."</p>
+<p>And he said no more.</p>
+<p>Durtal thought of nothing; he digested and smoked, dizzy with
+the
+rumbling of the carriage.</p>
+<p>At the end of another hour they came into the heart of the
+forest.</p>
+<p>"Are we near?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, not yet!"</p>
+<p>"Can we see La Trappe from a distance?"</p>
+<p>"Oh no, you must have your nose just over it to see it, it is
+quite in a
+bottom, at the end of a lane, like that," said the peasant, pointing to
+a grassy lane into which they turned.</p>
+<p>"There is a fellow coming from the place," he said, pointing
+out a
+vagabond, who was crossing the copse at a great pace.</p>
+<p>And he explained to Durtal that every beggar had a right to
+food and
+even to lodging at La Trappe; they gave them the ordinary fare of the
+community in a room close to the brother porter's lodge, but did not
+let
+them into the convent.</p>
+<p>When Durtal asked him the opinion which the villagers round
+about had of
+the monks, the peasant was evidently afraid of compromising himself,
+for
+he answered,</p>
+<p>"Some say nothing about them."</p>
+<p>Durtal began to be rather weary, when suddenly as they turned
+out of a
+lane, he saw an immense building below him.</p>
+<p>"There is La Trappe!" said the peasant, gathering his reins
+for the
+descent.</p>
+<p>From the height where he was, Durtal looked over the roofs,
+and saw a
+large garden, with thickets, and in front of them a formidable crucifix.</p>
+<p>Then the vision disappeared, the carriage again went through
+the wood,
+descending by zig-zag roads where the foliage intercepted the view.</p>
+<p>They came at last, by long circuits, to an open place, at the
+end of
+which rose a wall with a large gate in the middle. The carriage stopped.</p>
+<p>"You have only to ring," said the peasant, showing Durtal an
+iron chain
+along the wall; and he added,</p>
+<p>"Shall I come for you again to-morrow?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Then you remain here?" and the peasant looked at him with
+astonishment,
+turned about, and drove up the hill.</p>
+<p>Durtal remained as one crushed, his portmanteau at his feet,
+before the
+door; his heart beat violently; all his assurance, all his enthusiasm,
+had vanished, and he stammered: "What will happen to me within?"</p>
+<p>And with a swift feeling of dread, there passed before him the
+terrible
+life of the Trappists; the body ill-nourished, exhausted from want of
+sleep, prostrate for hours on the pavement; the soul trembling,
+squeezed
+like a sponge in the hand, drilled, examined, ransacked even to its
+smallest folds; and at the end of its failure of an existence, thrown
+like a wreck against this rude rock, into the silence of a prison, and
+the dreadful stillness of the tomb!</p>
+<p>"My God, my God, have pity upon me!" said he, as he wiped his
+brow.</p>
+<p>Mechanically he looked around, as if he expected some help;
+the roads
+were deserted and the woods were empty; no sound was heard in the
+country, or in the monastery.</p>
+<p>"At any rate I must make up my mind to ring;" and, his limbs
+sinking
+under him, he pulled the chain.</p>
+<p>The sound of the bell, hard, rusty, grumbling, sounded on the
+other side
+of the wall.</p>
+<p>"Get up and don't be a fool," he said to himself, as he heard
+the
+clatter of a pair of sabots behind the door.</p>
+<p>This opened, and a very old monk, clad in the brown cloth of
+the
+Capuchins, looked at him inquiringly.</p>
+<p>"I come to make a retreat, and I wish to see Father Etienne."</p>
+<p>The monk bowed, took up the portmanteau, and made a sign to
+Durtal to
+follow him. He went with bent head and short steps across an orchard.
+They reached a grating, passed on the right of the vast building a sort
+of dilapidated chateau, flanked by two wings advancing on a court.</p>
+<p>The brother entered the wing close to the grating. Durtal
+followed him
+along a corridor into which several grey doors opened; on one of these
+he read the word "Auditorium." The Trappist stopped before it, lifted
+the wooden latch, ushered Durtal into the room, and after some minutes
+he heard repeated calls on the bell.</p>
+<p>Durtal sat down and looked at this gloomy chamber, for the
+window was
+half closed by shutters. There was little furniture; the most important
+a dining-table with an old cover; in the corner, a "prie-Dieu" above
+which was nailed a figure of Saint Antony of Padua rocking the infant
+Jesus in his arms; a large crucifix on the other wall, and here and
+there were placed two high-backed chairs and four ordinary chairs.</p>
+<p>Durtal took from his pocket-book the letter of introduction to
+the
+father. "What sort of reception will he give me?" he asked himself; "he
+at any rate can speak; well, we shall soon see," he said, as he heard
+steps.</p>
+<p>A monk in white with a black scapular whose two ends fell, one
+on his
+shoulders, the other on his breast, appeared; he was young and smiling.</p>
+<p>He read the letter, then he took Durtal's hand, and led him in
+silent
+astonishment across the court to the other wing of the building, opened
+a door, dipped his finger in a holy-water stoup, and offered it to him.</p>
+<p>They were in a chapel. The monk invited Durtal by a sign to
+kneel on a
+step before the altar, and he prayed in a low voice; he then rose,
+returned slowly to the threshold, offered Durtal holy water again,
+still
+without opening his lips, and leading him by the hand they went the way
+they came to the Auditorium.</p>
+<p>There, he inquired after the health of the Abbé Gévresin,
+seized the
+portmanteau, and mounted an immense staircase falling into ruin. At the
+top of this staircase, which had only one story, there extended a vast
+landing bounded at each of its extremities by a door.</p>
+<p>Father Etienne entered that on the right, crossed a broad
+vestibule, and
+led Durtal into a room, which a ticket printed in large letters placed
+under the invocation of St. Benedict, and said, "I am sorry, sir, to be
+only able to put at your disposal this room, which is not very
+comfortable."</p>
+<p>"But it will do very well," said Durtal, "and the view is
+charming," he
+continued, approaching the window.</p>
+<p>"At least you will be in good air," said the monk, opening the
+casement.</p>
+<p>Below stretched the orchard through which Durtal had passed
+under the
+conduct of the brother porter. An enclosure full of apple trees stunted
+and clipped, silvered by lichens, and gilt by moss; then beyond the
+monastery, and above the walls, rose fields of clover intersected by a
+great white road, extending to the horizon, which was notched by the
+foliage of trees.</p>
+<p>"You will see, sir," Father Etienne went on, "if you need
+anything in
+this cell, and tell me quite simply, will you not? for otherwise we
+should heap up regret for both of us, for you who have only to ask for
+what might be useful to you, for me who should only discover it later
+and be sorry for my forgetfulness."</p>
+<p>Durtal looked at him reassured by this frank greeting; he was
+a young
+priest, about thirty years old. His face bright, and finely cut, was
+streaked with red fibres on the cheeks; this monk wore a beard, and
+round his shaven head was a crown of brown hair. He spoke somewhat
+rapidly, and smiled, with his hands pushed into the large leathern belt
+round his waist. "I will come back directly, for I have some important
+work to finish," he said; "try to make yourself at home as much as
+possible, and if you have time glance over the rule which you have to
+follow in this monastery&#8212;it is written on one of these cards on the
+table; we will talk about it after you have mastered it, if you like."</p>
+<p>And he left Durtal alone.</p>
+<p>He soon made an inventory of the room; it was very high and
+extremely
+narrow like a gun-barrel, the door was at one end, the window at the
+other.</p>
+<p>At the bottom, in a corner, near the casement, was a little
+iron bed,
+and a small round table in chestnut wood. At the foot of the bed which
+stood along the wall was a prie-Dieu in faded rep, upon which was a
+crucifix, and a branch of dried fir below it; on the same side was a
+table of white wood covered with a towel, on which were placed an ewer,
+a basin, and a glass. On the opposite wall was a wardrobe, and by the
+fireplace, on the mantelpiece of which a crucifix was placed, was a
+table opposite the bed near the window; three straw chairs completed
+the
+furniture of this room. "I shall never have water enough to wash in,"
+thought Durtal, gauging the miniature jug, which held about a pint;
+"since Father Etienne shows himself so obliging, I must ask him for a
+larger ration." He unpacked his portmanteau, undressed, put on flannel
+instead of his starched shirt, arranged his toilet things on the
+washing-stand, folded his linen in the wardrobe; then sat down, looked
+around the cell, and thought it sufficiently comfortable, and above all
+very clean. He then went towards the table on which were laid a ream of
+ruled paper, an inkstand, and some pens; he was grateful for this
+attention of the monk, who knew no doubt by the Abbé Gévresin's letter
+that his business was writing, opened two volumes bound in leather and
+shut them again. The one was "The Introduction to the Devout Life," by
+Saint Francis de Sales, the other was "Manresa," or "The Spiritual
+Exercises" of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and he arranged his own books
+on
+the table.</p>
+<p>Then he took up, just as it came, one of the cards spread on
+the table
+and read:&#8212;</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Exercises of the Community for ordinary days&#8212;from Easter to
+the
+Invention of the Cross in September. </p>
+<ul class="list">
+<li>Rise. 2.</li>
+<li>Prime and Mass.&nbsp;5.15.</li>
+<li>Work after the Chapter.</li>
+<li>End of work and leisure time.&nbsp; 9.</li>
+<li>Sext.&nbsp; 11.</li>
+<li>Angelus and Dinner.&nbsp; 11.30.</li>
+<li>Siesta after Dinner.</li>
+<li>End of Siesta.&nbsp;1.30.</li>
+<li>None and work, five minutes after waking.</li>
+<li>End of work and leisure.&nbsp; 4.30.</li>
+<li>Vespers followed by prayer.&nbsp; 5.15.</li>
+<li>Supper and leisure.&nbsp; 6.</li>
+<li>Compline.&nbsp; 7.25.</li>
+<li>Retire to rest.&nbsp;8."</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+<p>He turned the card, and on the other side was a new horary,
+entitled:&#8212;</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Winter Exercises, from the Invention of the Cross in
+September to
+Easter." </p>
+</div>
+<p>The hour of rising was the same, but bed-time was an hour
+earlier;
+dinner was changed from 11.30 to 2; siesta and supper at 6 o'clock were
+suppressed; the canonical hours were the same, except vespers and
+compline, which were changed from 5.15 and 7.25 to 4.30 and 6.15.</p>
+<p>"It is not pleasant to drag oneself from bed in the middle of
+the
+night," sighed Durtal, "but I am inclined to think that the Retreatants
+are not subject to this rule of wakefulness," and he took up another
+card. "This must be the one intended for me," he said, reading the head
+of the card:&#8212;</p>
+<p>Rules of Retreat from Easter to the Invention of the Cross in
+September.</p>
+<p>Let us look at these rules rather more closely.</p>
+<p>He examined the two tables, brought together, one for the
+morning, and
+one for the evening.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Morning</span>.</p>
+<br />
+<table summary="" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">4.</td>
+<td align="left">Rise at the Angelus bell.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">4.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Prayer and Meditation.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">5.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Prime and Mass.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">6-7.</td>
+<td align="left">Examination of Conscience.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.</td>
+<td align="left">Breakfast.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Way of the Cross.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">8.</td>
+<td align="left">Sext and None.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">8.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Second Meditation.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">9.</td>
+<td align="left">Spiritual Reading.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">11.</td>
+<td align="left">Adoration and Examination. Tierce.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">11.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Angelus. Dinner. Recreation.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">12.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Siesta. Absolute Silence.</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<br />
+<br />
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Evening</span>.</p>
+<br />
+<table summary="" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">1.30.</td>
+<td align="left">End of Siesta. Rosary.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">2.</td>
+<td align="left">Vespers and Compline.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">3.</td>
+<td align="left">Third Meditation.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">3.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Spiritual Reading.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">4.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Matins and Lauds.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">5.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Reflections. Choir Vespers.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">5.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Examination and Prayer.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">6.</td>
+<td align="left">Supper and Recreation.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.</td>
+<td align="left">Litanies. Absolute Silence.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Assist at Compline.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Salve Regina. Angelus.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.45.</td>
+<td align="left">Private Examination. Retire to rest.</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+</div>
+<p>"This at any rate is more practical&#8212;four o'clock in the
+morning is an
+almost possible hour, but I do not understand it, the canonical hours
+on
+this tablet do not agree with those of the monks, and then why these
+double Vespers and Compline? Lastly, these little points in which you
+are invited to meditate so many minutes, to read so many more, scarcely
+suit me. My mind is scarcely malleable enough to run in those
+channels&#8212;it is true that after all I am free to do as I please, for no
+one can verify what tricks I may play, can know, for instance, if I
+meditate....</p>
+<p>"Ah, here is again a regulation at the back," he went on, as
+he turned
+the card, "the regulation for September, I need not trouble myself
+about
+it, it differs, moreover, little from the other; but here is a
+postscript which concerns both horaries."</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Note</span>.</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Those who are not bound to say the Breviary will say the
+Little
+Office of the Blessed Virgin.</li>
+<li>The Retreatants are requested to make their Confessions at
+an
+early date, in order to have their mind more free for meditation.</li>
+<li>After each meditation an analogous chapter of the Imitation
+must
+be read.</li>
+<li>The best time for confessions and the Way of the Cross is
+from
+6-9 in the morning, 2-5 in the afternoon, and in summer from 9 in
+the morning till 5 in the afternoon.</li>
+<li>To read the table of notices.</li>
+<li>It is well to be punctual at meals to keep no one waiting.</li>
+<li>The Father Guestmaster alone is charged with providing for
+the
+wants of guests.</li>
+<li>Guests may ask for books for the retreat, if they have none
+themselves. </li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+<p>Confession! He saw this word only in the whole series of
+rules. He must
+at once have recourse to it. He felt a cold shiver down his back; and
+knew that he must speak to Father Etienne about it as soon as he
+returned.</p>
+<p>He had not long to wrestle with himself, for the monk entered
+almost at
+once and said,</p>
+<p>"Have you noticed anything you need, and the presence of which
+may be
+useful to you?"</p>
+<p>"No, Father; yet if you could let me have a little more water."</p>
+<p>"Nothing is easier; I will send you up a large pitcher every
+morning."</p>
+<p>"Thank you ... see, I have been studying the rules."</p>
+<p>"I will at once put you at ease," said the monk. "You are
+compelled to
+nothing but the strictest punctuality. You must follow the canonical
+offices to the letter. As to the exercises marked on the card, they are
+not of obligation; they may be useful, as they are laid down, for
+people
+who are very young and devoid of all initiative, but, as I think at
+least, they somewhat hamper others, and as a general rule we do not
+trouble the retreatants here, we let solitude act on them; it belongs
+to
+yourself to discriminate and distinguish the best mode of occupying
+your
+time holily. Therefore I will not impose on you any of the reading laid
+down on this card, and only take leave to get you to say the Little
+Office of the Blessed Virgin. Have you it?"</p>
+<p>"Here it is," said Durtal, holding out a bound book.</p>
+<p>"Your volume is charming," said Father Etienne, as he turned
+over the
+pages exquisitely printed in red and black. He paused at one of them,
+and read aloud the third lesson of Matins.</p>
+<p>"Is it not fine?" he cried. A sudden joy sprang up in his
+face; his eyes
+grew bright, his hands trembled on the cover. "Yes," he said, closing
+it, "read this office, here especially, for you know our true
+patroness,
+the true Abbot of the Trappists, is the Blessed Virgin!"</p>
+<p>After a silence he continued: "I have fixed a week as the
+duration of
+your retreat, in the letter I sent to the Abbé Gévresin, but I need not
+say that if you are not too weary here, you can stay as long as seems
+good to you."</p>
+<p>"I hope to be able to prolong my stay among you, but this must
+depend
+upon the way in which my body stands the struggle; my stomach is
+somewhat weak, and I am not without some fear; I shall, therefore, be
+much obliged to you if you will let me see the confessor as soon as
+possible."</p>
+<p>"Good; you shall see him to-morrow. I will tell you the time
+this
+evening, after compline. As for the food, if you think it insufficient,
+I will see that you have an extra egg, but there ceases the discretion
+I
+can exercise, for the rule is precise, no fish, no flesh&#8212;vegetables,
+and I am bound to admit they are not first rate.</p>
+<p>"But you shall judge, and, indeed, as it is just upon
+supper-time, I
+will show you the room where you will dine in company with M. Bruno."</p>
+<p>And as they descended the staircase, the monk went on: "M.
+Bruno is a
+person who has renounced the world, and, without having taken the vows,
+lives enclosed. He is what our rule calls an oblate, he is a holy and
+learned man, whom you will certainly like; you can talk with him during
+the meal."</p>
+<p>"Ah!" said Durtal, "and before and after I must keep silence?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, unless you have anything to ask, in which case I shall
+be always
+at your service, ready to answer you. As for that question of silence,
+as for those of the hours of rising and going to bed, and the offices,
+the rule allows no modification, it must be observed to the letter."</p>
+<p>"Good," said Durtal, a little taken aback by the decided tone
+of the
+Father, "but I saw on my card a note directing me to consult a table of
+regulations, and I have not that table."</p>
+<p>"It hangs on the wall of the staircase, near your room; you
+can read it
+when your head is rested to-morrow. Will you go in?" he said, opening a
+door in the lower corridor, just opposite that of the auditorium.</p>
+<p>Durtal bowed to an old gentleman who came to meet him; the
+monk
+introduced them and vanished.</p>
+<p>The dishes were on the table, two poached eggs, a bowl of
+rice, another
+of French beans, and a pot of honey.</p>
+<p>M. Bruno said grace, and proceeded to help Durtal.</p>
+<p>He gave him an egg.</p>
+<p>"This is a poor supper for a Parisian," he said, with a smile.</p>
+<p>"Ah, as long as there is an egg and wine it is bearable. I was
+afraid, I
+confess, that my only drink would be cold water."</p>
+<p>They talked as friends.</p>
+<p>The man was pleasant, and distinguished, with ascetic
+features, but with
+a bright smile, lighting up a grave face, yellow and wrinkled.</p>
+<p>He lent himself with perfect good grace to Durtal's inquiries,
+and told
+him, that after a tempestuous life, he felt that Grace had touched him,
+and he had retired from the world to expiate by years of austerities
+and
+silence his own sins and those of others.</p>
+<p>"And you have never grown tired of being here?"</p>
+<p>"Never, during the five years that I have spent in this
+cloister, time,
+cut up as it is at La Trappe, seems short."</p>
+<p>"You are present at all the exercises of the Community?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; I only replace manual labour by meditation in my cell;
+my position
+as oblate, however, dispenses me, if I so wish, from getting up at two
+o'clock to follow the night office, but it is a great joy to me to
+recite the magnificent Benedictine Psalter before daybreak&#8212;but you are
+listening to me, and eat nothing. Let me give you a little more rice."</p>
+<p>"No, thank you, but I will take, if you will allow me, a
+spoonful of
+honey.</p>
+<p>"The food is not bad," he said, "but I do not quite understand
+the same
+strange and identical taste in all the dishes; it smells, how shall I
+express it? like burnt fat or suet."</p>
+<p>"That is the warm oil with which the vegetables are dressed,
+you will
+soon grow accustomed to it, in a couple of days you will cease to
+notice
+it."</p>
+<p>"But in what consists, precisely, the part of an oblate?"</p>
+<p>"His life is less austere, and more contemplative than that of
+a monk;
+he may travel if he will, and though he is not bound by vows, he shares
+in all the spiritual advantages of the order.</p>
+<p>"In old times the rule admitted those whom it styled
+'familiars.'</p>
+<p>"Those were oblates who received the tonsure, wore a distinct
+costume,
+and pronounced the three greater vows; they led in fact a mitigated
+life, half layman, half monk. This rule, which still exists among the
+true Benedictines, has disappeared among the Trappists since the year
+1293, the date at which it was suppressed by the Chapter General.</p>
+<p>"At the present time, in the Cistercian abbeys are only the
+fathers, the
+lay brothers, the oblates, when there are any, and the peasants
+employed
+in field labour."</p>
+<p>"The lay brothers, I suppose, are those whose heads are
+completely
+shaven, and who are clothed in a brown habit, like the monk who opened
+the door to me?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; they do not sing office, and have only manual tasks."</p>
+<p>"By the way, the rule for retreat which I read in my room does
+not seem
+clear. As far as I recall it, it doubles certain offices, places Matins
+at four in the afternoon, and Vespers at two; in any case the horary is
+not the same as that of the Trappists; how am I to understand and
+reconcile them?"</p>
+<p>"You have only to take into consideration the exercises set
+out on your
+card; Father Etienne must, I think, have said so; that mould was only
+made for people who cannot occupy and guide themselves. That explains
+to
+you how, to prevent them from becoming idle, the priests' breviary has
+been in some degree taken to pieces, and their time has been
+distributed in small slices, so that, for instance, they may be obliged
+to recite the psalms for Matins at hours when there is no psalm."</p>
+<p>Dinner was over; M. Bruno said grace, and said to Durtal,</p>
+<p>"You have twenty minutes free from now to Compline; you can
+make
+acquaintance with the garden and woods." He bowed politely and went out.</p>
+<p>"I can smoke a cigarette," thought Durtal, when he was alone.
+He took
+his hat and left the room. Night was coming on. He passed through the
+great court, skirted a small building surmounted by a long
+chimney-stack, discovered by the smell that it was a chocolate factory,
+and entered an avenue of trees.</p>
+<p>The sky was so obscure that he could scarcely see the group of
+trees he
+entered, and not seeing anyone he rolled his cigarettes, and smoked
+them
+slowly, with enjoyment, consulting his watch from time to time by his
+cigar lights.</p>
+<p>He was astonished at the silence of the monastery; not a
+sound, however
+hushed, however distant, save now and then a gentle rustle of boughs;
+he
+went to the side whence the noise came, and saw a piece of water, on
+which a swan was sailing, which came towards him.</p>
+<p>He saw its white plumage oscillate against the darkness which
+it
+displaced with a splash, when a bell sounded with slow strokes; "Ah,"
+said he, looking again at his watch, "that is the hour of Compline."</p>
+<p>He went to the chapel, which was still empty; and he took
+occasion of
+the solitude to examine it at his ease.</p>
+<p>It was in the form of a truncated cross, a cross without a
+foot, rounded
+at the summit, holding out two square arms, with a door at either end.</p>
+<p>The upper part of the cross, below a cupola painted blue,
+formed a
+little circular apse, round which was a circle of stalls placed back
+against the wall; in the middle rose a great altar of white marble,
+surmounted by wooden chandeliers, flanked on the left and right by
+candelabra also of wood, placed on marble shafts.</p>
+<p>The lower part of the altar was hollow, and closed in front by
+a glass,
+behind which appeared a shrine in Gothic style, which reflected in its
+copper gilt mirror the light of the lamps.</p>
+<p>The apse opened into a large porch, with three steps in front,
+on the
+arms of the cross, which were prolonged into a kind of vestibule
+serving
+at once as nave and side aisles to this stumpy church.</p>
+<p>The hollowed arms, at their extremities near the doors, held
+two very
+small chapels set back in niches painted blue, like the cupola,
+containing above two stone altars without ornament, two mediocre
+statues, one of Saint Joseph, the other of Christ.</p>
+<p>Lastly, a fourth altar, dedicated to the Virgin, was situated
+in this
+vestibule opposite the steps leading to the apse, opposite therefore to
+the high altar. It was relieved against a window whose lights
+represented Saint Bernard in white on one hand, and Saint Benedict in
+black on the other, and it appeared to recede into the church, because
+of the two ranges of seats which stood on the left and right before the
+two other little chapels, leaving only room necessary to pass along the
+vestibule, or to go in a straight line from this altar of the Virgin in
+the apse, to the high altar.</p>
+<p>"This sanctuary is alarmingly ugly," said Durtal, who had sat
+down on a
+bench in front of the statue of Saint Joseph. "To judge by the few
+subjects carved along the walls, this edifice dates from the time of
+Louis XVI., an abominable date for a church."</p>
+<p>He was disturbed in these thoughts by the sound of bells, and
+at the
+same time all the doors were opened; one situated in the apse itself,
+on
+the left of the altar, gave passage to about half a score monks,
+wrapped
+in great white cowls, who spread out into the choir, and occupied the
+stalls on either side.</p>
+<p>Then, by the two doors of the vestibule, came a crowd of brown
+monks,
+who knelt at the benches on the two sides of Our Lady's altar.</p>
+<p>Durtal had some of them near him; but they bowed their heads,
+and joined
+their hands, he dared not observe them; moreover, the vestibule had
+become almost dark, the light was concentrated in the choir, where the
+lamps were kindled.</p>
+<p>He could make out the faces of the white monks in their stalls
+in the
+part of the apse he could see, and among them he recognized Father
+Etienne on his knees near a short monk; but another at the end of the
+stalls near the porch, almost opposite the altar, and in full light,
+attracted him.</p>
+<p>He was tall and strong, and looked like an Arab in his white
+burnous.
+Durtal could only see him in profile, and he distinguished a long grey
+beard, a shaven skull, surrounded by the monastic crown, a high
+forehead, and a nose like an eagle's beak. He had a grand appearance,
+with his imperious features, and his fine figure as it swayed under the
+cowl.</p>
+<p>"That is probably the abbot of La Trappe," thought Durtal, and
+he felt
+certain when this monk struck a little bell hidden under the desk
+before
+him, and directed the office.</p>
+<p>All the monks bowed to the altar; the abbot recited the
+opening prayers,
+then there was a pause, and, from the other side of the apse, which
+Durtal could not see, rose the frail voice of an old man, a voice which
+had returned to the clear tones of childhood, but was just a little
+cracked, growing higher as it declaimed the antiphon,</p>
+<p>"Deus in adjutorium meum intende."</p>
+<p>And the other side of the choir, that on which were Father
+Etienne and
+the abbot, answered, scanning the syllables very slowly, with voices of
+bass pitch,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Domine ad adjuvandum me festina."</p>
+<p>And all bowed their heads over the folios placed before them,
+and took
+up the words,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto."</p>
+<p>And they lifted their heads while the other part of the
+Fathers
+pronounced the response, "Sicut erat in principio, etc."</p>
+<p>The office began.</p>
+<p>It was not chanted but declaimed, now rapid and now slow. The
+side of
+the choir which Durtal saw made all the vowels sharp and short letters;
+the other, on the contrary, altered them all into long letters and
+seemed to cap all the Os with a circumflex accent. It might be said
+that
+one side had the pronunciation of the South, the other that of the
+North; thus chanted, the office became strange, and ended by rocking
+like an incantation, and soothing the soul which fell asleep in the
+rolling of the verses, interrupted by the recurrent doxology like a
+refrain after the last verse of each of the psalms.</p>
+<p>"Ah well, I cannot understand it," thought Durtal, who had his
+Compline
+at his fingers' ends, "they are not singing the Roman office at all."</p>
+<p>The fact is that one of the psalms was wanting. He caught
+indeed, at one
+moment, the hymn of Saint Ambrose, the "Te lucis ante terminum," sung
+to
+a simple and rugged tune of the old plain chant, and yet the last
+stanza
+was not the same; but he lost himself afresh, and waited for the "Short
+Lessons" and the "Nunc Dimittis" which never came.</p>
+<p>"Yet Compline does not vary like Vespers," he thought, "I must
+ask
+Father Etienne the meaning of this to-morrow."</p>
+<p>Then his reflections were disturbed by a young white monk, who
+passed
+him, genuflected to the altar, and lighted two tapers.</p>
+<p>Suddenly all rose, and with a great shout, the "Salve Regina"
+shook the
+arches.</p>
+<p>Durtal was affected as he listened to this admirable chant,
+which had
+nothing in common with that which is bellowed at Paris in the churches.
+This was at once flexible and ardent, sustained by such suppliant
+adoration, that it seemed to concentrate in itself alone, the
+immemorial
+hope of humanity, and its eternal lamentation.</p>
+<p>Chanted without accompaniment, unsustained by the organ, by
+voices
+indifferent to themselves and blending in one only, masculine and deep,
+it rose with quiet boldness, sprang up with irresistible flight towards
+Our Lady, then made, as it were, a return upon itself, and its
+confidence was lessened; it advanced more tremblingly, but so
+different,
+so humble, that it felt itself forgiven, and dared then in passionate
+appeals to demand the undeserved pleasures of heaven.</p>
+<p>It was the absolute triumph of the neumes, those repetitions
+of notes on
+the same syllable, the same word, which the Church invented to paint
+the
+excess of that interior joy or sorrow which words cannot render; it was
+a rush, a going forth of the soul, escaping in the passionate voices,
+breathed forth by the bodies of the monks as they stood and trembled.</p>
+<p>Durtal followed in his prayer-book this work with so short a
+text, so
+long a chant; and as he listened to, and read it with recollection,
+this
+magnificent prayer seemed to decompose as a whole, and to represent
+three different states of the soul, to exhibit the triple phase of
+humanity, during its youth, its maturity, and its decline; it was, in a
+word, an essential summary of prayer for all ages.</p>
+<p>First, there was the canticle of exultation, the joyous
+welcome of a
+being yet little, stammering forth respectful caresses, petting with
+gentle words, and fondness of a child who seeks to coax his mother&#8212;this
+is the "Salve Regina, Mater misericordiĉ, vita, dulcedo et spes nostra,
+salve." Then the soul so candid, so simply happy, has grown, and
+knowing
+the wilful failings of thought, the repeated loss through sin, joins
+her
+hands, and asks, sobbing, for help. She adores no longer with a smile,
+but with tears; it is "Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Hevae; ad te
+suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lachrymarum valle." At last old
+age comes; the soul lies, tormented by the memory of counsels
+neglected,
+by regret for lost graces; and having become weaker, and more full of
+fears, is alarmed before her deliverance, before the destruction of
+that
+prison of the flesh which she feels at hand, and then she thinks of the
+eternal death of those whom the Judge condemns. On her knees she
+implores the Advocatress of earth, the Consultrix of heaven; it is the
+"Eia ergo Advocata nostra; illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos
+converte; et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc
+exilium ostende."</p>
+<p>And to that essence of prayer composed by Peter of Compostella
+or
+Hermann Contract, Saint Bernard, in an excess of hyperdulia, added the
+three invocations at the end, "O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria,"
+sealing the inimitable prose with a triple seal, by those three cries
+of
+love which recall the hymn to the affectionate adoration of its
+beginning.</p>
+<p>"This is unprecedented," thought Durtal, as the Trappists
+chanted these
+sweet and eager appeals; the neumes were prolonged on the Os, which
+passed through all the colours of the soul, through the whole register
+of sound; and these interjections summed up again, in the series of
+notes which clothed them, the inventory of the human soul, which now
+recapitulated the whole body of the hymn.</p>
+<p>And suddenly at the word "Maria," at the glorious cry of that
+name, the
+chant fell, the tapers were extinguished, the monks fell on their
+knees,
+a silence like death came upon the chapel. The bells rang slowly, and
+the Angelus unfolded under the arches the separated petals of its clear
+sounds.</p>
+<p>All, now prostrate, their faces buried in their hands, were
+praying, and
+this lasted long; then the sound of the little hand-bell was heard,
+everyone rose, genuflected to the altar, and in silent file the monks
+disappeared through the door in the apse.</p>
+<p>"Ah! the true creator of plain music, the unknown author who
+cast into
+the brain of man the seed of plain chant, was the Holy Ghost," said
+Durtal, sick and dazzled, with tears in his eyes.</p>
+<p>M. Bruno, whom he had not noticed in the chapel, came and
+joined him.
+They crossed the court without speaking, and when they had entered the
+guest-house, M. Bruno lighted two candles, gave one to Durtal, and said
+gravely, "I wish you a good night, sir."</p>
+<p>Durtal went up the staircase behind him. They bowed again on
+the
+landing, and Durtal entered his cell.</p>
+<p>The wind blew under the door, and the room, scarcely lighted
+by the low
+flame of the candle, seemed to him gloomy, the high ceiling vanished in
+shadow, and rained down darkness.</p>
+<p>Durtal sat down by his bed, discouraged.</p>
+<p>And yet he was thrust forward by one of those impulses it is
+impossible
+to translate into words, in which it seems that the heart swells almost
+to bursting, and before his inability to get away and fly from self,
+Durtal ended by becoming a child again, by weeping without definite
+cause, simply from the need of relieving himself by tears.</p>
+<p>He sank down at the prie-Dieu, expecting he knew not what,
+which never
+came; then before the crucifix which stretched its arms above him, he
+began to speak to Him, and to say to Him in low tones:</p>
+<p>"Father, I have driven the swine from my being, but they have
+trampled
+on me, and covered me with mire, and the very stye is in ruins. Have
+pity on me, for I return from a distant land. Have mercy, O Lord, on
+the
+swine-herd without a house. I have entered into Thy house; do not send
+me away, be to me a kindly host, wash me."</p>
+<p>"Ah," he said suddenly, "that reminds me that I have not seen
+Father
+Etienne, who was to tell me the hour at which the confessor would
+receive me to-morrow; he has no doubt forgotten to ask him; so much the
+better. At any rate it will put it off for a day; my soul is so cramped
+that I have indeed need of rest."</p>
+<p>He undressed, sighing: "I must be up at half-past three to be
+in the
+chapel at four: I have no time to lose if I wish to sleep. If only I
+have no neuralgia to-morrow, and can wake before dawn!"</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_II" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER
+II.</h2>
+<p>He passed a most terrible night; it was so special, so
+dreadful, that he
+did not remember, in the whole of his existence, to have endured such
+anguish, undergone the like fears.</p>
+<p>It was an uninterrupted succession of sudden wakings and of
+nightmares.</p>
+<p>And these nightmares overpassed the limits of abomination that
+the most
+dangerous madness dreams. They developed themselves in the realm of
+lust; and they were so special, so new to him, that when he woke Durtal
+remained trembling, almost crying out.</p>
+<p>It was not at all that involuntary and well known act, that
+vision which
+ceases just at the moment when the sleeper clasps an amorous form; it
+was as and more complete than in nature, long and accomplished,
+accompanied by all the preludes, all the details, all the sensations,
+and the orgasm took place with a singularly painful acuteness, an
+incredible spasm.</p>
+<p>A strange fact, which seemed to point the difference between
+this state,
+and the unconscious uncleanness of night, was, beyond certain episodes
+and caresses which could only follow each other in reality, but were
+united at the same moment in the dream, the sensation clear and precise
+of a being, of a fluid form disappearing, with the sharp sound of a
+percussion cap, or the crack of a whip close by, on waking. This being
+was felt near him so distinctly, that the sheet, disarranged by the
+wind
+of the flight, was still in motion, and he looked at the empty place in
+terror.</p>
+<p>"Ah," thought Durtal, when he had lighted his candle, "this
+carries me
+back to the time when I used to visit Madame Chantelouve, and reminds
+me of the stories of the Succubus."</p>
+<p>He remained sitting up in bed, astonished, and looked with
+real
+uneasiness round the cell steeped in shadow. He looked at his watch, it
+was only eleven o'clock at night. "God," he said, "if the nights are
+always like this in monasteries!"</p>
+<p>He had recourse to bathing with cold water in order to recover
+himself,
+opened his window to change the air, and lay down again, thoroughly
+chilled.</p>
+<p>He hesitated to blow out his candle, uneasy at the darkness
+which seemed
+to him inhabited, full of ambushes and threats. He decided at last to
+extinguish it, and repeated the stanza he had already heard sung that
+evening in chapel:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza"><span class="i0">Procul
+recedant somnia<br />
+</span><span class="i0">Et noctium phantasmata,<br />
+</span><span class="i0">Hostemque nostrum comprime,<br />
+</span><span class="i0">Ne polluantur corpora.<br />
+</span></div>
+</div>
+<p>He ended by falling asleep and dreamt again of impurity, but
+he came to
+himself in time to break the charm, experiencing again the impression
+of
+a shadow evaporating before he could seize it in the sheets. He looked
+at his watch; it was two o'clock.</p>
+<p>"If this goes on, I shall be broken down to-morrow," he
+thought, but he
+succeeded somehow or other in dozing, and waking every ten minutes to
+wait for three o'clock.</p>
+<p>"If I fall asleep again, I shall not be able to wake at the
+moment I
+wish," he thought, "suppose I get up."</p>
+<p>He sprang out of bed, dressed, prayed, reduced his thoughts to
+order.</p>
+<p>Real excesses would have exhausted him less than these sham
+freaks, but
+what seemed to him especially odious was the want of satisfaction left
+by the completed rape of these ghosts. Compared with their greedy
+tricks, the caresses of a woman only diffused a temperate pleasure, and
+ended in a feeble shock, but with this Succuba one remained in a fury
+at
+having clasped only the void, at having been the dupe of a lie, the
+plaything of an appearance, of which one could not remember the form or
+the features. It necessarily brought with it the desire of the flesh,
+the wish to clasp a real body, and Durtal began to think of Florence;
+she at least quenched his desires, and did not leave him thus, panting
+and feverish, in quest of he knew not what, in an atmosphere where he
+was surrounded, spied upon by an unknown whom he could not discern, by
+a
+phantom he could not escape.</p>
+<p>Then Durtal shook himself, and would repulse the assault of
+these
+memories. "At any rate I will go and breathe the fresh air, and smoke a
+cigarette; we will see afterwards."</p>
+<p>He descended the staircase, whose walls seemed not to keep
+their place,
+and danced in the light of his candle, threaded the corridors, blew out
+his light, placed the candlestick near the auditorium, and rushed out.</p>
+<p>It was pitch dark; at the height of the first story a round
+window in
+the wall of the chapel cut a hole through the darkness like a red moon.</p>
+<p>Durtal took a few whiffs of a cigarette, and then made his way
+to the
+chapel. He turned the latch of the door gently; the vestibule into
+which
+he entered was dark, but the apse, though it was empty, was lighted by
+numerous lamps.</p>
+<p>He made a step, crossed himself, and fell back, for he had
+stumbled over
+a body; and he looked down at his feet.</p>
+<p>He had come upon a battle-field.</p>
+<p>On the ground human forms were lying, in the attitudes of
+combatants
+mowed down by grape shot, some flat on their faces, others on their
+knees, some leaning their hands on the ground as if stricken from
+behind, others extended with their fingers clenched on their breast,
+others again holding their heads or stretching out their arms.</p>
+<p>And from this group in their agony rose no groan, no complaint.</p>
+<p>Durtal was stupefied as he looked at this massacre of monks,
+and
+suddenly stopped with open mouth. A shaft of light fell from a lamp
+which the Father Sacristan had just placed in the apse, and crossing
+the
+porch, it showed a monk on his knees before the altar dedicated to the
+Virgin.</p>
+<p>He was an old man of more than four-score years; motionless as
+a statue,
+his eyes fixed, leaning forward in such an access of adoration, that
+the
+faces in ecstasy in the Early Masters seemed, compared with his, forced
+and cold.</p>
+<p>Yet his features were vulgar, his shaven skull, without a
+crown, tanned
+by many suns and rains, was brick-coloured, his eye was dim, covered
+with a film by age, his face was wrinkled, shrivelled, stained like an
+old log, hidden in a thicket of white hair, while his somewhat snub
+nose
+made the general effect of the face singularly common.</p>
+<p>But there went out, not from his eyes, nor his mouth, but from
+everywhere and nowhere, a kind of angelic look which was diffused over
+his head, and enveloped all his poor body, bowed in its heap of rags.</p>
+<p>In this old man the soul did not even give herself the trouble
+to reform
+and ennoble his features, she contented herself in annihilating them
+with her rays; it was, as it were, the nimbus of the old saints not now
+remaining round the head, but extending over all the features, pale and
+almost invisible, bathing his whole being.</p>
+<p>He saw nothing and heard nothing; monks dragged themselves on
+their
+knees, came to warm themselves, and to take shelter near him, and he
+never moved, dumb and deaf, so rigid that you might have believed him
+dead, had not his lower lip stirred now and then, lifting in this
+movement his long beard.</p>
+<p>The dawn whitened the windows, and as the darkness was
+gradually
+dissipated, the other brethren were visible in turn to Durtal; all
+these
+men, wounded by divine love, prayed ardently, flashed out beyond
+themselves noiselessly before the altar. Some were quite young, on
+their
+knees, with their bodies upright; others, their eyeballs in ecstasy,
+were leaning back, and seated on their heels; others again were making
+the way of the cross, and were often placed each opposite another face
+to face, and they looked without seeing, as with the eyes of the blind.</p>
+<p>And among these lay brethren, some fathers buried in their
+great white
+cowls lay prostrate and kissed the ground.</p>
+<p>"Oh to pray, pray like these monks!" cried Durtal within
+himself.</p>
+<p>He felt his unhappy soul grow slack within him; in this
+atmosphere of
+sanctity he unbent himself, and sank down on the pavement, humbly
+asking
+pardon from Christ, for having soiled by his presence the purity of
+this
+place.</p>
+<p>He prayed long, unsealing himself for the first time,
+recognizing his
+unworthiness and vileness so that he could not imagine how, in spite of
+His mercy, the Lord could tolerate him in the little circle of His
+elect; he examined himself, saw clearly, and avowed that he was
+inferior
+to the least of these lay brothers who perhaps could not even spell out
+a book, understood that the culture of the mind was naught and the
+culture of the soul was all, and little by little, without perceiving
+it, thinking only of stammering forth acts of gratitude, he disappeared
+from the chapel, his soul borne up by the souls of others, away, away
+from the world, far from his charnel-house, far from his body.</p>
+<p>In this chapel, the impulse had come at last, the going forth
+from self,
+till now refused, was at last permitted; he no longer strove with self
+as in the time when he escaped with so great difficulty from his
+prison-house, as at St. Severin or Notre Dame des Victoires.</p>
+<p>Then he again realized this chapel, where his animal part had
+alone
+remained, and he looked round him with astonishment; the greater part
+of
+the brethren had gone, one father remained prostrate before Our Lady's
+altar; he quitted it in his turn, and went back to the apse, as the
+other fathers entered it.</p>
+<p>Durtal looked at them; they were of all sizes and all kinds;
+one fat and
+bald, with a long black beard and spectacles, some little fair and
+puffy
+men, some very old, bristling with skin like a wild boar, others very
+young, with a vague air of German dreaminess, with their eyes under
+their glasses; and almost all except the very young had this feature in
+common: a large belly, and cheeks with little red streaks.</p>
+<p>Suddenly through the open door in the apse itself appeared the
+tall monk
+who had conducted the office the evening before. He threw back on his
+chasuble the woollen hood which covered his head, and assisted by two
+white monks went up to the high altar to say mass.</p>
+<p>And it was not one of those masses served as so many are
+cooked in
+Paris, but a mass slow, meditated, and profound, a mass where the
+priest
+takes long to consecrate, overwhelmed before the altar, and when he
+elevated the Host no little bell tinkled, but the bells of the
+monastery
+spread abroad their slow peal, brief dull strokes, almost plaintive,
+while the Trappists disappeared; crouched on all-fours, their heads
+hidden below their desks.</p>
+<p>When the mass ended it was nearly six o'clock. Durtal took the
+same way
+as the evening before, passed before the little chocolate factory, and
+saw through the windows the fathers wrapping up the tablets in lead
+paper, and in another room a tiny steam engine which a lay brother was
+directing.</p>
+<p>He reached the walk where he had smoked the cigarettes in the
+shade. So
+gloomy at night, it was now charming with its two rows of aged limes
+which rustled gently while the wind wafted to him their enervating
+scent.</p>
+<p>Seated on a bench, he could see at a glance the whole front of
+the
+abbey.</p>
+<p>Before it was a long kitchen garden, with here and there some
+rose trees
+spread over the blueish basins and large balls of cabbages, and the old
+house, built in the monumental style of the seventeenth century,
+extended, solemn and immense, with eighteen windows in a row, and a
+pediment, in the span of which was placed a mighty clock.</p>
+<p>It was roofed with slate, and surmounted by a ring of small
+bells, and
+was reached by a flight of several steps. It reached a height of at
+least five stories, though it had in reality only a ground and a first
+floor, but to judge by the unexpected height of the windows, the rooms
+had to accommodate their ceilings to the vast altitude of the church;
+on
+the whole the building was striking and cold, more apt, since it had
+been converted into a convent, to shelter the disciples of Jansen, than
+the sons of Saint Bernard.</p>
+<p>The weather was warm that morning; the sun was filtered
+through the
+moving sieve of foliage, and the daylight, thus screened, was changed
+to
+rose colour as it touched the white. Durtal, who was about to read his
+prayer-book, saw the pages growing red, and by the law of complementary
+colours all the letters printed in black ink grew green.</p>
+<p>He was amused by these details, and with his back to the
+warmth, he
+brightened up in this aromatic breeze, rested in this bath of sunshine
+from his fatigues of the night, when at the end of the walk he saw some
+of the brothers. They walked in silence, some carrying under their arms
+great round loaves, others holding milk cans, or baskets full of hay
+and
+eggs; they passed before him, and bowed respectfully.</p>
+<p>All had a joyous and serious aspect. "Ah, good fellows," he
+thought,
+"for they helped me this morning, it is to them I owe it that I could
+keep silence no longer, and was able to pray, to have at last known the
+joy of supplication which at Paris was only a snare for me! to them,
+and
+above all to Our Lady de l'Atre, who had pity on my poor soul."</p>
+<p>He sprang from his bench in an access of joy, went into the
+lateral
+walks, reached the piece of water he had partially seen the evening
+before; in front of it rose the huge cross he had seen at a distance
+from the carriage, in the wood, before he reached La Trappe.</p>
+<p>It was placed opposite the monastery itself, and turned its
+back upon
+the pond; it bore an eighteenth-century Christ, of natural size, in
+white marble; the pond also took the form of a cross such as is shown
+on
+the greater part of the plans of churches.</p>
+<p>This brown and liquid cross was spotted by duckweed, which the
+swan
+displaced as he swam.</p>
+<p>He came towards Durtal, with extended beak, expecting, no
+doubt, a piece
+of bread.</p>
+<p>Not a sound arose in this deserted spot, save the rustle of
+dry leaves
+which Durtal brushed as he walked. The clock struck seven.</p>
+<p>He remembered that breakfast would be ready, and he walked
+quickly to
+the abbey. Father Etienne was waiting for him, shook hands, asked if he
+had slept well, then said:</p>
+<p>"What would you like? I can only offer you milk and honey; I
+will send
+to-day to the nearest village and try to get you a little cheese, but
+you will have only a poor meal this morning."</p>
+<p>Durtal proposed to exchange the milk for wine, declaring that
+he should
+then do very well, and said, "In any case I should do ill to complain,
+for you are fasting."</p>
+<p>The monk smiled. "Just now," he said, "we are doing penance,
+on account
+of certain feasts of our order." And he explained that he only took
+food
+once a day, at two o'clock in the afternoon, after Nones.</p>
+<p>"And you have not even wine and eggs to keep up your strength!"</p>
+<p>Father Etienne smiled again. "One gets accustomed to it," he
+said. "What
+is this rule in comparison with that adopted by Saint Bernard and his
+companions, when they went to till the valley of Clairvaux? Their meal
+consisted of oak leaves, salted, cooked in muddy water."</p>
+<p>And after a silence the Father continued: "No doubt the
+Trappist rule is
+hard, but it is mild if we carry our thoughts back to the rule of Saint
+Pacomius in the East. Only think; whoever wished to join that order had
+to remain ten days and nights at the door of the convent, and had to
+endure spitting and insults; if he still desired to enter, he fulfilled
+a three years' novitiate, inhabited a hut where he could not stand up,
+nor lie at full length, ate only olives and cabbage, prayed twelve
+times
+in the morning, twelve times in the afternoon, twelve times in the
+night; the silence was perpetual, and his mortifications never ceased.
+To prepare himself for this novitiate, and to learn to subdue his
+appetite, Saint Macarius thought of the plan of soaking his bread in a
+vessel with a very narrow neck, and only fed on the crumbs which he
+could take out with his fingers. When he was admitted into the
+monastery, he contented himself with gnawing leaves of raw cabbage on
+Sunday. Ah! they could stand more than we. We, alas! have no longer
+souls nor bodies stout enough to bear such fasts; but do not let that
+stop your meal; make as good an one as you can. Ah, by the way," said
+the monk, "be in the auditorium at ten precisely, where the Father
+Prior
+will hear your confession."</p>
+<p>And he left the room.</p>
+<p>If Durtal had received a blow on his head with a mallet, he
+could not
+have been more overwhelmed. All the scaffolding of his joys, so rapidly
+run up, fell. This strange fact had occurred, in the impulse of joy he
+had felt since daybreak he had wholly forgotten that he had to confess.
+He had a moment of aberration. "But I am forgiven," he thought; "the
+proof is that state of happiness, such as I have never known, that
+truly
+wonderful expansion of soul which I experienced in the chapel and in
+the
+wood."</p>
+<p>The idea that nothing had begun, that all was still to do,
+terrified
+him; he had not the courage to swallow his bread, he drank a little
+wine, and rushed out of doors in a wind of panic.</p>
+<p>He went, wildly, with great strides. Confession! The prior?
+Who was the
+prior? He sought in vain among the fathers whose faces he remembered
+the
+one who would hear him.</p>
+<p>"My God!" he said, all at once, "but I do not even know how a
+confession
+is made."</p>
+<p>He sought a deserted corner, where he could recollect himself
+a little.
+He was striding along without even knowing how he came there, along a
+walnut-tree walk with a wall on one side. There were some enormous
+trees, he hid himself behind the trunk of one of them, and sitting on
+the moss, turned over the leaves of his prayer-book, and read: "On
+arriving at the confessional, place yourself on your knees, make the
+sign of the cross, and ask the priest for his blessing, saying, 'Bless
+me, Father, for I have sinned;' then recite the Confiteor as far as <i>mea
+culpa</i> ... and ..."</p>
+<p>He stopped, and without any need of probing it his life sprang
+out in
+jets of filth.</p>
+<p>He shrank from it, there was so much, of every kind, that he
+was
+overwhelmed with despair.</p>
+<p>Then by an effort of his will he pulled himself together,
+endeavoured to
+control and bank up these torrents, to separate them so as to
+understand
+them, but one affluent rolled back all the others, ended by
+overwhelming
+them, and became the river itself.</p>
+<p>And this sin appeared at first ape-like and sly, at school
+where
+everyone tempted and corrupted others; then there was all his greedy
+youth, dragged through tap-rooms, rolled in swine troughs, wallowing in
+the sinks of prostitution, and then an ignoble manhood. To his regular
+tasks had succeeded toll paid to his senses, and shameful memories
+assailed him in a crowd; he recalled to mind how he had sought after
+monstrous iniquities, his pursuit of artifices aggravating the malice
+of
+the act, and the accomplices and agents of his sins passed in file
+before him.</p>
+<p>Among all, at one time, there was a certain Mme. Chantelouve,
+a
+demoniacal adulteress who had drawn him headlong into frightful
+excesses, who had linked him to nameless crimes, sins against holy
+things, to sacrileges.</p>
+<p>"How can I tell all this to the monk?" thought Durtal,
+terrified by the
+remembrance; "how can I even express myself, so as to make him
+understand without defilement?"</p>
+<p>Tears rushed from his eyes. "My God, my God!" he sighed, "this
+is indeed
+too much."</p>
+<p>And in her turn Florence appeared with her little street-arab
+smile, and
+her childish haunches. "I can never tell the confessor all that was
+brewed in the perfumed shade of her vices," cried Durtal. "I can by no
+means make him face these torrents of pus.</p>
+<p>"Yet they say this has to be done;" and he bowed under the
+weight of the
+foulness of this girl.</p>
+<p>"How shameful to have been riveted to her, how disgusting to
+have
+satisfied the abominable demands of her desires!"</p>
+<p>Behind this sewer extended others. He had traversed all the
+districts of
+sin which the prayer-book patiently enumerated. He had never confessed
+since his first communion, and with the piling up of years had come
+successive deposits of sins. He grew pale at the thought that he was
+about to detail to another man all his dirt, to acknowledge his most
+secret thoughts, to say to him what one dares not repeat to one's own
+self, lest one should despise oneself too much.</p>
+<p>He sweated with anguish, then nausea at his being, remorse for
+his life
+solaced him, and he gave himself up; regret for having lived so long in
+this cesspool was a very crucifixion to him; he wept long, doubting
+pardon, not even daring to ask it, so vile did he feel himself.</p>
+<p>At last he sprang up; the hour of expiation must be at hand,
+in fact his
+watch pointed to a quarter to ten. His agony as he thus wrought with
+himself had lasted more than two hours.</p>
+<p>He hurriedly reached the main path which led to the monastery.
+He walked
+with his head down, forcing back his tears.</p>
+<p>He slackened his pace somewhat as he drew near the little
+pond; he
+lifted his eyes in supplication to the cross, and as he lowered them he
+met a look so moved, so compassionate, so gentle, that he stopped, and
+the look disappeared with the bow of a lay brother, who passed on his
+way.</p>
+<p>"He read my thoughts," said Durtal to himself. "Oh, this
+charitable monk
+has good reason to pity me, for indeed I suffer. Ah, Lord, that I might
+be like that humble brother!" he cried, remembering that he had seen
+that very morning the young tall lad, praying in the chapel with such
+fervour that he seemed to rise from the ground, before Our Lady.</p>
+<p>He arrived at the auditorium in a frightful state, and sank on
+a chair;
+then, like a hunted animal that thinks itself discovered, he sprang up,
+and, disturbed by his fears, moved by a wind of disorder, he thought of
+flight, that he would pack his bag, and make for the train.</p>
+<p>He mastered himself, undecided and trembling, his ear on the
+watch, his
+heart beating with great strokes, and he heard the sound of distant
+steps. "My God," he said, waiting for the steps that drew near, "what
+manner of monk is coming?"</p>
+<p>The steps were silent, and the door opened. Durtal in his
+alarm dared
+not look at the confessor, in whom he recognized the tall Trappist,
+with
+the imperious profile, whom he believed to be the abbot of the
+monastery.</p>
+<p>His breath was taken away, and he drew back without saying a
+word.</p>
+<p>Surprised at this silence, the prior said,&#8212;</p>
+<p>"You have asked to make your confession, sir?"</p>
+<p>And at a sign from Durtal, he pointed out the prie-Dieu placed
+against
+the wall, and himself knelt down, turning his back.</p>
+<p>Durtal braced himself, fell down at the prie-Dieu, and then
+completely
+lost his head. He had vaguely prepared how to enter on the matter,
+noted
+the points of his statement, classified his sins in some degree, and
+now
+remembered nothing.</p>
+<p>The monk rose, sat down on a straw chair, leant towards the
+penitent,
+his hand behind his ear to hear the better.</p>
+<p>He waited.</p>
+<p>Durtal wished rather to die than speak; he succeeded, however,
+in
+mastering himself, and bridling his shame; he opened his lips, but no
+word came; he remained overwhelmed, his head in his hands, repressing
+the tears he felt ready to fall.</p>
+<p>The monk did not move.</p>
+<p>At last he made a desperate effort, stammered the beginning of
+the
+Confiteor, and said,</p>
+<p>"I have not confessed, since my childhood; since then I have
+led a
+shameful life, I have ..."</p>
+<p>The words would not come.</p>
+<p>The Trappist remained silent, and did not assist him at all.</p>
+<p>"I have committed every kind of debauch, I have done
+everything ...
+everything ..."</p>
+<p>He choked, and the tears he had repressed flowed, he wept, his
+body was
+shaken, his face hidden in his hands.</p>
+<p>And as the prior, still bending over him, did not move,</p>
+<p>"But I cannot," he cried; "I cannot."</p>
+<p>All that life he could not bring out, stifled him; he sobbed
+in despair
+at the view of his sins, and crushed also at finding himself thus
+abandoned, without a word of kindness, without help. It seemed to him
+that all was giving way, that he was lost, repulsed even by Him who yet
+had directed him to this abbey.</p>
+<p>Then a hand was laid on his shoulder, while a gentle, low
+voice said,</p>
+<p>"Your soul is too tired for me to fatigue you with questions,
+come back
+at nine o'clock to-morrow, we shall have time before us, we shall not
+then be hurried by any office; from now till then, think of the story
+of
+Calvary; the cross, which was made for the sins of the whole world, lay
+so heavily on the shoulders of the Saviour, that His knees bent and He
+fell. A man of Cyrene passed by who helped the Lord to bear it. You, in
+detesting, in weeping for your sins, have alleviated and rendered
+lighter, if one may say so, the cross of the burthen of your sins, and
+having made it less heavy, have thus allowed Our Lord to lift it.</p>
+<p>"He has recompensed you by the most astonishing of miracles,
+the miracle
+of having brought you here from so far off. Thank Him, then, with all
+your heart, and be not discomforted. You will say to-day for your
+penance, the Penitential Psalms, and the Litany of the Saints. I will
+give you my blessing."</p>
+<p>And the prior blessed him and went out. Durtal raised himself
+up after
+his tears; what he feared so much had happened; the monk who would take
+him in hand was impassive, almost dumb. "Alas!" he thought, "my
+abscesses are ripe, but it needs the cut of a lancet to open them."</p>
+<p>"After all," he went on, as he went upstairs to bathe his eyes
+in his
+cell, "this Trappist was compassionate at last, not so much in what he
+said, as the tone in which he said it; then, to be just, he was perhaps
+confused by my tears; the Abbé Gévresin certainly did not tell Father
+Etienne that I was taking refuge in La Trappe in order to be converted,
+let us put ourselves in the place of a man living in God, far from the
+world, over whose head a shower bath is suddenly discharged.</p>
+<p>"Well, we shall see to-morrow;" and Durtal made haste to
+sponge his
+face, for it was nearly eleven o'clock and the office of Sext was about
+to begin.</p>
+<p>He went to the chapel, which was almost empty, for the
+brothers were
+working at that time in the chocolate factory, and in the fields.</p>
+<p>The fathers were in their places in the apse. The prior struck
+his bell,
+all signed themselves with a large cross, and on the left, where he
+could not see, for Durtal had taken the same place as in the morning,
+near Saint Joseph's altar, a voice arose:</p>
+<p>"Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum."</p>
+<p>And the other part of the choir answered:</p>
+<p>"Et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus."</p>
+<p>There was a moment's pause, and the pure thin voice of the old
+Trappist
+sang as before the office of Compline the evening before:</p>
+<p>"Deus in adjutorium meum intende."</p>
+<p>And the liturgy continued its course, with its "Gloria Patri,"
+etc.,
+during which the monks bowed their foreheads on their books, and with
+its series of psalms, accented in short tones on the one side, and long
+on the other.</p>
+<p>Durtal, as he knelt, allowed himself to be rocked by the
+psalmody, too
+tired to be able to pray himself.</p>
+<p>Then, when Sext was ended, all the fathers meditated, and
+Durtal caught
+a look of pity from the prior, who turned a little towards his bench.
+He
+understood that the monk implored the Saviour for him, and perhaps
+asked
+God to show him the way in which he might conduct himself on the morrow.</p>
+<p>Durtal rejoined M. Bruno in the court; they shook hands, and
+the oblate
+announced the presence of a new guest.</p>
+<p>"A retreatant?"</p>
+<p>"No; a curate from the neighbourhood of Lyons, he has come to
+see the
+abbot, who is ill."</p>
+<p>"But I thought the abbot of Notre Dame de l'Atre was the tall
+monk who
+led the office?"</p>
+<p>"Oh no; that was the prior Father Maximin, you have not seen
+the abbot,
+and I doubt if you will see him, for I do not think he will leave his
+bed before you go."</p>
+<p>They reached the guest-house, and found Father Etienne making
+excuses to
+a short fat priest for the poor fare he could offer.</p>
+<p>He was a jovial priest, with strong features moulded in yellow
+fat.</p>
+<p>He joked M. Bruno, whom he seemed to have known some time, on
+the sin of
+gluttony which must so often be committed at La Trappe, then tasted,
+pretending a chuckle of delight, the scentless bouquet of the poor wine
+he poured out, and lastly, when he divided with a spoon the omelette
+which was the main dish of their dinner, he pretended to cut up a fowl,
+and to be delighted with the fine appearance of the flesh; saying to
+Durtal, "This is a barley-fed fowl, may I offer you a wing?"</p>
+<p>This kind of pleasantry exasperated Durtal, who had no wish to
+laugh
+that day; he therefore was satisfied to make a vague bow, wishing to
+himself that the end of dinner was at hand.</p>
+<p>The conversation continued between the priest and M. Bruno.</p>
+<p>After it had spread over various commonplaces, it took a more
+definite
+form, in regard to an invisible otter which plundered the abbey ponds.</p>
+<p>"But, no doubt," said the curate, "you have found its lair?"</p>
+<p>"Never; it is easy to see in the lain grass the paths it
+traverses to
+get to the water, but we always lose its traces at the same spot. We
+have watched for days with Father Etienne, but it has never shown
+itself."</p>
+<p>The abbé explained various traps which might be set with
+advantage.
+Durtal thought of the otter-hunt which Balzac tells so pleasantly at
+the
+beginning of his "Paysans," when the dinner came to an end.</p>
+<p>The curate said grace, and said to M. Bruno, "Suppose we take
+a turn;
+the fresh air will do instead of the coffee, which they forget to give
+us."</p>
+<p>Durtal returned to his cell.</p>
+<p>He felt himself emptied, injured, cheated, reduced to a state
+of fibre,
+a state of pulp. His body, crushed by the nightmares of the night,
+enervated by the scene of the morning, needed entire rest, and if his
+soul had not still that infatuation which had broken it in tears at the
+monk's feet, it was sad and restless, and it also asked for silence,
+repose, and sleep.</p>
+<p>"Let us see," said Durtal, "I must not give way, let me bestir
+myself."</p>
+<p>He read the Penitential Psalms and the Litanies of the Saints;
+then he
+hesitated between two volumes of Saint Bonaventure and Saint Angela.</p>
+<p>He decided on the Blessed Angela. She had sinned and had been
+converted,
+and she seemed less far from him, more intelligible, more helpful than
+the Seraphic Doctor, than a Saint who had always remained pure,
+sheltered from falls. For she too had been a carnal sinner; she too had
+reached the Saviour from afar.</p>
+<p>A married woman, she lived in adultery and shame; lovers
+succeeded one
+another, and when she had exhausted them she threw them aside like
+husks. Suddenly grace rose in her and made her soul break forth; she
+went to confession, not daring to avow the more awful of her sins, and
+she communicated, thus grafting sacrilege upon her other faults.</p>
+<p>She lived, day and night tortured by remorse, and finally
+prayed to
+Saint Francis of Assisi to help her; and the next night the saint
+appeared to her. "My sister," he said, "if you had called on me sooner,
+I should have granted your prayer before this." The next day she went
+to
+church, heard a priest preaching, understood she must address herself
+to
+him, and laid all before him in a full confession.</p>
+<p>Then began the trials of an appalling life of purification. In
+blow
+after blow she lost her mother, her husband, her children; she went
+through such violent temptations to impurity that she was obliged to
+seize on lighted coals and cauterize the plague of her senses with fire.</p>
+<p>During two years the demon sifted her. She parted her goods
+among the
+poor, assumed the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis, gathered
+in
+the sick and infirm, and begged for them in the streets.</p>
+<p>One day a feeling of sickness came over her before a leper
+whose sores
+were stinking. To punish herself she drank the water in which she had
+washed the sores; she was overcome with nausea; and punished herself
+yet more by forcing herself to swallow a scab which had not gone down
+with the water and remained dry in her throat.</p>
+<p>For years she dressed ulcers and meditated on the Passion of
+Christ.
+Then her novitiate of sorrows drew to a close and a radiant day of
+visions dawned on her. Jesus treated her as a spoilt child, called her,
+"My sweetest, my well-beloved daughter;" He dispensed her from the
+necessity of eating, and nourished her only with the Sacred Species; He
+called her, drew her, absorbed her in uncreated light, and by
+anticipating her inheritance, enabled her to understand, in life, the
+joys of heaven.</p>
+<p>And she was so simple and timid that she feared in spite of
+all, for the
+memory of her sins alarmed her. She could not believe herself forgiven,
+and said to Christ; "Ah, if I could but put myself in an iron collar
+and
+drag myself to the market-place to proclaim my shame."</p>
+<p>And He consoled her: "Be easy, My daughter, My sufferings have
+atoned
+for your sins;" and as she reproached herself for having lived in
+opulence and having delighted in clothes and jewels, He addressed her,
+smiling: "To buy you riches, I have wanted for everything; you required
+a great number of clothes, and I had but one garment of which the
+soldiers stripped Me, for which they drew lots; My nakedness was the
+expiation of your vanity in ornaments."</p>
+<p>And all her conversations with Christ were in this tone. He
+passed His
+time in comforting this humble creature whom His benefits overwhelmed;
+and this has made her the most loving of the saints! her work is a
+succession of spiritual outpourings and caresses; her book is such a
+living hearth that beside it the volumes of other mystics seem but dull
+coal.</p>
+<p>"Ah," said Durtal to himself, in turning over these pages, "it
+was
+indeed the Christ of Saint Francis, the God of mercy who spoke to this
+Franciscan!" and he went on: "that ought to give me courage, for Angela
+of Foligno was as great a sinner as I am, but all her sins were
+remitted! Yes, but then what a soul she had, while mine is good for
+nothing; instead of loving, I reason; nevertheless it is right to
+remember that the conditions of the Blessed Angela were more favourable
+than mine. Living in the thirteenth century she had a shorter journey
+to make to approach God, for since the Middle Ages, each century takes
+us further from Him! she lived in a time full of miracles, which
+overflowed with Saints. For me, I live in Paris in an age when miracles
+are rare and Saints scarcely abound. And once away from here, what a
+vista is before me of falling away, of soaking myself in a stew of
+infamy, in a bath of the sins of great cities."</p>
+<p>"By the way" ... he looked at his watch and started; it was
+two
+o'clock&#8212;"I have missed the office of Nones," he said; "I must simplify
+my complicated horary, or I shall never know where I am;" and at once
+he
+traced in a few lines:</p>
+<p>"Morning. Rise at 3 o'clock, or rather at 3.30. Breakfast at
+7&#8212;Sext at
+11, dinner at 11.30&#8212;Nones at 1.30&#8212;Vespers at 5.15&#8212;Supper at 6, and
+Compline at 7.25."</p>
+<p>"There, at least that is clear and easy to remember&#8212;If only
+Father
+Etienne have not noticed my absence from chapel!"</p>
+<p>He left his room. "Ah, here is the famous rule," he said to
+himself, on
+seeing a framed table hung on the landing.</p>
+<p>He approached and read:&#8212;</p>
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"Rule for Visitors."</span><br />
+</p>
+<p>It was composed of numerous paragraphs, and opened as follows:&#8212;</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Those whom Divine Providence has guided to this monastery are
+requested to note the following:&#8212;</p>
+<p>"They will at all times avoid meeting the religious and lay
+brothers, and will not go near their places of work.</p>
+<p>"They are forbidden to leave the cloister for the farm or the
+neighbourhood of the monastery." </p>
+</div>
+<p>Then came a series of instructions which he had already seen
+on the
+printed horary.</p>
+<p>Durtal skipped several paragraphs, and read again:&#8212;</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Visitors are requested not to write anything on the doors,
+not to
+strike matches on the wall, and not to spill water on the floor.</p>
+<p>"They are not allowed to visit each other's rooms or to speak
+to
+one another.</p>
+<p>"Smoking is not allowed in the house." </p>
+</div>
+<p>"Nor indeed outside," thought Durtal. "But I want a cigarette
+badly;"
+and he went down.</p>
+<p>In the corridor he ran against Father Etienne, who immediately
+observed
+that he had not seen him in his place during the office. Durtal excused
+himself as well as he could. The monk said no more, but Durtal
+understood that he was observed, and that under his childlike aspect
+the
+guest-master would, where discipline was concerned, hold him in an iron
+grip. He was confirmed in this impression when at Vespers he noticed
+that the monk's first glance on entering the chapel was at him, but
+that
+day he felt so sore and broken that he cared but little. This sudden
+change of existence, and of the manner in which he had been accustomed
+to spend his time, astounded him, and since the crisis of the morning
+he
+had been in a kind of torpor which took from him all power of recovery.
+He drifted to the end of the day, no longer thinking of anything,
+sleeping as he stood, and when the evening came he fell on his bed a
+mere inert mass.</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_III" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+<p>He woke with a bound at eleven o'clock, with an impression of
+someone
+looking at him in his sleep. Lighting a match, he ascertained the time,
+and seeing no one, fell back in bed again, and slept at a stretch till
+four o'clock. Then he dressed himself in haste and ran to the church.</p>
+<p>The vestibule, which had been dark on the previous evening,
+was lit up
+that morning, for an old monk was celebrating mass at the altar of St.
+Joseph. He was bald and infirm, with a white beard waving from side to
+side in long threads with every gust of wind.</p>
+<p>A lay brother was assisting him, a small man with black hair
+and a
+shaven head, like a ball painted blue; he looked like a bandit, with
+his
+beard in disorder and his worn-out robe of felt.</p>
+<p>And the eyes of this bandit were gentle and startled like
+those of a
+little boy. He served the priest with an almost timid respect and a
+suppressed joy which was touching to see.</p>
+<p>Others, kneeling on the flagstones, prayed with concentrated
+attention
+or read their mass. Durtal noticed the old man of eighty, immovable
+with
+outstretched face and closed eyes; and the youth whose look of pity had
+helped him near the pond, was following the office in his prayer-book
+with attentive meditation. He looked about twenty years old, tall and
+strong; his face, with an air of fatigue, was at once masculine and
+tender, with emaciated features, and a light beard which fell over his
+habit in a point.</p>
+<p>Durtal gave way to his emotions in this chapel, where everyone
+did a
+little to help him, and thinking of the confession he was about to
+make,
+he implored the Saviour to help him, and prayed that the monk would
+completely explore his soul.</p>
+<p>And he felt himself less dismayed, more master of himself, and
+firmer.
+He collected and pulled himself together, feeling a melancholy
+confusion, but he had no longer the sense of desolation which had
+overcome him the evening before. He set his mind on the idea that he
+would not abandon himself, that he would help himself with all his
+might, and that in any case he could not collect himself better.</p>
+<p>These reflections were interrupted by the departure of the old
+Trappist,
+who had finished offering the sacrifice, and by the entry of the prior,
+who went up in the rotunda between two white fathers to say mass at the
+high altar.</p>
+<p>Durtal was absorbed in his prayer-book, but he ceased reading
+when the
+priest had consumed the Species, for all rose, and he was amazed at a
+sight of which he had never dreamed, a communion of monks.</p>
+<p>They advanced in single file, silent and with downcast eyes,
+and when
+the first arrived before the altar, he turned round to embrace the
+comrade who followed; he in turn took in his arms the religious who
+followed him, and so on to the last. All, before receiving the
+Eucharist, exchanged the kiss of peace, then they knelt, communicated,
+and came back in single file, turning into the rotunda behind the altar.</p>
+<p>And the return was unexpected; with the white fathers at the
+head of the
+line, they made their way very slowly with closed eyes and joined
+hands.
+The faces seemed to be somewhat altered; they were differently lit from
+within; it seemed that the soul, driven by the power of the Sacrament
+against the sides of the body, filtered through the pores and lit up
+the
+skin with a special light of joy, with that kind of brightness which
+pours from white souls, and makes way like a rose-coloured vapour along
+the cheeks, and shines, as if concentrated, on the brow.</p>
+<p>Watching the mechanical and hesitating gait of these monks, it
+seemed as
+if their bodies were no more than automata moving from habit, and that
+the souls, being elsewhere, gave no heed to them.</p>
+<p>Durtal recognized the old lay brother, bent so much that his
+face
+disappeared in his beard which pressed against his chest, and his two
+great knotty hands trembled as he clasped them; he also noticed the
+tall
+young brother, his features seeming drawn on a dissolved surface,
+gliding with short steps, his eyes closed.</p>
+<p>By a fatal chance he thought upon himself. He was the only one
+who did
+not communicate, for he saw M. Bruno coming last from behind the altar
+and returning to his place with folded arms. This exclusion brought
+home
+to him clearly how different he was, and how far apart, from those
+around him! All were admitted, and he alone remained outside. His
+unworthiness was more apparent, and he grew sad at being put aside,
+looked on, as he deserved to be, as a stranger, separated like the goat
+of the Scriptures, penned, far from the sheep, on the left of Christ.</p>
+<p>These reflections were of use to him, for they relieved him of
+the
+terror of confession which was again coming over him. This act seemed
+to
+him so natural and just, in his necessary humiliation and unavoidable
+suffering, that a desire came over him to accomplish it at once, so
+that
+he might appear in this chapel purified and washed, and with at least
+some resemblance to the others.</p>
+<p>When the mass was over, he made his way towards his cell to
+get a tablet
+of chocolate.</p>
+<p>At the top of the stairs M. Bruno, with a large apron round
+him, was
+getting ready to clean the steps.</p>
+<p>Durtal looked on him with surprise. The oblate smiled and
+shook hands
+with him.</p>
+<p>"This is an excellent task for the soul," he said, showing his
+broom;
+"it recalls modest sentiments which one is too inclined to forget after
+living in the world."</p>
+<p>And he began sweeping vigorously, and collecting into a pan
+the dust
+which like pepper filled every crevice in the floor.</p>
+<p>Durtal carried his tablet into the garden. "Let us consider,"
+he said to
+himself as he nibbled it; "supposing I took another walk and tried an
+unknown part of the wood?" And he felt no wish to do so. "No, placed as
+I am, I would rather haunt the same spot and not leave the places to
+which I am accustomed; I am already so little under control, and so
+easily disturbed, that I do not wish to risk anything by curiosity to
+see new places." And he went down to the cross pond. He went along the
+banks, and having reached the end, was astonished to find, a few steps
+farther, a stream spotted with green pellicules, hollowing its way
+between two hedges which fenced in the monastery. The fields stretched
+out beyond, and the roofs of a large farmhouse were visible in the
+trees, and all round the horizon on hills were forests which seemed to
+stop the way before the sky.</p>
+<p>"I imagined the grounds were larger," he said to himself,
+retracing his
+steps; and having reached the end of the cross pond, he gazed on the
+huge wooden crucifix reared in the air which was reflected in that
+black
+mirror. It sank down, seen from behind, trembling in the small waves
+stirred up by the breeze, and seemed to fall whirling round in that
+stretch of ink. And as the body of the marble Christ was hidden by the
+wood, only the two white arms which hung below the tree could be seen,
+twisted in the blackness of the water.</p>
+<p>Seated on the grass, Durtal gazed on the hazy image of the
+recumbent
+cross, and thinking of his soul, which, like the pond, was tanned and
+stained by a bed of dead leaves and a dunghill of sins, he pitied the
+Saviour whom he was about to invite to bathe Himself there, for it
+would
+no longer be the Martyr of Golgotha to whom at all events death came on
+a hill, His head high, by daylight, in the open air! but it would be by
+an increase of outrages, the abominable plunging of the crucified body,
+the head low, by night, into a depth of mud.</p>
+<p>"Ah! it would be time to spare Him, in filtering and
+clarifying me," he
+cried to himself. And the swan, till then motionless in an arm of the
+pond, swept over the lamentable image in advancing, and whitened the
+moving mourning of the waters with its peaceful reflection.</p>
+<p>And Durtal thought of the absolution which he would perhaps
+obtain, and
+he reopened his prayer-book and numbered his faults; and, slowly, as on
+the day before, he tapped, in his innermost being, a fountain of tears.</p>
+<p>"I must control myself," he said, trembling at the idea that
+he would
+suffocate again and be unable to speak; and he resolved to begin his
+confession at the other end, first going over the minor sins, keeping
+the great ones for the end so as to finish with the avowal of his
+carnal
+misdeeds: "if I succumb then I can explain myself in two words. My God!
+may the prior only not remain silent as he did yesterday, may he only
+absolve me!"</p>
+<p>He shook off his sadness, left the pond, and returning to the
+lime
+avenue, he interested himself in a closer inspection of the trees. They
+raised huge trunks, covered with reddish-brown stonecrop, silvered grey
+by mosses; and several that morning were wrapped as in a mantle trimmed
+with pearls, gossamer threads studded with drops of dew.</p>
+<p>He sat down on a bench, but fearing a shower, for it looked
+threatening,
+he retired to his cell.</p>
+<p>He felt no desire to read; he was eager for, while yet he
+dreaded, the
+arrival of nine o'clock, to have done with, to get rid of the weight
+upon his soul, and he prayed mechanically, without knowing what he
+mumbled, always thinking on this confession, full of alarm and harassed
+with fears.</p>
+<p>He went down a little before the time, and when he entered the
+auditorium his heart failed him.</p>
+<p>In spite of himself, his eyes were fixed upon the prie-Dieu,
+where he
+had suffered so cruelly.</p>
+<p>To think that he had to put himself on that hurdle again, to
+stretch
+himself on that rack of torture! He tried to collect himself, to
+compose
+himself&#8212;and he drew himself up quickly; he heard the footsteps of the
+monk. The door opened, and, for the first time, Durtal dared to look
+the
+prior in the face; it seemed to be hardly the same man, nor the face,
+he
+had noticed from a distance; the profile was so haughty, and the full
+face so sweet; the eye dulled the proud energy of the features, an eye
+familiar and deep, when at the same time there was a quiet joy and a
+sad
+pity.</p>
+<p>"Come," he said, "do not be disturbed, you are about to speak
+to our
+Saviour alone, who knows all your faults." And he knelt down and prayed
+for some time and came, as on the day before, to sit by the prie-Dieu;
+he bent towards Durtal and listened.</p>
+<p>Somewhat reassured, the penitent began without too great
+anguish. He
+accused himself of faults common to all men, want of charity towards
+his
+neighbour, evil speaking, hate, rash judgment, abuse, lies, vanity,
+anger, etc.</p>
+<p>The monk interrupted him for a moment.</p>
+<p>"You said, just now, I think, that in your youth you
+contracted debts;
+have you paid them?"</p>
+<p>And on an affirmative sign from Durtal, he said, "Good," and
+went on,</p>
+<p>"Have you belonged to any secret society? have you fought a
+duel?&#8212;I am
+obliged to ask these questions for they are reserved cases."</p>
+<p>"No?&#8212;Good"&#8212;and he was silent.</p>
+<p>"Before God, I accuse myself of everything," resumed Durtal;
+"as I
+confessed to you, yesterday, since my first communion I have given up
+everything; prayers, mass, everything; I have denied God, I have
+blasphemed, I had entirely lost faith."</p>
+<p>And Durtal stopped.</p>
+<p>He was reaching the sins of the flesh. His voice fell.</p>
+<p>"Here I do not know how to explain myself," he said, keeping
+back his
+tears.</p>
+<p>"Let us see," the monk said gently; "you told me yesterday
+that you had
+committed all those acts which are comprised in the sin of lust."</p>
+<p>"Yes, father;" and trembling, he added, "Must I go into the
+details?"</p>
+<p>"No, it is useless. I will confine myself to asking you, for
+it alters
+the nature of the sin, whether in your case there have been any private
+sins, or any sins committed between persons of the same sex?"</p>
+<p>"Not since I left school."</p>
+<p>"Have you committed adultery?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>"Am I to understand that in your relations with women, you
+have
+committed every possible excess?"</p>
+<p>Durtal made an affirmative sign.</p>
+<p>"That is sufficient."</p>
+<p>And the monk was silent.</p>
+<p>Durtal choked with disgust; the avowal of these horrors was a
+terrible
+effort to him; yet crushed as he was by shame, he was beginning to
+breathe, when suddenly he plunged his head again in his hands.</p>
+<p>The remembrance of the sacrilege in which Madame Chantelouve
+had made
+him share, came back to him.</p>
+<p>Hesitatingly he confessed that he had from curiosity assisted
+at a black
+mass, and that afterwards, without wishing it, he had defiled a Host
+which that woman, saturated with Satanism, concealed about her.</p>
+<p>The prior listened without moving.</p>
+<p>"Did you continue your visits to that woman?"</p>
+<p>"No; that had given me a horror of her."</p>
+<p>The Trappist reflected and said,</p>
+<p>"That is all?"</p>
+<p>"I think I have confessed everything," replied Durtal.</p>
+<p>The confessor was silent for some minutes, and then in a
+pensive voice,
+he murmured,</p>
+<p>"I am struck, even more than yesterday, by the astonishing
+miracle which
+Heaven has worked in you.</p>
+<p>"You were sick, so sick that what Martha said of the body of
+Lazarus
+might truly have been said of your soul, 'Iam foetet!' And Christ has,
+in some manner, raised you. Only do not deceive yourself, the
+conversion
+of a sinner is not his cure, but only his convalescence; and this
+convalescence sometimes lasts for several years and is often long.</p>
+<p>"It is expedient that you should determine from this moment to
+fortify
+yourself against any falling back, and to do all in your power for
+recovery. The preventive treatment consists of prayer, the sacrament of
+penance, and holy communion.</p>
+<p>"Prayer?&#8212;you know it, for without much prayer you could not
+have
+decided to come here after the troubled life you had led."</p>
+<p>"Ah! but I prayed so badly!"</p>
+<p>"It does not matter, as your wish was to pray well!
+Confession?&#8212;It was
+painful to you; it will be less so now that you no longer have to avow
+the accumulated sins of years. The communion troubles me more; for it
+is
+to be feared that when you have triumphed over the flesh the Demon
+should await you there, and endeavour to draw you away, for he knows
+well that, without this divine government, no healing is possible. You
+will therefore have to give this matter all your attention."</p>
+<p>The monk reflected a minute, and then went on,</p>
+<p>"The holy Eucharist ... you will have more need of it than
+others, for
+you will be more unhappy than less cultured and simpler beings. You
+will
+be tortured by the imagination. It has made you sin much; and, by a
+just
+recompense, it will make you suffer much; it will be the badly closed
+door of your soul by which the Demon will enter and spread himself in
+you. Watch over this, and pray fervently that the Saviour may help you.
+Tell me, have you a rosary?"</p>
+<p>"No, father."</p>
+<p>"I feel," said the monk, "that the tone in which you said 'No'
+shows a
+certain hostility to the rosary."</p>
+<p>"I admit that this mechanical manner of saying prayers wearies
+me a
+little; I do not know why, but it seems to me that at the end of some
+seconds I can no longer think of what I am saying; I should mock, and
+should certainly end by stammering out something stupid."</p>
+<p>"You have known," quietly answered the prior, "some fathers of
+families.
+Their children stammer forth caresses, and tell them no matter what,
+and
+yet they are delighted to listen! Why should not our Lord, who is a
+good
+Father, love to hear His children when they drawl, or even when they
+talk nonsense?"</p>
+<p>And after a pause he went on,</p>
+<p>"I scent the devil's artifice in what you say, for the highest
+graces
+are attached to this crown of prayers. The most Blessed Virgin herself
+revealed to the saints this means of prayer; she declared she delighted
+in it; that should be enough to make us love it.</p>
+<p>"Do it, then, for her who has powerfully assisted in your
+conversion,
+who has interceded with her Son to save you. Remember, also, that God
+wished that all graces should come to us through her. St. Bernard
+expressly declares 'Totum nos habere voluit per Mariam.'"</p>
+<p>The monk paused anew, and added,</p>
+<p>"However, the rosary enrages fools, and that is a sure sign.
+You will
+for a penance recite ten every day for a month."</p>
+<p>He ceased, and then went on again, slowly,</p>
+<p>"All of us, alas! retain that scar of original sin which is
+the
+inclination towards evil; each man encourages it more or less; as for
+you, since you grew up, the scar has been always open, but as you hate
+the wound God will close it.</p>
+<p>"So I will say nothing of your past, as your repentance and
+your firm
+resolve to sin no more efface it. To-morrow, you will receive the
+pledge
+of reconciliation, you will communicate; after so many years the Lord
+will set out on the way to your soul and will rest there; approach Him
+with great humility, and prepare yourself from this moment, by prayer,
+for this mysterious meeting of hearts which His goodness desires. Now
+say your act of contrition and I will give you holy absolution."</p>
+<p>The monk raised his arms, and the sleeves of his white cowl
+rose above
+him like two wings. With uplifted eyes he uttered the imperious formula
+which breaks the bonds, and the three words, "Ego te absolvo," spoken
+more distinctly and slowly, fell upon Durtal, who trembled from head to
+foot. He almost sank to the ground, incapable of collecting himself or
+understanding himself, only feeling, in the clearest manner, that
+Christ
+Himself was present, near him in that place, and finding no word of
+thanks, he wept, ravished and bowed down under the great sign of the
+cross with which the monk enveloped him.</p>
+<p>He seemed to be waking from a dream as the prior said to him,</p>
+<p>"Rejoice, your life is dead; it is buried in a cloister, and
+in a
+cloister it will be born again; it is a good omen; have confidence in
+our Lord and go in peace."</p>
+<p>And the father added, pressing his hand, "Do not be afraid of
+disturbing
+me, I am entirely at your service, not only for confession, but for
+interviews and for any advice which may be of use to you; you quite
+understand me?"</p>
+<p>They left the auditorium together; the monk bowed to him in
+the corridor
+and disappeared. Durtal hesitated whether to meditate in his cell or in
+the church, when M. Bruno met him. Approaching Durtal he said,</p>
+<p>"Well? that is a fine weight the less on your stomach!"</p>
+<p>And as Durtal looked at him in astonishment he laughed.</p>
+<p>"Do you think that an old sinner like me could not tell from a
+thousand
+nothings, if only from the way your poor eyes are now shining, that you
+had not been reconciled when you landed here? Now I have just met the
+reverend father returning to the cloister, and I find you coming out of
+the auditorium; there is no need to be particularly sly to guess that
+the great wash has just taken place."</p>
+<p>"But," said Durtal, "you could not have seen the prior with
+me, for he
+had left before you came in, and he might have been performing some
+other duty."</p>
+<p>"No, for he was not in his scapular; he had his cowl on. And
+as he
+never puts on that robe except to go to church or at confessions, I was
+quite certain that he came from the auditorium, as there is no office
+at
+this hour. I may also point out that as the Trappists do not come to
+confession in this room, two persons only could have been with him, you
+or I."</p>
+<p>"You may say as much," replied Durtal, laughing.</p>
+<p>Father Etienne met them in the midst of all this, and Durtal
+asked him
+for a rosary.</p>
+<p>"But I have not one," exclaimed the monk.</p>
+<p>"I have several," said M. Bruno, "and shall be most happy to
+offer you
+one. You will allow me, father?..."</p>
+<p>The monk acquiesced by a sign.</p>
+<p>"Then if you will come with me," replied the oblate,
+addressing Durtal,
+"I will hand it you without delay."</p>
+<p>They went upstairs together, and Durtal then learnt that M.
+Bruno lived
+in a room at the bottom of a small corridor, not far from his own.</p>
+<p>His cell was very simply furnished with old middle-class
+furniture, a
+bed, a mahogany bureau, a large book-case full of ascetic books, an
+earthenware stove and some arm-chairs. These articles were evidently
+the
+property of the oblate, for they were nothing like the furniture of La
+Trappe.</p>
+<p>"Pray be seated," said M. Bruno, indicating an arm-chair; and
+they
+conversed.</p>
+<p>Having first discussed the Sacrament of Penance, the talk came
+round to
+the subject of Father Maximin, and Durtal admitted the high bearing of
+the prior had terrified him at first.</p>
+<p>M. Bruno laughed. "Yes," he said, "he produces that effect on
+those who
+never come near him, but when one associates with him, one finds that
+he
+is only strict for himself, for no one is more indulgent to others. In
+every acceptation of the term he is a true and holy monk; besides, he
+has great judgment...."</p>
+<p>And as Durtal spoke to him of the other cenobites, and
+wondered that
+there were some quite young men among them, M. Bruno replied,</p>
+<p>"It is a mistake to suppose that most Trappists have lived in
+the world.
+The idea, so widespread, that people take refuge in La Trappe after
+long
+sorrows or disorderly lives, is absolutely false; besides, to be able
+to
+stand the weakening rule of the cloister it is necessary to begin
+young, and not to come in worn out with every kind of abuse.</p>
+<p>"It is also necessary to avoid confounding misanthropy with
+the monastic
+vocation; it is not hypochondria, but the divine call, which leads to
+La
+Trappe. There is a special grace, which makes all young men who have
+never lived in the world long to bury themselves in silence and therein
+suffer the hardest privations; and they are happy as I hope you will
+be;
+and yet their life is still more rigorous than you would think; take
+the
+lay brothers, for example.</p>
+<p>"Think of their giving themselves up to the most painful
+labour, and
+that they have not, like the fathers, the consolation of singing and
+assisting at all the offices; remember that even their reward, the
+communion, is not very often conceded to them.</p>
+<p>"Now think of the winter here. The cold is frightful; in these
+decayed
+buildings nothing shuts properly, and the wind sweeps the house from
+top
+to bottom; they freeze without fires, they sleep upon pallets, and they
+cannot help or encourage each other, for they hardly know each other,
+as
+all conversation is forbidden.</p>
+<p>"Think, also, that these poor people never hear a kindly word,
+a word
+which would soothe and comfort them. They work from dawn till night,
+and
+the master never thanks them for their zeal, never tells the good
+workman that he is pleased.</p>
+<p>"Consider, also, that in summer when men are hired from the
+neighbouring
+villages to reap the harvest, these rest when the sun scorches the
+fields; they sit in their shirt sleeves under the shade of the ricks,
+and drink, if they are thirsty, and eat; and the lay brother in his
+heavy clothes looks at them and goes on with his work, and neither eats
+nor drinks. Ah! men must have well-tempered souls to stand such a life."</p>
+<p>"But surely there must be some off days," said Durtal, "when
+the rule is
+relaxed?"</p>
+<p>"Never; there is not even, as in some very strict orders&#8212;the
+Carmelites, to take one instance&#8212;an hour of recreation, when the
+religious may talk and laugh. Here, the silence is eternal."</p>
+<p>"Even when they are together in the refectory?"</p>
+<p>"Then they read the Conferences of Cassien, the 'Holy Ladder'
+of
+Climacus, the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, or some other pious
+book."</p>
+<p>"And on Sunday?"</p>
+<p>"On Sunday they rise an hour earlier; but on the whole it is
+their best
+day, for they can follow all the offices and pass their whole time in
+church."</p>
+<p>"Humility and self-denial carried to such an extent are
+superhuman!"
+cried Durtal. "But they are surely given a sufficient quantity of
+strong
+nourishment to enable them to give themselves up from morning till
+evening to exhausting work in the fields?"</p>
+<p>M. Bruno smiled.</p>
+<p>"They simply get vegetables which are not even as good as
+those which
+are served to us, and, by way of wine, they quench their thirst with a
+sour and insipid liquid, which leaves half a glass full of sediment.
+They get a pint each, and if they are thirsty they can add water."</p>
+<p>"And how often do they eat?"</p>
+<p>"That depends. From the 14th September to Lent they only eat
+once a day,
+at half-past two&#8212;and during Lent this meal is put off till four
+o'clock. From Easter to the 14th September, when the Cistercian fast is
+less strict, dinner is at about half-past eleven, and to this may be
+added a light meal in the evening."</p>
+<p>"It is frightful! to work for months on one meal a day, two
+hours after
+noon, after being up since two o'clock in the morning; having had no
+dinner the evening before."</p>
+<p>"It is sometimes necessary to relax the rule a little, and
+when a monk
+fails from weakness he is not refused a morsel of bread.</p>
+<p>"It would be well," continued M. Bruno, pensively, "to relax
+still
+further the grasp of these observances, for this question of food is
+becoming a veritable stumbling-block in recruiting for La Trappe; souls
+which delight in these cloisters are forced to fly them, because their
+bodies cannot stand the rule."<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+<p>"And the fathers lead the same life as the lay brothers?"</p>
+<p>"Absolutely&#8212;they set the example; they all swallow the same
+pittance,
+and sleep in the same dormitory on similar beds; there is complete
+equality. Only, the fathers have the advantage of singing the office
+and
+obtaining more frequent communions."</p>
+<p>"Among the lay brothers there are two who have interested me
+particularly, one quite young, a tall fair man with a pointed beard,
+the
+other a very old man, quite bent?"</p>
+<p>"The young one is Brother Anacletus; this young man is a
+veritable
+column of prayer, and one of the most precious recruits whom Heaven has
+bestowed upon our abbey. As for old Simeon, he is a child of La Trappe,
+for he was brought up in an orphanage of the order. There you have an
+extraordinary soul, a true saint, who already lives absorbed in God. We
+will talk of him at greater length another day, for it is time we went
+down; the hour of Sext is near.</p>
+<p>"Wait, here is the rosary which I am pleased to offer you.
+Allow me to
+add to it a medal of Saint Benedict." And he made over to Durtal a
+small
+wooden rosary, and the strange circle engraved with cabalistic letters,
+the amulet of Saint Benedict.</p>
+<p>"Do you know the meaning of these signs?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; I read it once in a pamphlet of Dom Guéranger."</p>
+<p>"Good. And, by-the-bye, when do you communicate?"</p>
+<p>"To-morrow."</p>
+<p>"To-morrow; it is impossible!"</p>
+<p>"Why impossible?"</p>
+<p>"Because there will be only a single mass to-morrow, that of
+five
+o'clock, and at that the rule prevents your communicating alone. Father
+Benedict, who usually says an earlier mass, went away this morning and
+will not return for two days. There is some mistake."</p>
+<p>"But the prior positively declared to me that I should
+communicate
+to-morrow!" exclaimed Durtal. "Not all the fathers here, then, are
+priests?"</p>
+<p>"No, in fact, as to priests, there is the abbot who is ill,
+the prior
+who will offer the sacrifice to-morrow at five o'clock, Father Benedict
+of whom I spoke to you, and another whom you have not seen and who is
+travelling. And then, if it had been possible, I also should have
+approached the Holy Table."</p>
+<p>"Then, if the fathers are not all ordained, what difference is
+there
+between those who have obtained the priesthood and the simple lay
+brothers?"</p>
+<p>"Education&#8212;to be a father a man must have studied, must know
+Latin, and
+in a word must not be what the lay brothers are, peasants or workmen.
+In
+any case I shall see the prior, and as to the communion to-morrow, I
+will let you know, after the office. But it is tiresome; it is a pity
+you could not have come up this morning, with us."</p>
+<p>Durtal made a gesture of regret. He went into the chapel,
+dwelling on
+this misfortune and praying God not to delay his re-entry into grace
+any
+longer.</p>
+<p>After Sext, the oblate came to rejoin him. "It is just as I
+thought," he
+said, "but nevertheless you will be admitted to take the Sacrament. The
+father prior has arranged with the curate who dines with us. He will
+say
+a mass to-morrow morning before leaving, and you will then communicate."</p>
+<p>"Oh!" groaned Durtal.</p>
+<p>This news broke his heart. That he should have come to La
+Trappe to
+receive the Eucharist from the hands of a priest of passage, from a
+jovial priest such as this man! "Ah, no, I have confessed to a monk,
+and
+I wished to receive the communion from a monk!" he exclaimed. "It would
+have been better to wait till Father Benedict returned&#8212;but what can I
+do? I can hardly explain to the prior how repugnant this unknown priest
+is to me, and how terribly painful it would be to me, after having gone
+through so much, to end by being thus reconciled in a cloister."</p>
+<p>And he complained to God, telling Him that all the joy he
+might have
+felt in being purified and clean at last, was now spoilt by this
+disappointment.</p>
+<p>He arrived at the refectory hanging his head.</p>
+<p>The curate was there already. Seeing Durtal's sad demeanour,
+he
+charitably tried to cheer him, but the jokes he attempted produced the
+opposite effect. Durtal smiled in order to be polite, but his air was
+so
+wearied that M. Bruno, who saw it, turned the conversation and
+monopolized the priest.</p>
+<p>Durtal was in a hurry for his dinner to be over. He had eaten
+his egg
+and was painfully swallowing a warm potato soup made with hot oil,
+which
+from its appearance might have been mistaken for vaseline; but he now
+cared little about his food.</p>
+<p>He said to himself, "It is dreadful to carry away an
+irritating and
+painful recollection of a first communion&#8212;and I know it will haunt me
+for ever. I know well enough that from a theological point of view it
+does not matter whether I am dealing with a priest or a Trappist; both
+are but interpreters between God and me, but yet, I feel very well that
+it is not at all the same thing. For once at least I need a guarantee
+of
+certain holiness, and how can I have it with an ecclesiastic who hawks
+about jokes like a bagman?" He stopped, remembering that the Abbé
+Gévresin, fearing this mistrust, had specially sent him to a Trappist
+monastery. "What a run of ill-luck!" he said to himself.</p>
+<p>He did not even hear the conversation which was going on
+beside him
+between the curate and the oblate.</p>
+<p>He struggled with himself all alone, as he chewed, with his
+nose in his
+plate.</p>
+<p>"I do not wish to communicate to-morrow," he went on, and he
+was
+shocked. He was cowardly, and becoming foolish at the last. Would not
+the Saviour give Himself to him all the same?</p>
+<p>He rose from the table, stirred by a dull anguish, and he
+wandered in
+the park and went down the paths as chance led him.</p>
+<p>Another idea was now growing in him, an idea that Heaven was
+inflicting
+a trial upon him. "I want humility," he repeated. "Well, it is to
+punish
+me that I am refused the joy of being sanctified by a monk. Christ has
+forgiven me, that is much. Why should He do more by taking note of my
+preferences and granting my wishes?"</p>
+<p>This thought appeased him for a few minutes, and reproaching
+himself
+for rebelling, he accused himself of being unjust towards a priest who,
+after all, might be a saint.</p>
+<p>"Ah, enough of that," he said; "I must accept the fact, and
+try for once
+to be a little humble! but I have to recite my rosary." He seated
+himself on the grass and began.</p>
+<p>He had not reached the second bead, when misunderstanding
+again pursued
+him. He began again on the Pater and Ave, and went on thinking no more
+of the sense of his prayers, reflecting: "What ill-luck that the one
+monk who says mass every day should be away, so that I have to go
+through such a disappointment to-morrow!"</p>
+<p>He was silent and had a moment of calm, when suddenly a new
+element of
+trouble burst upon him.</p>
+<p>He looked at the rosary, of which he had told ten beads.</p>
+<p>"Let me see, the prior told me to recite ten every day&#8212;ten
+beads or ten
+rosaries?"</p>
+<p>"Beads," he said, and almost at the same moment answered,
+"Rosaries."</p>
+<p>He remained perplexed.</p>
+<p>"But that is idiotic, he could not have told me to go through
+the rosary
+ten times a day; that would amount to something like five hundred
+prayers on end; no one could do such a task without losing his wits.
+There is no doubt, it is clear he meant ten beads!</p>
+<p>"But no! for if a confessor gives a penance, it must be
+admitted that he
+would proportion it to the greatness of the sins. And as I have such
+repugnance for these drops of devotion taken in globules, it is natural
+that he should gorge me with a large dose of the rosary!</p>
+<p>"Still ... still ... it cannot be! I should not have even time
+for it
+all in Paris; it is absurd!"</p>
+<p>And the idea that he was deceiving himself came intermittently
+charging
+back.</p>
+<p>"Still, there must be no haggling; in ecclesiastical language
+'ten'
+means ten beads; no doubt ... but I remember very well that after he
+pronounced the word rosary, the father expressed himself thus: 'you
+will
+say ten,' that means ten rosaries, for otherwise he would have
+specified
+ten ... of a rosary."</p>
+<p>And so he thrust and parried with himself&#8212;"The father had no
+need to
+put the dots on all the i's, if he were using an ordinary phrase, known
+to everyone. This cavilling about the value of a word is ridiculous."</p>
+<p>He tried to get rid of this torment by appealing to his
+reason; and
+suddenly there came out some argument which unsettled him.</p>
+<p>He found out that it was through cowardice, idleness, desire
+for
+contradiction and the necessity of rebelling, that he did not wish to
+wind his ten reels. "Of the two interpretations I have chosen the one
+which would relieve me of all effort and trouble, it is really too
+easy!&#8212;that alone proves that I deceive myself when I try to persuade
+myself that the prior only ordered me to pick out ten beads!"</p>
+<p>"Then a Pater, ten Aves, and a Gloria are nothing; it is not
+heavy as a
+penance!"</p>
+<p>And then he answered himself, "But it is much for you, for you
+cannot
+even attempt so much without wandering."</p>
+<p>He was turning on himself without advancing a step.</p>
+<p>"I have never felt such hesitation," he said, trying to pull
+himself
+together; "I am not stupid and yet I am fighting against my good sense,
+for it is not a matter of doubt, I know it, I ought to say ten Aves and
+not one more!"</p>
+<p>He remained nonplussed, almost frightened at his condition
+which was new
+to him.</p>
+<p>And, to get out of the difficulty, to silence himself, he
+thought of a
+new idea to conciliate both parties, which seemed most concise and
+which
+presented at least a provisional solution.</p>
+<p>"In any case," he reflected, "I cannot communicate to-morrow
+if I do not
+complete my penance to-day; in the doubt, the wisest course is to yoke
+myself to the ten rosaries; later I shall see; if necessary I shall be
+able to consult the prior. It is true that he will think me an idiot if
+I speak to him of these rosaries! so I shall not be able to ask him
+that!"</p>
+<p>"But then, you see, you admit yourself, it can only be ten
+beads!"</p>
+<p>He was furious with himself, and for silence' sake rushed upon
+the
+rosary.</p>
+<p>He might well shut his eyes, and try to collect himself, it
+was
+impossible for him at the end of the second ten to follow his prayers;
+he hesitated, forgetting the large beads of the Paters, losing his way
+in the small beads of the Aves, stamping on the ground.</p>
+<p>To check himself, he thought of transporting himself in
+imagination at
+each dose, into one of the chapels of the Virgin which he loved to
+attend in Paris, at Notre Dame des Victoires, at St. Sulpice, at St.
+Severin; but these Virgins were not numerous enough for him to dedicate
+each set of ten to them, so he evoked the Madonnas of the early
+masters,
+and, absorbed before their images, he turned the windlass of his
+prayers, not understanding what he mumbled, but praying the Mother of
+the Saviour to accept his paternosters, as she would receive the lost
+smoke of a censer forgotten before the altar.</p>
+<p>"I cannot force myself any more," he said. He left this toil
+worried and
+crushed and wanting to take breath; there were still three rosaries to
+exhaust.</p>
+<p>And as soon as he had stopped, the question of the Eucharist,
+which had
+been dropped, came up again.</p>
+<p>"Better not to communicate than to communicate badly;" and it
+was
+impossible that after such debates and with such prejudices he could
+properly approach the Holy Table.</p>
+<p>"Yes, but then what shall I do?&#8212;in reality, was it not
+monstrous of me
+to dispute the monk's orders, to wish to carry them out in my own way,
+to take them up at my convenience! If this goes on, I shall sin so much
+to-day that I shall have to confess again," he said.</p>
+<p>To break through this feeling, he threw himself again upon his
+wheel,
+but then stupefied himself completely; the device he had tried to keep
+himself before the Virgin at least was used up. When he wished to
+abstract himself and to bring up a recollection of Memling, he could
+not
+succeed, and his lip-prayers, wearying him, distressed him.</p>
+<p>"My soul is worn out," he thought, "I should do well to let it
+rest,
+while I stay quiet."</p>
+<p>He wandered round the pond, not knowing what to do next.</p>
+<p>"Suppose I go to my cell!" He went there, tried to become
+absorbed in
+the Little Office of the Virgin, and did not grasp a single word of the
+phrases he was reading. He went down and began to prowl about the park
+again.</p>
+<p>"This is enough to drive me mad," he cried&#8212;and mournfully he
+exclaimed,
+"I ought to be happy, to pray in peace and prepare myself for
+to-morrow's act, yet never have I been so restless, so upset, so far
+from God!</p>
+<p>"But I must finish this penance!" Despair seized him, and he
+was on the
+point of letting all go; he mortified himself again, and compelled
+himself to tell the beads.</p>
+<p>He finished by despatching them; he was at the end of his
+powers. And he
+immediately found a new means of torture.</p>
+<p>He reproached himself with having moaned the prayers
+negligently,
+without having even seriously tried to follow their meaning. And he was
+on the point of beginning the rosary over again, but in the face of the
+evident folly of this suggestion he pulled himself up, refused to
+listen, and then he worried himself again.</p>
+<p>"It is none the less true that you have not literally
+fulfilled the task
+assigned you by the confessor, for your conscience reproaches you for
+your want of reflection and your wandering."</p>
+<p>"But I am half dead!" he exclaimed. "I cannot go through the
+exercises
+again in this condition!"&#8212;and once again he ended, by giving a casting
+vote, and finding a new weakness.</p>
+<p>By saying over another ten, thoughtfully pronouncing the
+prayers with
+care, he might make up for all the beads of the rosary which he had
+mumbled without understanding them.</p>
+<p>And he tried to turn the crank, but as soon as he had got out
+the Pater,
+he wandered; he was obstinate in wishing to grind out the Aves, but
+then
+his mind gave way and became thoroughly distracted.</p>
+<p>He stopped, thinking, "What is the use of it? besides, would
+one set of
+ten, however well said, be equal to five hundred prayers that have
+missed fire? and then why one set of ten and not two, why not three? it
+is absurd!"</p>
+<p>He grew angry; "After all," he concluded, "these repetitions
+are absurd;
+Christ positively declared that we should not use vain repetitions in
+our prayers. Then what is the object of this wheel of Aves?"</p>
+<p>"If I dwell upon such ideas, if I cavil at the injunctions of
+the monk,
+I am lost," said he suddenly; and by an effort of will, he stifled the
+revolt which was rumbling in him.</p>
+<p>He took refuge in his cell; the hours lengthened interminably;
+he killed
+the time by recapitulating all the same objections with all the same
+answers. It was a repetition of which he was himself ashamed.</p>
+<p>"So much is certain, that I am the victim of an aberration,"
+he said. "I
+do not speak of the Eucharist; there my thoughts may not be exact, but
+at least they are not maddening, while as for this question of
+paternosters!"</p>
+<p>He confused himself so much that he felt hammered like an
+anvil between
+these two opposing ideas, and finally sank drowsily on a chair.</p>
+<p>Thus he passed the time till the hour of vespers and supper.
+After this
+meal he returned to the park.</p>
+<p>And then the slumbering dispute revived and all came back. A
+furious
+battle was raging within him. He remained there, immovable, astounded,
+listening to himself, when a rapid footstep approached and M. Bruno
+said
+to him,</p>
+<p>"Take care, you are possessed by the devil!"</p>
+<p>And as Durtal, stupefied, did not answer,</p>
+<p>"Yes," he said, "God sometimes allows me intuitions, and I am
+certain at
+this moment that the devil is working in you. Let us see, what is wrong
+with you?"</p>
+<p>"I ... I do not know myself;" and Durtal told him of the
+extraordinary
+conflict about the rosary which had been raging in him since the
+morning.</p>
+<p>"But this is madness," exclaimed the oblate; "it is ten beads
+the prior
+ordered you to tell; ten rosaries would be impossible."</p>
+<p>"I know it ... and yet I doubt still."</p>
+<p>"Always the same tactics," said M. Bruno; "contriving to
+render
+disgusting the thing you ought to do. Yes, the devil wished to make the
+rosary odious to you by crushing you with it. And what is there
+besides?
+You do not wish to communicate to-morrow?"</p>
+<p>"True," replied Durtal.</p>
+<p>"I thought as much, when I was watching you at supper. Ah!
+well, after
+conversions the Evil One is at work; and it is nothing, believe me; he
+was harder on me than that."</p>
+<p>He slipped his arm under Durtal's, and leading him to the
+auditorium,
+begged him to wait, and disappeared.</p>
+<p>Some minutes afterwards, the prior entered.</p>
+<p>"Well," said he, "M. Bruno tells me that you are suffering.
+What is it,
+exactly?"</p>
+<p>"It is so stupid that I am ashamed to explain myself."</p>
+<p>"You will never astonish a monk," said the prior, smiling.</p>
+<p>"Well, I know precisely, I am certain that you gave me ten
+beads of the
+rosary to recite every day for a month, and, since this morning, I have
+been arguing with myself against all common sense, to convince myself
+that my daily penance is to be the rosary ten times."</p>
+<p>"Hand me your rosary," said the monk, "and look at these ten
+beads;
+well, that is all I prescribed for you, and all you have to recite. So
+you have told all the beads ten times to-day?"</p>
+<p>Durtal signified assent.</p>
+<p>"And naturally you were perplexed, you lost all patience, and
+ended up
+by rambling."</p>
+<p>And seeing Durtal's pitiful smile,</p>
+<p>"Well, listen to me," declared the father, in an energetic
+tone, "I
+absolutely forbid you for the future to begin a prayer again; it has
+been badly said; so much the worse, go on, do not repeat it.</p>
+<p>"I need not ask you if the idea of abstaining from communion
+occurred to
+you, for that comes of itself; it is there that the enemy directs all
+his efforts. Do not listen to the devil's voice which would keep you
+away; whatever happens you will communicate to-morrow. You should have
+no scruple, for I command you to receive the Sacrament; I take it all
+upon myself.</p>
+<p>"And now another question; what sort of nights have you?"</p>
+<p>Durtal told him of the awful night of his arrival at La
+Trappe, and of
+the feeling of being spied upon which had awakened him the day before.</p>
+<p>"We have long known these manifestations, they are without
+imminent
+danger; do not therefore let them trouble you. At the same time, if
+they
+continue you will let me know, and we will not neglect attending to
+them."</p>
+<p>And the Trappist left quietly, while Durtal remained thinking.</p>
+<p>"I never doubted that those phenomena were satanic," he
+thought, "but I
+did not understand these attacks upon the soul, this charge at full
+speed against my reason which remains untouched, and yet is overcome;
+that is remarkable; if only this lesson may be useful to me so that I
+may not be unhorsed on the first alarm!"</p>
+<p>He went up to his cell again and a great peace fell upon him.
+All had
+died down at the voice of the monk; he now only felt surprise at having
+been off the rails for hours; he understood now that he had been
+assailed unawares and that the struggle had not been with himself.</p>
+<p>He said his prayers and lay down. And, suddenly, the assault
+began again
+by new tactics he had not guessed at.</p>
+<p>"No doubt I shall communicate to-morrow," he said to himself;
+"but ...
+but ... am I prepared for such an act? I ought to have collected my
+thoughts in the day-time, I ought to have thanked the Lord for having
+absolved me, and I have lost my time in nonsense."</p>
+<p>"Why did I not say that just now to Father Maximin? how is it
+I did not
+think of it? Then I ought to have confessed again. And this priest who
+will give me the communion, this priest!"</p>
+<p>The horror which he felt for this man increased suddenly and
+became so
+vehement that he was astonished. "Ah, but there I am again knocked
+about
+by the enemy," he said, and he went on:</p>
+<p>"All that shall not prevent me from receiving the Heavenly
+Bread
+to-morrow, for I have quite decided; only how frightful it is that the
+Spirit of Malice should be allowed to oppress and harass me without
+respite while I have no sign from Heaven which does not interfere, and
+I
+know nothing.</p>
+<p>"Ah! Lord, if I were only certain this communion would please
+Thee! Give
+me a sign, show me that I may ally myself with Thee without remorse;
+let
+the impossible take place so that, to-morrow, it may be a monk and not
+this priest...."</p>
+<p>And he stopped himself, astonished at his boldness, asking
+himself how
+he dared ask for, and indicate a sign.</p>
+<p>"It is idiotic!" he exclaimed; "in the first place, no one has
+a right
+to claim such favours from God; and then, as He will not grant my
+prayer, what shall I have gained? I shall infer from the refusal that
+my
+communion will be worth nothing!"</p>
+<p>And he prayed the Lord to forget his wish, excused himself for
+having
+formed it, and wished to convince himself that He should not take it
+into account, and, helped by the agitations of the day, he ended by
+falling asleep as he prayed.</p>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a>
+The opinion of M. Bruno has been lately adopted by all the
+abbeys of the order. In a General Chapter of La Trappe, held from the
+12th to the 18th September, 1894, in Holland, at Tilburg, it was
+decided
+that except in seasons of fasting, the monks might eat a little in the
+morning, dine at eleven, and sup in the evening.
+</p>
+<p>Article CXVI. of the new constitutions, voted by this assembly
+of the
+Chapter and approved by the Holy See, is in effect thus conceived:&#8212;
+</p>
+<p>"Diebus quibus non jejunatur a Sancto Pascha usque ad Idus
+Septembris,
+Dominicis per totum annum et omnibus festis Sermonis aut feriatis extra
+Quadrigesimam, omnes monachi mane accipiant mixtum, hora undecima
+prandeant et ad seram c&#339;nent."</p>
+</div>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_IV" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER
+IV.</h2>
+<p>When he left his cell he said to himself, "This morning I
+shall
+communicate," and these words, which should have thrilled him through
+and through, woke no zeal in him. He remained dull, tired and caring
+for
+nothing, feeling cold in the depth of his being.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless a fear stimulated him when he was outside. "I do
+not know,"
+he said to himself, "when I must leave my seat and go to kneel before
+the priest; I know that the congregation should communicate after the
+celebrant; but at what moment exactly ought I to move? It is indeed
+another misfortune that I should have to go up, alone, towards this
+Table which so disturbs me; otherwise I shall only have to follow the
+others and at least be sure of not doing anything improperly."</p>
+<p>He scrutinized the chapel as he went in, looking round for M.
+Bruno who,
+had he been by his side, might have kept off his scruples, but the
+oblate could not be found. Durtal sat down, disabled, dreaming of the
+sign he had asked for the evening before, endeavouring to throw off the
+recollection, thinking of it all the same.</p>
+<p>He wished to examine himself and collect himself, and he was
+praying
+Heaven to forgive him his mental vacillations when M. Bruno came in,
+and
+went to kneel before the statue of the Virgin.</p>
+<p>Almost at the same minute a brother, who had a beard like
+seaweed
+growing from a face like a pear, took up to the altar of St. Joseph a
+small rustic table on which he placed a basin, a towel, two vases and a
+napkin.</p>
+<p>Before these preparations, which recalled the imminence of the
+Sacrifice, Durtal stiffened himself and succeeded by an effort in
+keeping back his anxieties and overthrowing his troubles, and escaping
+from himself he ardently implored Our Lady to intervene so that he
+might, for this hour at least, without wandering, pray in peace.</p>
+<p>And when he had finished his prayer he lifted his eyes and
+looked with a
+start at the priest who was advancing, preceded by a lay brother, to
+celebrate mass.</p>
+<p>This was not the curate whom he knew, but another, younger,
+very tall,
+with a majestic air, with cheeks pale and shaven, and a bald head.</p>
+<p>Durtal was watching him solemnly marching towards the altar
+with his
+eyes cast down when he suddenly noticed a violet flame light up his
+fingers.</p>
+<p>"He wears an episcopal ring, he is a bishop," thought Durtal,
+who leant
+forward to see the colour of the vestment underneath the chasuble and
+alb. It was white.</p>
+<p>"Then it is a monk," he said, astounded; and, mechanically, he
+turned
+towards the statue of the Virgin, summoning the oblate by a hasty
+glance, who came to sit beside him.</p>
+<p>"Who is he?"</p>
+<p>"Dom Anselm, the abbot of the monastery."</p>
+<p>"He who was ill?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, he will give us communion."</p>
+<p>Durtal fell upon his knees, suffocated, almost trembling: he
+was not
+dreaming! Heaven was answering him by the sign on which he had fixed.</p>
+<p>He ought to abase himself before God, to be overwhelmed at His
+feet, to
+spread himself in a passion of gratitude; he knew and wished it! And
+without knowing how, he was exercising himself in seeking natural
+causes
+which might account for the substitution of a monk for the priest.</p>
+<p>No doubt it was very simple; for on the whole, before
+admitting a kind
+of miracle.... "anyhow, I will keep an open mind, for after the
+ceremony
+I wish to clear the matter up."</p>
+<p>And he repelled the insinuations which crept into him. Well!
+what
+interest could there be in the motive of this change? there clearly
+must
+be a motive, but it was only a consequence, an accessory; the important
+point was the supernatural will which had produced it. "In any case you
+have obtained more than you asked; you have even a better than the
+simple monk you wished for, you have the abbot of La Trappe himself!"
+And he cried: "Oh, to believe, to believe like these poor lay brothers,
+not to be endowed with a soul which is blown about by every wind; to
+have the faith of a child, an immovable faith, a faith which cannot be
+rooted up! Ah, Father, Father, bury it, rivet it in me!"</p>
+<p>And such was his enthusiasm that he came out of himself; all
+around him
+seemed to disappear and he cried, stammering, to Christ: "Lord, go not
+far from me. Let Thy pity curb Thy justice; be unjust, forgive me;
+receive Thy poor bedesman for communion, the poor in spirit!"</p>
+<p>M. Bruno touched his arm, and with a glance invited him to
+accompany
+him. They went up to the altar and knelt upon the flagstones, then,
+when
+the priest had blessed them, they knelt closer on the single step, and
+the lay brother handed them a napkin, for there was no bar or cloth.</p>
+<p>And the abbot of La Trappe gave them the communion.</p>
+<p>They returned to their places. Durtal was in a state of
+absolute torpor;
+the Sacrament had, in a manner, anĉsthetized his mind; he fell on his
+knees at his bench, incapable even of unravelling what might be moving
+within him, unable to rally and pull himself together.</p>
+<p>And all of a sudden the impression came over him that he was
+suffocating
+and wanted air; the mass was finished; he rushed out and ran to his
+walk; there he wished to take an account of himself and he found
+nothing.</p>
+<p>And in front of the cross pond, in whose waters the Christ was
+drowning,
+there came over him an infinite melancholy, a vast sadness.</p>
+<p>It was a true syncope of the soul; it lost consciousness; and
+when it
+came to itself, he was astonished that he had not felt an unknown
+transport of joy; then he dwelt on a troublesome recollection, on the
+all too human side of the deglutition of a God; the Host had stuck
+against his palate, and he had had to seek it with his tongue and roll
+it about like a pancake in order to swallow it.</p>
+<p>Ah! it was still too material! he only wanted a fluid, a
+perfume, a
+fire, a breath!</p>
+<p>And he tried to explain to himself the treatment that the
+Saviour made
+him follow.</p>
+<p>All his anticipations had returned; it was the absolution and
+not the
+communion which had worked. When with the confessor he had very clearly
+perceived the presence of the Redeemer; all his being had, in a manner,
+been injected with divine effluvia, and the Eucharist had only brought
+him suffocation and trouble.</p>
+<p>It seemed that the effects of the two Sacraments had changed
+places the
+one with the other; they had worked the wrong way with him; Christ had
+been perceptible to his soul before and not afterwards.</p>
+<p>"But it is easy enough to see," he reflected, "that the great
+question
+for me is to have an absolute certainty of my forgiveness! By a special
+favour, Jesus has ratified my faith in the healing power of Penance.
+Why
+should He have done more?"</p>
+<p>"And then, what bounties would He reserve for His saints?
+After all I am
+astonishing. It is too much that I should wish to be treated as He
+certainly treats Brother Anacletus and Brother Simeon."</p>
+<p>"I have obtained more than I deserve. And what an answer I
+had, this
+very morning? Yes, indeed, but why should such advances end suddenly in
+this recoil?"</p>
+<p>And making his way towards the abbey to eat his bread and
+cheese, he
+said to himself: "My error towards God is to be always arguing, when I
+ought to adore stupidly as these monks here do. Ah! to be able to keep
+silence, silence to one's self, that is indeed a grace!"</p>
+<p>He reached the refectory, which, as a rule, he had to himself,
+M. Bruno
+never coming to the meal at seven o'clock in the morning. He was
+beginning to cut himself a piece of bread, when the father guest-master
+appeared.</p>
+<p>He had a whetstone and some knives in his hand, and smiling at
+Durtal,
+he said: "I am going to polish the knives of the monastery, for they
+want it badly." And he placed them on a table in a small room attached
+to the refectory.</p>
+<p>"Well, are you satisfied?" he said, on coming back.</p>
+<p>"Certainly&#8212;but, what happened this morning, how is it I was
+communicated by the abbot of La Trappe, when I should have been by the
+curate who dines with me?"</p>
+<p>"Ah!" exclaimed the monk, "I was as much surprised as you. On
+waking,
+the Father Abbot suddenly declared that he must say mass this morning.
+He got up in spite of the observations of the prior, who as a doctor,
+forbade him to leave his bed. Neither I, nor any one else, knows what
+took him. Then they told him that a retreatant would communicate and he
+answered 'Just so, I shall communicate him.' And then M. Bruno took the
+opportunity of also approaching the Sacrament, for he loves to receive
+our Saviour from the hands of Dom Anselm."</p>
+<p>"And this arrangement also satisfied the curate," the monk
+went on,
+smiling; "for he left La Trappe at an earlier hour this morning and has
+been able to say his mass in a parish where he was expected.... By the
+way, he told me to make his excuses to you for not having been able to
+bid you good-bye."</p>
+<p>Durtal bowed. "There is no doubt about it," he thought, "God
+wished to
+give me an unmistakable answer."</p>
+<p>"And your health?"</p>
+<p>"It is good, father; I am astounded; my digestion has never
+been so good
+as it is here; to say nothing of the fact that the neuralgia, which I
+feared so much, has spared me."</p>
+<p>"That shows that Heaven protects you."</p>
+<p>"Yes, indeed. But now that I remember it, I have long wished
+to ask you
+this&#8212;how are your offices arranged? They do not correspond with those
+printed in my prayer-book."</p>
+<p>"No, they differ from yours, which belong to the Roman ritual.
+At the
+same time, the Vespers are almost similar, except sometimes the
+lessons,
+and then what may put you out is that ours are often preceded by the
+Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. As a general rule we have a psalm less
+in
+the office, and the lessons are nearly always short.</p>
+<p>"Except," Father Etienne went on, smiling, "in Compline, the
+very one
+you recite. Thus you may have noticed we know nothing of 'In manus
+tuas,
+Domine,' which is one of the few short lessons sung in parish churches.</p>
+<p>"We have also a special Proper of Saints; we celebrate the
+commemoration
+of the Blessed of our order which you will not find in your books. In
+fact we follow the letter of the monastic breviary of Saint Benedict."</p>
+<p>Durtal had finished his breakfast. He rose, fearing to trouble
+the
+father by his questions.</p>
+<p>One word of the monk, however, was troubling his brain, that
+relating to
+the prior as a doctor; and before going out he spoke of this again to
+Father Etienne.</p>
+<p>"No&#8212;the Reverend Father Maximin is not a doctor, but he
+understands
+simples very well, and he has a small pharmacy which is enough as long
+as no one is seriously ill."</p>
+<p>"And in that case?"</p>
+<p>"In that case the practitioner can be called in from one of
+the nearest
+towns, but no one is ever so ill as that; or else the end is
+approaching
+and the doctor's visit would be useless...."</p>
+<p>"So on the whole the prior looks after soul and body at La
+Trappe."</p>
+<p>The monk signified assent.</p>
+<p>Durtal went out. He hoped to get rid of his suffocation by a
+long walk.</p>
+<p>He took a road which he had not been along before, and came
+out on a
+glade where stood the ruins of an ancient convent, some bits of wall,
+truncated columns and capitals in the Roman style; unhappily these
+remains were in a deplorable condition, rough, covered with moss and
+riddled with holes like pumice stones.</p>
+<p>He went on and came to the end of a long walk, at the top of
+which was a
+pond five or six times as large as the small one in the form of a
+cross,
+which he frequented.</p>
+<p>The walk was planted with old oaks on each side, and in the
+middle, near
+a wooden bench, stood a cast-iron statue of the Virgin.</p>
+<p>He groaned as he looked at it. The crime of the church
+followed him once
+more; even in this little chapel so full of divine compassion, all the
+statues came from the religious bazaars of Paris or Lyons.</p>
+<p>He took his position below, near the pond whose banks were
+bordered by
+reeds surrounded by tufts of osiers; and he amused himself by examining
+the colours of these shrubs, with their smooth green leaves and stalks
+of citron yellow, or blood red, noticing the curling water which began
+to foam with a gust of wind. And the martins skimmed it, touching it
+with the tips of their wings from which drops of water fell like pearls
+of quicksilver. And the birds rose whirling above and giving out their
+cries of weet, weet, weet, while the dragon-flies shone brightly in the
+air which they slashed with blue flames.</p>
+<p>"Peaceful refuge!" thought Durtal; "I ought to have come to
+rest here
+before." He sat down on a bed of moss and interested himself in the
+noiseless and active life of the waters. Now the splash and flash of
+the
+turn of a leaping carp; now great spiders skating on the surface,
+making
+little circles and driving one against another, stopping, going back
+and
+making new rounds; then, near him on the ground, Durtal noticed
+jumping,
+green grasshoppers with vermilion bellies, or, scaling the oaks,
+colonies of queer insects on whose backs a devil's head was painted in
+red lead on a black ground.</p>
+<p>And above all that, if he raised his eyes, there was the
+silent upturned
+sea of heaven, a blue sea crested with surging white clouds like waves;
+and at the same time this firmament moved in the water where it
+billowed
+under a blueish gray glass.</p>
+<p>Durtal felt himself expand as he smoked cigarettes; the
+melancholy which
+had oppressed him since the dawn began to melt away, and joy crept into
+him as he felt his soul was washed in the pool of the Sacraments and
+dried in the air of a cloister. And he was at once happy and uneasy;
+happy, for the meeting he had had with the father guest-master, had
+removed all the doubts he had entertained as to the supernatural side
+to
+the sudden change of a priest for a monk to communicate him; happy,
+also, to know that not only had Christ not repulsed him in spite of all
+the disorders of his life, but that He was encouraging him and giving
+him pledges, ratifying the signs of His favours by perceptible acts.
+And
+nevertheless he was uneasy, for he knew himself to be barren, and felt
+that it was necessary for him to be grateful for this goodness by a
+struggle with himself and an entirely new existence differing
+completely
+from that he had hitherto led.</p>
+<p>"Well, we shall see!" and he went off to the office of Sext
+almost
+calmed, and thence to dinner, where he found M. Bruno.</p>
+<p>"We will go for a walk to-day," said the oblate, rubbing his
+hands.</p>
+<p>Durtal looked at him with astonishment.</p>
+<p>"Yes, indeed, I thought that after a communion a little air
+outside the
+walls would do you good, and I proposed to the Reverend Father Abbot to
+free you from the rule for to-day, if the offer is not disagreeable to
+you."</p>
+<p>"I gladly accept, and thank you sincerely for your kind
+attention," said
+Durtal.</p>
+<p>They dined off a soup made with oil in which a stick of
+cabbage and some
+peas were swimming; it was not bad; but the bread made at La Trappe
+reminded him, when stale, of the bread in the siege of Paris, and made
+the soup turn sour.</p>
+<p>Then they tasted an egg with sorrel and some rice steeped in
+milk.</p>
+<p>"If it suits you," said the oblate, "we will begin by paying a
+visit to
+Dom Anselm, who has expressed a wish to know you."</p>
+<p>And M. Bruno led Durtal through a labyrinth of passages and
+staircases
+to a small cell where the abbot was. He was dressed like the fathers in
+a white robe and a black scapular; only at the end of a violet cord he
+bore on his breast an abbot's cross of ivory, in the centre of which,
+under a round glass, some relics were inserted.</p>
+<p>He gave his hand to Durtal and begged him to sit down.</p>
+<p>Then he asked if the food seemed to be enough for him. And on
+receiving
+a reply in the affirmative from Durtal he inquired if the long silence
+did not weigh upon him too much.</p>
+<p>"Not at all, this solitude suits me perfectly."</p>
+<p>"Well," said the abbot, laughing, "you are one of the few
+laymen who
+have borne our rule so easily. Generally those who have tried to make a
+retreat here have been devoured by home sickness and spleen, and have
+had but one idea, to get away."</p>
+<p>"Let us see," he said after a pause; "it is not possible, all
+the same,
+that such a sudden change of habits should not bring with it some
+painful privations; there must be at least one which you feel above all
+the others?"</p>
+<p>"True, I feel the want of being able to light a cigarette
+whenever I
+like."</p>
+<p>The abbot answered smiling, "But I suppose you have not been
+entirely
+without smoking, since you came here?"</p>
+<p>"I should tell a lie if I said I had not smoked in secret."</p>
+<p>"Why, bless me, tobacco was not foreseen by St. Benedict;
+there is no
+mention of it in his rule, and I am therefore free to allow its use; so
+smoke as many cigarettes as you like without being uneasy."</p>
+<p>And Dom Anselm added:</p>
+<p>"I hope shortly to have a little more time to myself, unless,
+indeed, I
+am obliged to keep my room, in that case I shall be happy to have a
+longer talk with you."</p>
+<p>And the monk, who seemed exhausted, shook them by the hand.</p>
+<p>Going down into the court with the oblate Durtal exclaimed,</p>
+<p>"The Father Abbot is charming, and quite young."</p>
+<p>"He is hardly forty."</p>
+<p>"He appears to be really ill."</p>
+<p>"Yes, he is not well, and he required no common energy to say
+his mass
+this morning; but let us see, we will first of all visit the grounds of
+La Trappe which you can hardly have been over completely, then we will
+leave the enclosure and push on to the farm."</p>
+<p>They started, skirting the remains of the ancient abbey, and
+as they
+walked, turning by the piece of water near which Durtal had been seated
+in the morning, M. Bruno entered into explanations about the ruins.</p>
+<p>"This monastery was founded in 1127 by St. Bernard, who
+installed the
+Blessed Humbert as abbot, an epileptic Cistercian, whom he had cured by
+a miracle. At that time there were apparitions in the convent; a legend
+relates that two angels came and cut one of the lilies planted in the
+cemetery every time one of the monks died.</p>
+<p>"The second abbot was the Blessed Guerric, who was famous for
+his
+knowledge, his humility and his patience in enduring evils. We possess
+his relics and they are enclosed in the shrine under the high altar.</p>
+<p>"But the most remarkable of the superiors, who succeeded each
+other here
+in the middle ages, was Peter Monoculus, whose story was written by his
+friend, the member of the synod, Thomas de Reuil.</p>
+<p>"Pierre, called Monoculus, or the one-eyed, was a saint
+thirsting for
+austerities and sufferings. He was assailed by horrible temptations at
+which he laughed. Exasperated, the Devil attacked his body and, by fits
+of neuralgia, broke his skull, but Heaven came to his aid and cured it.
+By shedding tears from a spirit of penitence, Peter lost an eye, and he
+thanked our Lord for this blessing, 'I had' he said, 'two enemies; I
+have escaped the first, but the one I retain troubles me more than the
+one I have lost.'</p>
+<p>"He worked miracles of healing. The king of France, Louis
+VII.,
+venerated him so much that, on seeing the empty eyelid, he wished to
+kiss it. Monoculus died in 1186; they soaked linen cloths in his blood,
+and washed his entrails in wine which was distributed, for the mixture
+was a powerful remedy.</p>
+<p>"The property of the abbey was then immense; it comprised all
+the
+country which surrounds us, kept up several lazar houses in the
+neighbourhood, and was the home of more than three hundred monks.
+Unfortunately what happened to others happened to Notre-Dame de l'Atre.
+Under the rule of abbots in commendam it declined, and it was dying
+with
+only six religious to look after it when the Revolution suppressed it.
+The church was then pulled down and afterwards replaced by the rotunda
+chapel.</p>
+<p>"Only in 1875 the present house, which I think dates from
+1733, was
+reconciled and became a monastery again. Trappists were brought here
+from Sainte Marie de la Mer, in the diocese of Toulouse, and this small
+colony has made Notre-Dame de l'Atre the Cistercian nursery you see.</p>
+<p>"Such, in few words, is the history of the convent," said the
+oblate.
+"As for the ruins they are buried underground, and no doubt precious
+fragments might be discovered, but for want of money and men no
+excavations have been made.</p>
+<p>"In addition to the broken columns and the capitals we passed,
+there
+remains from the old church a large statue of the Virgin which has been
+erected in one of the corridors of the abbey; besides this there are
+two
+angels fairly well preserved and which you may see down there at the
+end
+of the cloister in a small chapel, hidden behind a curtain of trees."</p>
+<p>"A virgin, before which St. Bernard may possibly have knelt,
+ought
+surely to have been put in the church on the altar dedicated to Mary,
+for the coloured statue, which surmounts it, is of crying
+ugliness&#8212;like that one also," said Durtal, pointing out in the distance
+the cast-iron Madonna which towered above the pond.</p>
+<p>The oblate bowed his head and did not reply.</p>
+<p>"Do you know," exclaimed Durtal, who in the face of this
+silence did not
+persist and changed the conversation, "do you know that I envy you
+living here?"</p>
+<p>"It is certain that I do not deserve this favour, for, on the
+whole, the
+cloister is less an expiation than a reward; it is the only place
+where,
+far from the world and near heaven, the only place where a man may give
+himself up to this mystic life which only develops in solitude and
+silence."</p>
+<p>"Yes, and if possible, I envy you yet more that you should
+have had the
+courage to venture into regions which, I confess, frightened me. And I
+know so well that, in spite of the spring-board of prayers and fasts,
+in
+spite of the green house, or orchid house atmosphere, wherein mysticism
+is grown, I should wither away in these regions without ever expanding
+again."</p>
+<p>The oblate smiled. "What do you know about it?" he replied,
+"the thing
+is not done in an hour; the orchid you speak of does not flower in a
+day; the advance is so slow, that mortifications space themselves out,
+fatigues are distributed over years, and, on the whole, are easily
+borne.</p>
+<p>"As a general rule it is necessary, to cross the distance
+which
+separates us from the Creator, to go through three grades to attain
+that
+science of Christian perfection which is called mysticism; we must live
+in turn the life of Purification, of Illumination and of Unity&#8212;to join
+the uncreated Good and be poured out in Him.</p>
+<p>"It matters little that these three grand phases of ascetic
+existence
+subdivide themselves into an infinity of stages; which are degrees
+according to Saint Bonaventure, dwelling places according to Saint
+Teresa, steps according to Saint Angela; they may vary in length and
+number, according to the will of the Lord and the temperament of those
+who go through them. It is not disputed that the journey of the soul
+towards God includes, first, perpendicular and breakneck roads&#8212;these
+are the roads of the life of Purification&#8212;next, narrower paths still,
+but well marked out and accessible&#8212;these are the paths of the life of
+Illumination&#8212;at length, a wide road almost smooth, the road of the
+life of unity, at the end of which the soul throws itself into the
+furnace of Love, and falls into the abyss of the most adorable Infinity!</p>
+<p>"On the whole, these three ways are successively reserved to
+those who
+start in Christian asceticism, to those who practise it, and finally to
+those who attain to the supreme end, the death of self and the life in
+God.</p>
+<p>"Long," pursued the oblate, "I have placed my desires beyond
+the
+horizon, yet I progress little; I am scarcely disengaged from the life
+of Purification, scarcely...."</p>
+<p>"And you do not fear&#8212;how shall I say&#8212;material infirmities, for
+if at
+last you succeed in attaining the limits of contemplation, you risk the
+ruin of your body for ever. Experience seems to show, in effect, that
+the deified soul acts on the constitution and brings incurable
+troubles."</p>
+<p>The oblate smiled. "In the first place I should, no doubt,
+fail to
+attain to the last degree of initiation, the extreme point of
+mysticism;
+then, supposing I attain it, what would corporal accidents be in the
+face of such results?</p>
+<p>"Let me also assure you that these accidents are neither so
+frequent nor
+so certain as you seem to think.</p>
+<p>"A man may be a great mystic, or an admirable saint, and not
+be the
+subject of visible phenomena for those who surround him. Would you not
+think, for example, that levitation, or the flight of bodies in the
+air,
+which seems to constitute the highest state of rapture, is one of the
+rarest? Whom can you quote to me? Saint Teresa, Saint Christina the
+Admirable, Saint Peter of Alcantara, Dominic of Mary Jesus, Agnes of
+Bohemia, Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament, the Blessed Gorardesca of
+Pisa, and above all Saint Joseph of Cupertino, who raised himself at
+will from the ground. But they are ten or twenty out of thousands of
+the
+elect!</p>
+<p>"And note well that these gifts do not prove their superiority
+over
+other Saints. Saint Teresa declares expressly: it must not be imagined
+that anyone, blessed as he may be in this respect, is better than those
+who are not so blessed, for our Lord directs each one according to his
+particular need.</p>
+<p>"And then the doctrine of the Church is seen in the untiring
+prudence
+shown in the canonization of the dead. Qualities and not extraordinary
+acts decide this; for the Church, miracles themselves are only
+secondary
+proofs, for she knows that the Spirit of Evil imitates them.</p>
+<p>"In the lives of the Blessed you will find, too, the most
+unusual deeds,
+and more amazing phenomena than in the biographies of the Saints. These
+phenomena have rather hindered than helped them. After having beatified
+them for their virtues, the Church has put off&#8212;and no doubt for a long
+time&#8212;their promotion to the sovereign dignity of Saints.</p>
+<p>"It is difficult, on the whole, to formulate an exact theory
+on this
+subject, for if the cause, if the mental action is the same in all
+mystics, it differs a little, as I have said, according to God's will
+and the character of the subjects; the difference of sex often changes
+the form of the mystic flow, though in essence it never varies; the
+rush
+of the Spirit from on High may produce different effects, but is none
+the less identical.</p>
+<p>"The only observation we dare make in these matters is that
+women, as a
+rule, are more passive and less reserved, while men resist more
+violently the wishes of Heaven."</p>
+<p>"That makes me think," said Durtal, "that even in religion
+there are
+souls which seem to have mistaken their sex. Saint Francis of Assisi,
+who was all love, had rather the feminine soul of a nun, and Saint
+Teresa, who was the most attentive of psychologists, had the virile
+soul
+of a monk. We might correctly speak of Saint Francis as a woman and
+Saint Teresa as a man."</p>
+<p>The oblate smiled. "To return to your question," he resumed,
+"I do not
+at all believe that illness can be the necessary consequence of
+phenomena aroused by the impetuous force of mysticism."</p>
+<p>"But look at Saint Colette, Lidwine, Saint Aldegonde,
+Jane-Mary of the
+Cross, Sister Emmerich and how many more who passed their existence,
+half paralyzed, upon a bed! They are a small minority. Besides, the
+Saints or Blessed ones whose names you quote were victims of
+substitution, expiating the sins of others, a part God had reserved to
+them; it is not, therefore, surprising that they were bed-ridden and
+cripples, and were constantly half dead.</p>
+<p>"No, the truth is that mysticism can modify the needs of the
+body,
+without, for all that, having much effect on, or destroying the health.
+I know well, you would answer me with that terrible phrase of Saint
+Hildegarde, a phrase at once just and sinister: 'the Lord dwells not in
+the bodies of the healthy and vigorous,' and you might add, with Saint
+Teresa, that evils are more frequent in the last of the castles of the
+soul. Yes, but these saints hoist themselves on the summit of life and
+retain God in a permanent manner in their carnal shell. Having reached
+this point, nature, too feeble to support a perfect state, gives way,
+but, I assert again, these cases are an exception and not a rule. And,
+alas, such maladies are not contagious.</p>
+<p>"I am quite aware," resumed the oblate, after a pause, "that
+the very
+existence of mysticism is resolutely denied by some who in consequence
+can never admit the possibility of any influence over the bodily
+organs,
+but the experience of this supernatural reality is from all time, and
+proofs abound.</p>
+<p>"Let us take the stomach for example. Well, under the heavenly
+influence, it becomes transformed, omits all earthly nourishment and
+consumes the Holy Species only.</p>
+<p>"Saint Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno lived for
+years
+exclusively on the Sacrament; and this gift devolved equally upon Saint
+Colette, Saint Lidwine, Dominic of Paradise, Saint Columba of Rieti,
+Mary Bagnesi, Rose of Lima, Saint Peter of Alcantara, Mother Agnes of
+Langeac and on many others.</p>
+<p>"Under the divine impress the senses of smell and taste
+presented no
+less strange metamorphoses. Saint Philip Nevi, Saint Angela, Saint
+Margaret of Cortona recognized a special taste in unleavened bread,
+when
+after the consecration there was no longer any wheat, but the very
+flesh
+of Christ. Saint Pacomius knew heretics by their foul smell; Saint
+Catherine of Siena, Saint Joseph of Cupertino and Mother Agnes of Jesus
+discovered sins by their evil odours; Saint Hilarion, Saint Lutgarde,
+Gentilla of Ravenna, could tell merely by the scent of those whom they
+met what faults they had committed.</p>
+<p>"And the Saints themselves, whether living or dead, exhaled
+powerful
+perfumes.</p>
+<p>"When Saint Francis de Paul and Venturini of Bergamo offered
+the
+Sacrifice they smelt sweet. Saint Joseph of Cupertino secreted such
+fragrant odours that his track could be followed; and sometimes it was
+during illness that these aromas were diffused.</p>
+<p>"The pus of Saint John of the Cross and of the Blessed Didée
+gave forth
+strong and distinct scent of lilies; Barthole, the tertiary, gnawed to
+the bones by leprosy, gave out pleasant emanations, and the same was
+the
+case with Lidwine, Ida of Louvain, Saint Colette, Saint Humiliana,
+Maria-Victoria of Genoa, Dominic of Paradise, whose wounds were boxes
+of
+perfume, whence fresh scents escaped.</p>
+<p>"And thus we can enumerate organs and senses one after
+another, and
+declare marvellous effects. Without speaking of those faithful stigmata
+which open or shut according to the Proper of the liturgical year, what
+is more astounding than the gift of bilocation, the power of doubling
+oneself, of being in two places at the same time, at the same moment?
+And yet what numerous examples exist of this incredible fact: many are
+celebrated, amongst others those of Saint Antony of Padua, Saint
+Francis
+Xavier, Marie of Agreda, who was at the same time in her monastery in
+Spain and in Mexico when she was preaching to infidels, Mother Agnes of
+Jesus, who came to visit M. Olier at Paris without leaving her convent
+at Langeac. And, again, the action from on High seems singularly
+energetic when it takes hold of the central organ of circulation, the
+motor which drives the blood into all parts of the body.</p>
+<p>"Numbers of the elect had such a burning heart that the linen
+they wore
+was singed; the fire which consumed Ursula Benincasa, the foundress of
+the Theatines, was so strong that this saint breathed columns of smoke
+as soon as she opened her mouth; Saint Catherine of Genoa dipped her
+feet or her hands in iced water and the water boiled; snow melted round
+Saint Peter of Alcantara, and, one day when the blessed Gerlach was
+crossing a forest in the depth of winter he advised his companion, who
+walked behind him, and who could not go on, as his legs were numb, to
+put his feet into his footsteps, and immediately he ceased to feel cold.</p>
+<p>"I will add that certain of these phenomena, which make
+freethinkers
+smile, have been renewed and have been verified quite recently.</p>
+<p>"Linen scorched by the fire of the heart has been observed by
+Dr.
+Imbert-Gourbeyre on the stigmatized Palma d'Oria, and phenomena of high
+mysticism, which no science can explain, were watched in the case of
+Louise Lateau, minute by minute, and noted and controlled by Professor
+Rohling, Dr. Lafebvre, Dr. Imbert Gourbeyre, Dr. de Noüe, by medical
+delegates from all countries....</p>
+<p>"But here we are," said the oblate; "excuse me, I will go
+first to show
+you the way."</p>
+<p>They had left the enclosure as he spoke, and cutting across
+the fields,
+reached an immense farm. Trappists bowed respectfully as they entered
+the court yard. M. Bruno, addressing himself to one of them, asked him
+to be good enough to take them over the property.</p>
+<p>The lay brother took them to the cattle sheds, then to the
+stables, then
+to the poultry yard; Durtal, who was not interested in such sights,
+confined himself to admiring the grace of these good people. No one
+spoke, but they replied to questions by signs and winks.</p>
+<p>"But how do they communicate with each other?" asked Durtal,
+when they
+were outside the farm.</p>
+<p>"You have just seen; they correspond by signs; they have a
+simpler
+alphabet than that of the deaf and dumb, for each idea that they may
+require to express for their common work is foreseen.</p>
+<p>"Thus the word 'wash' is translated by one hand tapping on the
+other;
+the word 'vegetable' by scratching the left forefinger; sleep is
+feigned
+by leaning the head upon the fist; drink by raising a closed hand to
+the
+lips. And for more spiritual expressions they employ a like method.
+Confession is translated by a finger kissed and laid upon the heart;
+holy water by five fingers of the left hand clasped on which a cross is
+made with the thumb of the right hand; fasting by fingers which close
+the mouth; the word 'yesterday' by turning the arm back towards the
+shoulder; shame by covering the eyes with the hand."</p>
+<p>"But supposing they wished to indicate me, who am not one of
+themselves,
+how would they set about it?"</p>
+<p>"They would use the sign of 'guest,' which they make by
+stretching out
+the hand and bringing it near the body."</p>
+<p>"That means that I come to them from far, an open and even
+transparent
+fact if you like."</p>
+<p>They went silently along a walk which led down into the labour
+fields.</p>
+<p>"I have not noticed Brother Anacletus or old Simeon among
+these monks,"
+exclaimed Durtal, suddenly.</p>
+<p>"They are not occupied on the farm; Brother Anacletus is
+employed in the
+chocolate factory, and Brother Simeon looks after the pigs; both are
+working in the immediate neighbourhood of the monastery. If you like,
+we
+will go and wish Simeon good-morning."</p>
+<p>And the oblate added, "You can tell them, when you go back to
+Paris,
+that you have seen a real saint, such as existed in the eleventh
+century; he carries us back to the time of St. Francis of Assisi; he is
+in some sense the reincarnation of that astonishing Juniper whose
+innocent exploits the Fioretti celebrate for us. You know that work?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; after the Golden Legend it is the book on which the soul
+of the
+Middle Ages is most clearly impressed."</p>
+<p>"But to return to Simeon; this old man is a saint of uncommon
+simplicity. Here is one proof out of a thousand. Several months ago I
+was in the prior's cell when Brother Simeon appeared. He made use of
+the
+ordinary formula in asking permission to speak, 'Benedicite.' Father
+Maximin replied 'Dominus,' and on this word, which permitted him to
+speak, the brother showed his glasses and said he could no longer see
+clearly.</p>
+<p>"'That is not very surprising,' said the prior, 'you have been
+using the
+same glasses for nearly ten years, and since then your eyes may well
+have become weaker; never mind, we will find the number which suits
+your
+sight now.'</p>
+<p>"As he spoke, Father Maximin mechanically moved the glass of
+the
+spectacles between his hands, and suddenly he laughed, showing me his
+fingers, which were black. He turned round, took a cloth, cleaned the
+spectacles, and replacing them on the brother's nose, said to him, 'Do
+you see, Brother Simeon?'</p>
+<p>"And the old man, astonished, cried 'Yes ... I see!'</p>
+<p>"But this is only one side of this good man. Another is the
+love of his
+beasts. When a sow is going to bring forth, he asks permission to pass
+the night by her, and delivers her, looking after her like his child,
+weeps when they sell his little pigs or when the big ones are sent to
+the slaughter-house! And how all the animals adore him!"</p>
+<p>"Truly," the oblate went on, after a silence, "God loves
+simple souls
+above all, for he loads Brother Simeon with graces. Alone, here, he can
+reabsorb and even prevent the demoniacal accidents which arise in
+cloisters. Then we assist at strange performances: one fine morning all
+the pigs fall on their sides; they are ill and at the point of death.</p>
+<p>"Simeon, who knows the origin of these evils, cries to the
+Devil: 'Wait,
+wait, and you will see!' He runs for holy water, and sprinkles them
+with
+it, praying the while, and all the beasts who were dying jump up,
+frisking about and wagging their tails.</p>
+<p>"As for diabolic incursions into the convent itself, they are
+but too
+real, and sometimes are only driven back after persistent prayers and
+energetic fastings; at certain times in most convents the Demon sows a
+harvest of hobgoblins of whom no one knows how to get rid. Here, the
+father abbot, the prior, and all those who are priests have failed; it
+was necessary, to give efficacy to the exorcisms, that the humble lay
+brother should intervene; so, to forestall new attacks, he has obtained
+the right to wash the monastery with holy water and to use prayers
+whenever he thinks well to do so.</p>
+<p>"He has the power of feeling where the Evil One is hidden, and
+he
+follows him, tracks him, and finally casts him out."</p>
+<p>"Here is the piggery," continued M. Bruno, showing a
+tumble-down old
+place in front of the left wing of the cloister, surrounded by
+palisades; and he added,</p>
+<p>"I warn you, the old man grunts like a pig, but he will not
+answer your
+questions except by signs."</p>
+<p>"But he can speak to his animals?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, to them only."</p>
+<p>The oblate opened a small door, and the lay brother, all bent,
+lifted
+his head with difficulty.</p>
+<p>"Good-day, brother," said M. Bruno; "here is a gentleman who
+would like
+to see your pupils."</p>
+<p>There was a grunt of joy on the lips of the old man. He smiled
+and
+invited them by a sign to follow him.</p>
+<p>He introduced them into a shed, and Durtal recoiled, deafened
+by
+horrible cries, suffocated by the pestilential heat of the liquid
+manure. All the pigs jumped up behind their barrier, and howled with
+joy at the sight of the brother.</p>
+<p>"Peace, peace," said the old man, in a gentle voice; and
+lifting an arm
+over the paling, he caressed the snouts which, on smelling him, were
+almost suffocated by grunting.</p>
+<p>He drew Durtal aside by the arm, and making him lean over the
+trellis
+work, showed him an enormous sow with a snub nose, of English breed, a
+monstrous animal surrounded by a company of sucking pigs which rushed,
+as if mad, at her teats.</p>
+<p>"Yes, my beauty; go, my beauty," murmured the old man,
+stroking her
+bristles with his hand.</p>
+<p>And the sow looked at him with little languishing eyes, and
+licked his
+fingers; she ended by screaming abominably when he went away.</p>
+<p>And Brother Simeon showed off other pupils, pigs with ears
+like the
+mouth of a trumpet and corkscrew tails, sows whose stomachs trailed and
+whose feet seemed hardly outside their bodies, new-born pigs which
+sucked ravenously at the teats, larger ones, who delighted in chasing
+each other about and rolled in the mud, snorting.</p>
+<p>Durtal complimented him on the beasts, and the old man was
+jubilant,
+wiping his face with his great hand; then, on the oblate inquiring
+about
+the litter of some sow, he felt his fingers in a row; replying to the
+observation that the animals were very greedy, by stretching his arms
+to
+heaven, showing the empty troughs, lifting ends of wood, tearing up
+tufts of grass which he carried to his lips, grunting as if he had his
+muzzle full.</p>
+<p>Then he took them into the courtyard, placed them against the
+wall,
+opened a door beyond, and hid himself. A formidable boar passed like a
+waterspout, upset a wheelbarrow, scattering everything round him with a
+noise like a shell bursting; then he broke into a gallop all round the
+courtyard, and ended by taking a header into a sea of liquid manure. He
+wallowed, turned head over heels, kicked about with his four feet in
+the
+air, and got up black and disgusting as the inside of a chimney.</p>
+<p>After this he halted, grunted a cheerful note, and wished to
+fawn on the
+monk, who checked him with a gesture.</p>
+<p>"Your boar is splendid!" said Durtal.</p>
+<p>And the lay brother looked on Durtal with moist eyes as he
+rubbed his
+neck with his hand, sighing.</p>
+<p>"That means they are going to kill him soon," said the oblate.</p>
+<p>And the old man acquiesced with a melancholy shake of his head.</p>
+<p>They left him, thanking him for his kindness.</p>
+<p>"When I think of how this being, who is devoted to the lowest
+duties,
+prays in church, I long to kneel before him and, like his pigs, kiss
+his
+hands!" exclaimed Durtal after a silence.</p>
+<p>"Brother Simeon is an angelic being," replied the oblate. "He
+lives the
+Unitive life, his soul plunged, drowned in the divine essence. Under a
+rough exterior an absolutely white soul, a soul without sin, lives in
+this poor body; it is right that God should spoil him! As I have told
+you, He has given him all power over the Demon; and in certain cases He
+allows him also the power of healing by the imposition of hands. He has
+renewed here the wonderful cures of the ancient saints."</p>
+<p>They ceased speaking, and, warned by the bells which were
+ringing for
+Vespers, they moved towards the church.</p>
+<p>And, coming to himself again, trying to recover, Durtal
+remained
+astounded. Monastic life retarded time. How many weeks had he been at
+La
+Trappe, and how many days since had he approached the Sacraments? that
+was lost in the distance. Ah, life was double in these cloisters! And
+yet he was not tired of it; he had bent himself easily to the hard
+rule,
+and, in spite of the scanty meals, he felt no sick headaches or
+failing;
+he had never felt so well!&#8212;but what remained was a feeling of stifling,
+of restrained sighs, this burning melancholy for hours, and, more than
+all, this vague anxiety at listening again within himself, and hearing
+united in his person the voices of this Trinity, God, the Devil, and
+Man.</p>
+<p>"This is not the peace of the soul I dreamed of&#8212;and it is even
+worse
+than at Paris," he said to himself, recalling the maddening trial of
+the
+rosary&#8212;"and yet&#8212;how can I explain it? I am happy here all the same."</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_V" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER
+V.</h2>
+<p>Rising, somewhat earlier than his wont, Durtal went down to
+the chapel.
+The office of Matins was over, but some lay brothers, amongst whom was
+Brother Simeon, were praying on their knees on the ground.</p>
+<p>The sight of this holy swine-herd threw Durtal into a long
+train of
+thought. He tried in vain to penetrate into the sanctuary of that soul,
+hidden like an invisible chapel behind the dunghill rampart of a body;
+he did not even succeed in representing to himself the docile and
+clinging soul of this man, who had attained the highest state to which
+the human creature can reach here below.</p>
+<p>"What a power of prayer he has," thought he, as he looked at
+the old
+man.</p>
+<p>He remembered the details of his interview the evening before.
+"It is
+true," he thought, "that in this monk I find something of the charm of
+that brother Juniper, whose surprising simplicity has come down through
+the ages."</p>
+<p>And he brought to mind the adventures of that Franciscan whom
+his
+companions left one day by himself in the convent, telling him to
+prepare dinner against their return.</p>
+<p>Juniper reflected, "What an amount of time is spent in
+preparing food!
+The brothers who take turns in that work have not even time to
+pray"&#8212;and desiring to lighten the work of those who should succeed him
+in the kitchen, he determined to cook such plentiful dishes that the
+community might dine on them for a fortnight.</p>
+<p>He lighted all the stoves, procured, we are not told how,
+enormous
+boilers, filled them with water, threw into them, pell-mell, eggs with
+their shells, chickens with their feathers, vegetables he had neglected
+to trim, and before a fire which would roast an ox, he exerted himself
+to pile up and stir the ridiculous jumble of his stock-pots.</p>
+<p>When the brothers came home, and sat down in the refectory, he
+ran, his
+face browned and his hands burnt, and joyously served up his stew. The
+superior asked him if he were not mad, while he remained stupefied that
+no one gobbled up this astonishing mess. He declared in all humility
+that he thought he was doing a service to his brethren, and only when
+he
+observed that so much food would be wasted, did he weep hot tears, and
+declare himself a wretch; he cried that he was good for nothing but to
+spoil the property of Almighty God, while the monks smiled, admiring
+this debauch of charity, and the excess of Juniper's simplicity.</p>
+<p>"Brother Simeon would be humble enough and simple enough to
+renew again
+such splendid jokes," thought Durtal, "but better still than the good
+Franciscan, he recalls the memory of that astonishing Saint Joseph of
+Cupertino, of whom the oblate spoke yesterday."</p>
+<p>He, who called himself brother Ass, was a charming and poor
+creature, so
+modest, and so ignorant, that he was turned away wherever he went. He
+passed through life, with open mouth, thrusting himself eagerly against
+all the cloisters that repulsed him. He wandered about unable to
+perform
+even the lowest tasks. He was, to use a popular expression, a regular
+butter-fingers, and broke whatever he touched. They ordered him to go
+and fetch water, and he wandered without understanding, absorbed in
+God,
+and at the end, when no one thought about it any more, brought some
+after a month.</p>
+<p>A monastery of Capucins which had received him, got rid of
+him. He went
+his way, vaguely, out of his orbit among the towns, stumbled into
+another convent where he employed himself in taking care of the
+animals,
+whom he adored, and he rose into a perpetual ecstasy, revealing himself
+as the most singular of wonder workers, putting the demons to flight,
+and healing the sick. He was at once idiotic and sublime; in the
+hagiography he stands alone, and seems to figure there to furnish a
+proof that the soul is identified with Eternal Wisdom, rather by
+ignorance than by science.</p>
+<p>"He also loves animals," said Durtal to himself, as he looked
+at old
+Simeon; "and he too puts to flight the Evil One, and works cures by his
+sanctity.</p>
+<p>"In a time when all men are exclusively haunted by the
+thoughts of
+luxury and lucre, the soul appears extraordinary when divested of its
+bark, as the candid and naked soul of this good monk. He is eighty
+years
+old and more, and he has led from his youth up the restricted life of
+the Trappists; he probably does not know in what time he lives, nor
+what
+latitudes he inhabits, whether he is in America or in France, for he
+has
+never read a newspaper, and outside rumours do not reach him.</p>
+<p>"He does not even know the taste of flesh meat or wine; he has
+no notion
+of money, of which he does not suspect the value nor the appearance; he
+does not imagine how a woman is made; and save for the breeding of his
+pigs, he perhaps cannot even guess the meaning and the consequences of
+the sin of the flesh.</p>
+<p>"He lives alone ringed round by silence, and buried in the
+shade; he
+meditates on the mortifications of the Fathers in the Desert, which are
+read to him as he eats, and the frenzy of their fasts makes him ashamed
+of his miserable repast, and he accuses himself that he is so well to
+do.</p>
+<p>"Ah! this Father Simeon is innocent; he knows nothing that we
+know, and
+knows that of which all others are ignorant; his education has been
+taken in hand by the Lord Himself, who teaches him truths which we
+cannot comprehend, models his soul after heaven, infuses Himself into
+him, possesses him, and deifies him in the union of Blessedness.</p>
+<p>"This puts us somewhat at a distance from hypocrites and
+devout persons;
+as far indeed as modern Catholicism is from Mysticism, for certainly
+that religion is as grovelling on the ground as Mysticism is high!</p>
+<p>"And that is true. Instead of directing all our forces to that
+unknown
+end, of taking our soul to fashion it in that form of a dove which the
+Middle Ages gave to the pyxes; instead of making it the shrine where
+the
+Host reposes in the very image of the Holy Spirit, the Catholic
+confines
+himself to trying to conceal his conscience, to deceive his Judge by
+the
+fear of a salutary hell; he acts not by choice, but by fear: he with
+the
+aid of his clergy, and the help of his imbecile literature, and his
+feeble press, has made of religion a mere fetishism, a ridiculous
+worship composed of statuettes and alms boxes; candles and
+chromo-lithographs; he has materialized the ideal of Love, in inventing
+an entirely physical devotion to the Sacred Heart.</p>
+<p>"What baseness of conception!" continued Durtal, who had come
+out of the
+chapel, and was strolling along the bank of the great pond. He looked
+at
+the reeds, which bent like an harvest still green, under a puff of
+wind;
+then he half saw as he leant forward, an old boat, which bore almost
+effaced on its blueish hull the name "Alleluia." This bark disappeared
+under the tufts of leaves round which were twined the bells of the
+convolvulus, a symbolic flower, since it widens out like a chalice, and
+has the dead white of a wafer.</p>
+<p>The scent of the water, at once enticing and bitter,
+intoxicated him.
+"Ah!" he thought, "happiness certainly consists in being restricted to
+a
+place closely locked, a prison very confined, or a chapel always open,"
+and he caught himself up: "Ah! there is Brother Anacletus;" the lay
+brother was coming towards him, bending under a hamper.</p>
+<p>He passed before Durtal, smiling at him with his eyes: and
+while he went
+his way, Durtal thought, "This man is a true friend of mine; when I was
+suffering so much before my confession, he expressed all to me in a
+look. To-day when he believes me serener, and more joyous, he is
+content, and shows it to me by a smile; and I shall never speak to him,
+I shall never thank him, I shall never even know who he is, I shall
+perhaps never even see him again.</p>
+<p>"In leaving this place, I shall keep a friend, for whom I too
+feel
+affection; yet neither of us has even exchanged a gesture with the
+other.</p>
+<p>"After all," he thought, "does not this absolute reserve make
+our
+friendship more perfect? it is stamped in the eternal distance, it
+remains mysterious and incomplete, and more certain."</p>
+<p>While thinking over these reflections, Durtal went towards the
+chapel,
+where the Office called him, and thence to the refectory.</p>
+<p>He was surprised to find the table laid only for one. "What
+has happened
+to M. Bruno? Yet I may as well wait a while," and to kill time, he
+occupied himself by reading a printed card, hung upon the wall.</p>
+<p>It was a sort of advertisement which began thus:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="center">"<span class="smcap">Eternity</span>.</p>
+<p>"Fellow sinners, you will die. Be ye always ready.</p>
+<p>"Watch then, pray without ceasing, never forget the Four Last
+Things which you see here traced </p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza"><span class="i0">"Death,
+the gate of Eternity,<br />
+</span><span class="i0">Judgment, which decides
+Eternity,<br />
+</span><span class="i0">Hell, the abode of unhappy
+Eternity,<br />
+</span><span class="i0">Paradise, the abode of
+blessed Eternity."<br />
+</span></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Father Etienne interrupted Durtal, telling him that M. Bruno
+had gone to
+Saint Landry to make some purchases, and would only return at bed-time
+at eight o'clock. "Dine then without waiting, and make haste, or all
+your dishes will be cold."</p>
+<p>"And how is the father abbot?"</p>
+<p>"Better, he keeps his room still, but he hopes to be able to
+come down a
+while, the day after to-morrow, and assist at least at some of the
+offices."</p>
+<p>And the monk bowed and disappeared.</p>
+<p>Durtal seated himself at table, ate some bean broth, swallowed
+a
+soft-boiled egg and a spoonful of warm beans, then once outside, he
+passed along the chapel, entered it, and knelt before the altar of the
+Virgin; but at once the spirit of blasphemy filled him; he wished,
+whatever it cost him, to insult the Virgin; it seemed to him that he
+would experience a sharp joy, an acute pleasure in soiling her; but he
+restrained himself, he wrinkled his face not to allow the coal-heaver's
+abuse, which was on his lips, to escape.</p>
+<p>And he detested these abominations; he revolted against them,
+strove
+against them with horror; and the impulse became so irresistible, that
+in order to keep silence he was obliged to bite his lips till they bled.</p>
+<p>"This is somewhat strong," he said, "to hear grumbling in
+oneself, the
+contrary of what one is thinking;" but he had need to call to his help
+all his will, he felt that he should yield, and spit out all these
+impurities; wherefore he fled, thinking, that should he find no means
+of
+resistance, it were better to vomit this filth in the court rather than
+in the church.</p>
+<p>And so soon as he quitted the chapel this madness of blasphemy
+ceased;
+he walked along the pond astonished by the strange violence of the
+attack.</p>
+<p>Little by little there came to him the unexplained intuition
+of a danger
+that menaced him. As a beast that scents a hidden enemy, he looked with
+precaution within himself, and ended by seeing a black point on the
+horizon of his soul, and suddenly, before he had time to reconnoitre,
+and take account of the danger he saw arising, this point extended, and
+covered him with its shadow; there was no more light in him.</p>
+<p>He had that minute of unrest which precedes the storm, and in
+the
+anxious silence of his being, arguments fell like drops of rain.</p>
+<p>The painful effects of the Sacrament justified themselves, had
+he not
+proceeded in such a way that his communion could not but be unfaithful?
+Evidently; instead of collecting and straining himself, he had passed
+an
+afternoon of revolt and anger; the very evening before he had
+unworthily
+judged an ecclesiastic whose only wrong was that he took pleasure in
+the
+vanity of easy jokes. Had he confessed this injustice, and these
+revolts? Not the least in the world; and after the communion still
+less;
+had he, as he should have done, shut himself up alone with his Guest?
+He
+had abandoned Him, without thinking more of Him; had quitted his
+innermost cell, had taken a walk in the wood, had not even been present
+at the Offices.</p>
+<p>"But come, come, this blame is foolish. I communicated, just
+as I was,
+on the formal order of the confessor; as for the walk, I did not ask
+for
+it nor wish for it. M. Bruno, in agreement with the abbot of La Trappe,
+decided it would do me good; I have then nothing to reproach myself
+with; I am blameless.</p>
+<p>"This does not prove that you would not have done better to
+spend the
+day in prayer, in the church.</p>
+<p>"But," he cried, "with such a system one could not move, one
+could not
+eat, nor sleep, for one should never leave the church. There must be
+time for everything, or the devil take it all!</p>
+<p>"No doubt, but a more diligent soul would have refused that
+excursion,
+just because it was pleasant; would have avoided it, out of
+mortification, in a spirit of penance."</p>
+<p>"Evidently, but" ... these scruples tortured him; "the fact
+is," he
+said, "I might have employed my afternoon more wholesomely than that;"
+to believe that he had spent it ill was but a step, and he made it. He
+pelted himself for an hour, sweating with agony, heaping on himself
+imaginary sins, and entering so far on that road that he ended by
+suddenly realizing his position and understanding he was out of the
+right track.</p>
+<p>The story of the rosary returned to his memory, and then he
+blamed
+himself for allowing himself to be again driven into a corner by the
+demon. He began to breathe again, to regain his footing, when other
+attacks equally formidable presented themselves.</p>
+<p>It was no longer an insinuation of arguments which ran drop by
+drop, but
+a furious rain, which threw itself like an avalanche on his soul. The
+storm, of which the wave of scruples was only the prelude, burst in its
+fulness; and in the panic of the first moment, in the violence of the
+tempest, the enemy unmasked his batteries, and struck him to the heart.</p>
+<p>He had got no good from that communion, but he was also too
+young at it.
+Ah! indeed, was he to believe that because a priest uttered five Latin
+words over a bit of unleavened bread, that bread was transubstantiated
+into the flesh of Christ? That a child should accept such nonsense,
+might be possible, but that a man past forty should listen to such
+formidable shams, was excessive; almost disquieting.</p>
+<p>And these insinuations lashed him like hail showers: how could
+bread
+made of wheat before, have only the appearance of wheat afterwards;
+what
+is flesh that is neither seen nor felt; what is a body, which has such
+ubiquity as to be at the same time on the altars of divers countries;
+what is that power which is annihilated when the Host is not made of
+pure wheat?</p>
+<p>And this became a regular deluge which overwhelmed him, and
+yet like an
+impenetrable pile, that Faith he had acquired without ever having known
+how, remained immovable, disappeared under torrents of interrogation,
+but never stirred.</p>
+<p>He revolted, and said to himself: "This only proves that the
+sacramental
+darkness of the Eucharist cannot be sounded. Moreover, if it were
+intelligible, it would not be divine. If the God whom we serve could be
+comprehended by reason, He could not be worth the trouble of serving,
+said Tauler; and the 'Imitation' declares plainly also at the end of
+the
+IVth book that if the works of God were such as man's intelligence
+could
+easily grasp, they would cease to be marvellous, and could not be
+qualified as ineffable."</p>
+<p>And a mocking voice replied,</p>
+<p>"That is what you call answering, avowing that there is
+nothing to
+answer."</p>
+<p>"In fact," said Durtal, who reflected, "I have been present at
+spiritualistic experiences, where no trickery was possible. It was
+quite
+evident that there was no fluid from the spectators, no suggestion of
+persons surrounding the table who dictated the responses; then in
+giving
+its raps, the table expressed itself suddenly in English, though no one
+spoke that language, then a few minutes later, addressing itself to me,
+who was at a distance from it, and consequently was not touching it, it
+told me this time in French, facts which I had forgotten, and I alone
+could know. I am then certainly obliged to suppose an element of the
+supernatural, using a table in guise of an interpreter, to accept if
+not
+the evocation of the dead, but at least the proved existence of ghosts.</p>
+<p>"Then it is not more impossible, more surprising that Christ
+should
+substitute Himself for a piece of bread, than that a ghost should hide
+and brag in the foot of a table. These phenomena equally put our senses
+to rout; but if one of them be undeniable, and spiritualistic
+manifestation certainly is so, what motives can we invoke to deny the
+other, which is moreover attested by thousands of saints?</p>
+<p>"After all," he went on with a smile, "we have already
+demonstration by
+the absurd, but this may be called demonstration by the abject, for if
+the Eucharistic mystery is sublime, it is not the same with
+spiritualism, which is after all only the latrine of the supernatural!"</p>
+<p>"If this were the only enigma," began the voice again, "but
+all the
+Catholic doctrines are on the same model; examine religion from its
+birth, and see if it do not always issue by an absurd dogma.</p>
+<p>"Here is a God, infinitely perfect, infinitely good, a God who
+is not
+ignorant of past, present, or future. He knew then that Eve would sin;
+therefore of two things, one; either He is not good, in that He
+submitted her to that proof knowing that she had not power to stand it;
+or again, He was not certain of her defeat; in that case He is not
+omniscient, He is not perfect."</p>
+<p>Durtal gave no answer to this dilemma; which is in fact
+difficult to
+resolve.</p>
+<p>"Yet," he thought, "we may at once exclude one of these two
+propositions, the latter; for it is childish to concern ourselves about
+the future, when we have to do with God; we judge Him by our miserable
+understanding, and there is for Him neither present nor past, nor
+future; He sees them all at the same moment in light uncreate. For Him
+distance has no figure, and space is nought. It is consequently
+impossible to doubt that the Serpent will conquer. This amputated
+dilemma is then out of order."</p>
+<p>"Be it so, but the other alternative remains; what do you make
+of His
+goodness?"</p>
+<p>"His goodness?" And Durtal had need to repeat again the
+arguments drawn
+from free will, and the promised coming of the Saviour; and he was
+obliged to admit that these answers were weak.</p>
+<p>And the voice became more pressing,</p>
+<p>"Then you admit original sin?"</p>
+<p>"I am obliged to admit it, because it exists. What are
+heredity and
+atavism, save, under another name, the terrible sin of the beginning?"</p>
+<p>"And does it appear to you just that innocent generations
+should make
+amends now and always for the sin of the first man?"</p>
+<p>And as Durtal did not reply, the voice insinuated gently,</p>
+<p>"This law is so iniquitous that it seems as if the Creator
+were ashamed
+of it, and that in order to punish Himself for His ferocity, and not to
+make Himself for ever execrated by His creature, He wished to suffer on
+the Cross, and expiate His crime in the person of His own Son."</p>
+<p>"But," cried Durtal, exasperated, "God could not commit a
+crime and
+punish Himself: were that so, Jesus would be the Redeemer of His
+Father,
+and not ours; it is madness!"</p>
+<p>Little by little he recovered his balance; he recited slowly
+the
+Apostles' Creed, while the objections which demolished it, pressed one
+after the other within him.</p>
+<p>"There is one fact certain," he said to himself, for in all
+this
+tumult, he was perfectly lucid, "that for the moment we are two persons
+in one. I can follow my reasonings, and I hear on the other side, the
+sophisms my double breathes in me. This duality has never appeared so
+clear to me."</p>
+<p>And the attack grew feebler, on this reflection; it might have
+been
+believed that the enemy now discovered was beating a retreat.</p>
+<p>But nothing of the kind; after a short truce, the assault
+began again on
+another point.</p>
+<p>"Are you very sure that you have not suggested and shown the
+blow to
+yourself? By having wished, you have ended by begetting belief, and by
+implanting in yourself a fixed idea, disguised under the name of grace,
+round which everything now clings. You complain that you did not
+experience sensible joys after your communion; this simply proves that
+you were not careful enough, or that, tired by the excess of the
+evening
+before, your imagination showed itself unready to play the infatuating
+fairy story you expected from yourself after the mass.</p>
+<p>"Moreover, you ought to know that in these questions all
+depends on the
+more or less feverish activity of the brain and the senses; see what
+takes place in the case of women, who deceive themselves more easily
+than men; for that again declares the difference of conformations, the
+variety between the sexes; Christ gives Himself carnally under the
+appearances of bread; that is mystical marriage, the divine union
+consummated by the way of the lips; He is indeed the spouse of women,
+while we men, without willing it, by the very lodestone of our nature,
+are more attracted by the Virgin. But she does not give herself, like
+her Son, to us; she does not reside in the Sacrament; possession is in
+her case impossible; she is our Mother, but she is not our Spouse, as
+he
+is the Spouse of virgins.</p>
+<p>"We conceive, therefore, that women are more violently duped,
+that they
+adore better, and imagine more easily the more they are petted.
+Moreover, M. Bruno said to you yesterday, 'Woman is more passive, less
+rebellious to the action of Heaven ...'</p>
+<p>"Well, what has that to do with me; what does that prove? that
+the more
+we love the better we are loved: but if that axiom is false, from the
+earthly point of view, it is certainly exact from the divine point of
+view; which would be monstrous, and would come to this, that the Lord
+would not treat the soul of a Poor Clare better than mine."</p>
+<p>There was again a time of rest, and the attack turned and
+rushed on a
+new place.</p>
+<p>"Then you believe in an eternal hell? You suppose a God more
+cruel than
+yourself, a God who has created people, without their having been
+consulted, without their having asked to be born; and after having
+suffered during their existence, they will be again punished without
+mercy after their death; but consider, if you were to see your worst
+enemy in torture, you would be taken by pity, and would ask pardon for
+him. You would pardon, and the Almighty be implacable; you will admit
+this is to have a singular idea of Him."</p>
+<p>Durtal was silent; hell going on infinitely became in fact
+wearisome.
+The reply that it is legitimate, that punishment should be infinite,
+because rewards are so, was not decisive, since indeed it were the
+property of perfect goodness, to abridge the chastisements and prolong
+the joys.</p>
+<p>"But, in fact," he said to himself, "Saint Catherine of Genoa
+has
+elucidated the question. She explains very well that God sends a ray of
+mercy, a current of pity into hell, that no damned soul suffers as much
+as it deserves to suffer; that if expiation ought not to cease, it may
+be modified, and weakened, and become at length less rigorous, less
+intense.</p>
+<p>"She remarks also, that at the moment of its separation from
+the body,
+the soul becomes obstinate or yields; if it remain hardened and shows
+no
+contrition for its faults, its guilt cannot be remitted, since, after
+death, free will subsists no more; the will which we possess at the
+moment of quitting the world remains invariable.</p>
+<p>"If, on the contrary, it does not persist in those impenitent
+sentiments, a part of the repression will no doubt be removed; and
+consequently is not devoted to a continual gehenna, as that which
+deliberately, while there is yet time, will not return to amendment,
+refuses in fact to lay aside its sins.</p>
+<p>"Let us add that according to the saint, God does not even
+make the soul
+empty to be never polluted by sin, for it goes there of itself; it is
+led there by the very nature of its sins, it flings itself in as into
+its own good; is, if one may say so, naturally engulfed there.</p>
+<p>"In fact we may imagine to ourselves a very small hell, and a
+very large
+purgatory; may imagine that hell is scantily peopled, is only reserved
+for cases of rare wickedness, that in reality the crowd of disincarnate
+souls presses into Purgatory and there endures punishments proportioned
+to the misdeeds it has willed here below. These ideas have nothing
+which
+cannot be sustained, and they have the advantage of being in accord
+with
+the ideas of mercy and justice."</p>
+<p>"Exactly," replied the voice in railing tones. "Man then will
+do well to
+constrain himself; he may steal, rob, kill his father, and violate his
+daughter; the price is the same; provided he repent at the last minute,
+he is saved!"</p>
+<p>"But no, contrition takes away the eternity of punishment
+only, and not
+punishment itself; everyone must be punished or rewarded according to
+his works. He who will be soiled by a parricide or an incest will bear
+a
+chastisement different in pain and length to him who has not committed
+them; equality in expiatory suffering, in reparative pain, does not
+exist.</p>
+<p>"Moreover this idea of a purgative life after death is so
+natural, so
+certain, that all religions assume it. All consider the soul is a sort
+of air balloon, which cannot mount and attain its last end in space
+except by throwing away its ballast. In the religions of the East, the
+soul is re-incarnistic; in order to purify itself it rubs itself
+against
+a new body, like a blade in sandstone troughs, to brighten it. For us
+Catholics it undergoes no terrestrial avatar, but it lightens and
+scours
+itself, clears itself in the Purgatory, where God transforms it, draws
+it out, extracts it little by little from the dross of its sins, till
+it
+can raise itself and lose itself in Him.</p>
+<p>"To have done with this irritating question of a perpetual
+hell, why not
+conceive that divine justice hesitates in the majority of cases to
+pronounce inexorable decrees? Humanity is for the most part composed of
+unconscious rascals and fools, who do not take any count of the reach
+of
+their faults. These are saved by their complete want of comprehension.
+As for others who rot, knowing what they do, they are evidently more
+blameworthy, but society which hates superior beings takes on itself
+their punishment, humiliates and persecutes them; and it is therefore
+allowed us to hope that our Lord will pity these poor souls so
+miserably
+pelted during their stay upon earth by a horde of fools."</p>
+<p>"Then there is every advantage in being imbecile, since one is
+spared
+both on earth and in heaven?"</p>
+<p>"Ah! certainly, and yet ... and yet.... What is the good of
+discussion,
+since we cannot frame for ourselves the least idea of the infinite
+justice of a God?"</p>
+<p>"Moreover, this is enough, these debates overwhelm me." He
+tried to
+distract his thoughts from these subjects, and would feign to break the
+obsession, betake himself to Paris; but five minutes had not passed
+before his double returned to the charge.</p>
+<p>He entered once more on that halting dilemma which had so
+recently
+assailed the goodness of the Creator in regard to the sins of man.
+"Purgatory is then exorbitant, for after all," said he, "God knew that
+man would yield to temptations; then why allow them, and above all why
+condemn them? Is that goodness, is that justice?"</p>
+<p>"But it is a sophism," cried Durtal, growing angry. "God has
+left to
+every man his liberty; no one is tempted beyond his power. If in
+certain
+cases, he allows the seduction to overpass our means of resistance, it
+is to recall us to humility, to bring us back to Him by remorse, for
+other causes which we know not, which it is not His business to show
+us.
+Then probably those transgressions are appreciated in a different way
+to
+those which we have practised with our full accord."</p>
+<p>"The liberty of man! it is a pretty thing. Yes, let us speak
+of it, and
+atavism, and our surroundings and diseases of the brain, and of the
+marrow. Is a man driven by the impulses of sickness, overwhelmed by
+troubles of the generative organs, responsible for his acts?"</p>
+<p>"But what can be said if under these conditions these acts are
+imputed
+to him on high. It is after all idiotic always to compare divine
+justice
+to man's tribunals; for it is exactly the contrary; human judgments are
+often so infamous that they attest the existence of another equity.
+Rather than the proofs of a theodicy, the magistrature proves God; for
+without Him, how can be satisfied that instinct of justice so innate in
+each of us, that even the humblest beast possesses it?"</p>
+<p>"Yet," replied the voice, "all this does not hinder the change
+of
+character according as the stomach does its work ill or well; slander,
+anger, envy are accumulated bile, or faulty digestion; good temper,
+joy,
+come from a free circulation of blood, the expansion of the body at
+will; mystics are anemo-nervous people; your ecstatics are hysterical
+patients badly-fed, madhouses are full of them; they depend on science
+when visions begin."</p>
+<p>All at once Durtal recovered himself, the material arguments
+were but
+little disquieting, for none could remain standing: all confounded the
+function and the organ, the lodger and the lodging, the clock and the
+hour. Their assertions rested on no base. To liken the happy lucidity
+and unequalled genius of a Saint Teresa to the extravagances of
+nymphomaniacs and other mad women were so obtuse, so clumsy, that it
+could only raise a smile!</p>
+<p>The mystery would remain complete; no doctor has been able to
+discover
+or could discover the psyche in those round or fusiform cells, in the
+white matter or grey substance of the brain. They would recognize more
+or less justly the organs which the soul uses to pull the strings of
+the
+puppet, which it is condemned to move, but itself remains invisible; it
+has gone, when after death they force open the rooms of its habitation.</p>
+<p>"No; these newsmongers have no effect on me," Durtal assured
+himself.</p>
+<p>"But does this one do any better? Do you believe in the
+utility of life,
+in the necessity of this endless chain, this towage of sufferings, to
+be
+prolonged for the most part after death? True goodness would have
+consisted in inventing nothing, creating nothing, in leaving all as it
+was, in nothingness, in peace."</p>
+<p>The attack turned round on itself, and after apparent
+variations,
+returned always to the same starting point.</p>
+<p>Durtal lowered his head, for this argument dismasted him; all
+the
+replies which could be imagined were remarkably weak, and the least
+feeble, that which consists in denying to ourselves the right to judge
+because we only see the details of the divine plan, because we can
+possess no general view of it cannot avail against that terrible phrase
+of Schopenhauer: "If God made the world I would not be that God, for
+the misery of the world would break my heart!"</p>
+<p>"There is no haggling in the matter," he said to himself. "I
+can quite
+understand that sorrow is the true disinfectant of souls, yet I am
+obliged to ask myself why the Creator has not invented a less atrocious
+way of purifying us?</p>
+<p>"Ah! when I think of the sufferings shut up in madhouses, and
+hospital
+wards, I am revolted, and inclined to doubt everything.</p>
+<p>"If, again, grief were an antiseptic for future misdeeds or a
+detersive
+for past faults, one might again understand, but now it falls
+indifferently on the bad and on the good; it is blind. The best proof
+is
+the Virgin who was without spot, and who had not like her Son to
+expiate
+for us. She consequently ought not to be punished; yet she too
+underwent
+at the foot of Calvary the punishment exacted by this horrible law.</p>
+<p>"Good; but then," replied Durtal, after a silence of
+reflection, "if the
+innocent Virgin has given us an example, by what right do we who are
+culpable dare to complain?</p>
+<p>"No; we must therefore resolve to dwell in darkness, to live
+surrounded
+by enigmas. Money, love, nothing is clear; chance if it exist is as
+mysterious as Providence, and indeed still more so; it is inexplicable.
+God is at least an origin of the unknown, a key.</p>
+<p>"An origin which is itself another secret, a key which opens
+nothing!</p>
+<p>"Ah! it is irritating," he said to himself, "to be thus
+harassed in
+every sense. Enough of it; besides these are questions which a
+theologian is alone able to discuss; I am unarmed, the game is not
+equal; I will not answer any more."</p>
+<p>And he could not but hear a vague laughter which arose in him.</p>
+<p>He quitted the garden, and directed his steps towards the
+chapel, but
+the fear of being seized again by the madness of blasphemy turned him
+away from it. Knowing not whither to go, he regained his cell, saying
+to
+himself, that he ought not to wrangle thus; yes, but how could he help
+hearing the cavils which rose he knew not whence? He almost shouted
+aloud: "Be silent, let the other speak!"</p>
+<p>When he was in his chamber he desired to pray, and fell on his
+knees at
+his bedside.</p>
+<p>This was abominable; for memories of Florence recurred to him.
+He rose,
+but the old aberrations returned.</p>
+<p>He thought of that creature, her strange tastes, her mania for
+biting
+his ears, for drinking toilet scents in little glasses, for nibbling
+bread and butter with caviare, and dates. She was so wild, and so
+strange; a fool no doubt, but obscure.</p>
+<p>"And if she were in this room, before you, what would you do?"</p>
+<p>He stammered to himself: "I would try not to yield."</p>
+<p>"You lie; admit then that you would send your conversion, the
+monastery,
+all, to the devil."</p>
+<p>He grew pale at the thought; the possibility of his cowardice
+was a
+punishment. To have communicated, when one was no more certain of the
+future, no more certain of oneself, was almost a sacrilege, he thought.</p>
+<p>And he became angry. Up till now he had kept right, but the
+vision of
+Florence subdued him. He threw himself, in desperation, on a chair, no
+longer knowing what would become of him, gathering what of courage
+remained to him to descend to the church, where the Office was
+beginning.</p>
+<p>He dragged himself there, and held himself down, assailed by
+filthy
+temptations, disgusted with himself, feeling his will yielding, wounded
+in every part.</p>
+<p>And when he was in the court he remained overwhelmed, asking
+himself
+where he could take shelter. Every place had become hostile to him; in
+his cell were carnal memories, outside were temptations against Faith,
+"or rather," he cried, "I carry these with me always. My God, my God! I
+was yesterday so tranquil."</p>
+<p>He strolled by chance into an alley, when a new phenomenon
+arose.</p>
+<p>He had had, up to this hour, in the sky within him, a rain of
+scruples,
+a tempest of doubts, a thunderstroke of lust; now was silence and death.</p>
+<p>Complete darkness was within him.</p>
+<p>He sought his soul by groping for it, and found it inert,
+without
+consciousness, almost icy. He had a body living and healthy; all his
+intelligence, all his reason, and his other powers, his other
+faculties,
+were benumbed little by little, and stopped. In his being there was
+manifested an effect at once analogous and contrary to that which
+curara
+produces on the organism, when it circulates in the network of the
+blood; the members are paralyzed, no pain is experienced, but cold
+rises, the soul ends by being sequestered alive in a corpse; in this
+case it was the living body that detained a dead soul.</p>
+<p>Harassed by fear, he disengaged himself with a supreme effort,
+he would
+make a visit to himself, see where he was, and like a sailor who
+descends into the hold in a ship that has sprung a leak, he had to step
+backwards, for the gangway was cut, the steps opened upon an abyss.</p>
+<p>In spite of the terror which rushed upon him, he hung
+fascinated over
+the hole, and by fixing the black point he distinguished appearances;
+in
+a light as of eclipse in rarefied air, he perceived at the basis of
+himself the panorama of his soul, a desert twilight on the horizons
+that
+approached the night, and under this doubtful light there seemed
+something like bare fields, a marsh heaped with rubbish and cinders;
+the
+place of the sins torn up by the confessor remained visible, but
+besides
+the dry darnel of dead vices which grew still, nothing budded.</p>
+<p>He saw himself exhausted; he knew that he had no further force
+to
+extirpate the last roots, and he fancied that he had again to sow the
+seed of virtues, to till this arid soil, manure this dead ground. He
+felt himself incapable of all work, and had at the same time the
+conviction that God rejected him, that God would aid him no more. This
+certainty tore him to pieces. It could not be expressed, for nothing
+could translate the anxiety, the anguish of a state through which he
+must have passed who could understand it. The terror of a child who has
+never left its mother's petticoats, and who is deserted, without
+warning, in the open country in a fog, could only give a vestige of an
+idea of it, and again by reason of his age the child after having felt
+desolate would end by growing calmer, by distracting himself from his
+grief, no longer seeing the danger which surrounds him, while in this
+state is danger, clinging and absolute, the immovable thought of
+abandonment, obstinate fear, which nothing diminishes, nothing appeases.</p>
+<p>One dare not advance nor retreat; rather cast oneself on the
+ground,
+with bowed head, and wait the end of what we know not, and be assured
+that the menaces we ignore, and those at which we guess, are removed.
+Durtal was at this point; he could not return on his steps, for the way
+he had quitted horrified him. He would rather have died than return to
+Paris, there to begin again his carnal experiences, to live again his
+hours of libertinage and lassitude; but if he could not again retrace
+his road, neither could he advance, for the road ended in a blind
+alley.
+If earth repulsed him, heaven at the same time was closed for him.</p>
+<p>He was lying, half on his side, in the darkness, in the shade,
+he knew
+not where.</p>
+<p>And this state was aggravated by an absolute failure to
+understand the
+causes which brought him there, was exaggerated by the memory of graces
+before received.</p>
+<p>Durtal remembered the sweetness of the beginning, the caress
+of the
+divine touches, the steady progress without obstacles, the encounter
+with a solitary priest, his being sent to La Trappe, the very ease with
+which he bent to the monastic life, the absolution which had such truly
+sensible effects, the rapid and clear answer that he might communicate
+without fear.</p>
+<p>And suddenly, without his will, he had in fact failed. He who
+had till
+then held him by the hand, refused to guide him, cast him off into the
+darkness without a word.</p>
+<p>"All is over," he thought; "I am condemned to float here
+below, like a
+waif which no one wants; no shore is henceforward accessible, for if
+the
+world refuses me, I disgust God. Ah! Lord, remember the garden of
+Gethsemani, the tragic defection of the Father whom Thou didst implore
+in unspeakable pangs." In the silence which received his cry he gave
+way, and yet he desired to react against this desolation, endeavoured
+to
+escape from his despair; he prayed, and had again that very precise
+sensation that his petitions did not carry, were not even heard. He
+called her who superintends allegiance, the Mediatrix of pardon, to his
+aid, and he was persuaded that the Virgin heard him no longer.</p>
+<p>He was silent and discouraged, while the shade grew still more
+dense,
+and complete darkness covered him. He did not then suffer any longer in
+the true sense of the word, but it was worse, for this was annihilation
+in the void, the giddiness of a man who is bent over a gulf; and the
+scraps of reasoning which he could gather and knit together in this
+breaking up, ended by branching out into scruples.</p>
+<p>He sought for any sins which since his communion might justify
+such a
+trial, and he could not find them. He even tried to magnify his small
+faults, enlarge his want of patience; he wished to convince himself
+that
+he had taken a certain pleasure in finding the image of Florence in his
+cell, and he tortured himself so violently that he reanimated the soul,
+which had half fainted, by these moxas, and placed it again, without
+wishing it, in that acute state of scruples, in which it was when the
+crisis declared itself.</p>
+<p>And in these brawling reflections he did not lose the sad
+faculty of
+analysis. He said to himself while gauging himself at a glance: "I am
+like the litter in a circus, trodden down by all the sorrows which go
+and come to play their parts. Doubts about Faith, which seemed to
+stretch into every sense, turned in fact in the same circle. And now
+scruples, from which I thought myself freed, reappear and course
+through
+me."</p>
+<p>How should he explain this? Was he who inflicted this torture
+on him the
+Spirit of Malice, or God?</p>
+<p>That he had been bruised by the Evil One was certain, the very
+nature of
+his attacks showed his handiwork, but how could this abandonment of God
+be explained, for in fact, the Demon could not prevent the Saviour from
+assisting him, and he was quite obliged to conclude that if he were
+martyrized by the one, the Other took no interest in him, let him be,
+and retired from him completely?</p>
+<p>This certainty deduced from precise observations, this
+reasoned
+assurance, finished him. He cried out from the anguish of it, looking
+at
+the pond by which he was walking, wishing he might fall in, thinking
+that death by drowning were preferable to such a life.</p>
+<p>Then he trembled before the water which attracted him, and
+carried away
+his sorrows to the charm of the woods. He tried to wear himself out by
+long walking, but he wearied himself without effect, and he ended by
+sinking down worn and broken at the refectory table.</p>
+<p>He looked at his plate, with no courage to eat, no desire to
+drink; he
+breathed hard, and, exhausted as he was, could not keep in one place.
+He
+rose and wandered in the court till Compline, and there in the chapel,
+where at least he hoped to find some solace, was the crowning point of
+all; the mine went off; the soul, sapped since the morning, exploded.</p>
+<p>On his knees, desolate, he tried again to invoke help, and
+nothing came;
+he choked, immured in so deep a trench, under a vault so thick, that
+every appeal was stifled, and no sound vibrated. Without courage, he
+wept with his head in his hands, and while he complained to God that He
+had brought him thither to punish him in a Trappist monastery, ignoble
+visions assailed him.</p>
+<p>Fluids passed before his face, and peopled the space with
+priapisms. He
+did not see them with the eyes of his body, which were in no degree
+hallucinated, but perceived them outside him, and felt them within him;
+in a word, the touch was external, and the vision internal.</p>
+<p>He tried to gaze on the statue of Saint Joseph, before which
+he kept
+himself, and to see nothing but it, but his eyes seemed to revolve, to
+see only within, and were filled with indecencies. It was a medley of
+apparitions with undecided outlines, and confused colours, which gained
+precision only in those parts coveted by the secular infamy of man. And
+this changed again. The human forms vanished. There remained only, in
+invisible landscapes of flesh, marshes reddened by the fires of what
+sunset it was impossible to say, marshes shuddering under the divided
+shelter of the grasses. Then the sensual spot grew smaller still, but
+remained, and this time did not move; it was the growth of an unclean
+flood, the spreading of the daisy of darkness, the unfolding of the
+lotos of the caverns, hidden at the bottom of the valley.</p>
+<p>And there, burning gasps excited Durtal, enwrapped him,
+stifled him with
+furious gasps which drank his mouth.</p>
+<p>He looked in spite of himself, unable to withdraw himself from
+the
+outrages imposed by these violations, but the body was still and
+remained calm, while the soul revolted with a groan; the temptation was
+then of no effect; but if the tricks only succeeded in suggesting to
+him
+disgust and horror, they made him suffer beyond measure, while they
+delayed; all the days of his shameful existence came to the surface,
+all
+these enticements to greedy desires crucified him. Joined to the sum of
+sorrows accumulated since the dawn, the overcharge of these sorrows
+overwhelmed him, and a cold sweat bathed him from head to foot.</p>
+<p>He was in agony, and suddenly, as though he had come to
+overlook his
+ministers, and to see if his orders were carried out, the executioner
+himself entered on the scene. Durtal did not see him, but felt him, and
+it was indescribable. Since he had the impression of a real demoniac
+presence, his whole soul trembled and desired to fly, like a terrified
+bird that clings to the window-panes.</p>
+<p>And it fell back exhausted; then unlikely as it may appear,
+the parts of
+his life were inverted, the body was upright, and held its own,
+commanding the terrified soul, repressed this panic in a furious
+tension.</p>
+<p>Durtal perceived very plainly and clearly for the first time
+the
+distinction, the separation of the soul from the body, and for the
+first
+time also, he was conscious of the phenomenon of a body, which had so
+tortured its companion by its needs and wants, to forget all its hatred
+in the common danger, and hinder her who resisted it, the habit of
+sinking.</p>
+<p>He saw that in a flash, and suddenly all vanished. It seemed
+that the
+Demon had taken himself off, the wall of darkness which encompassed
+Durtal opened, and light issued from all parts; with an immense impulse
+the "Salve Regina," springing up from the choir, swept aside the
+phantoms, and put the goblins to flight.</p>
+<p>The elevated cordial of this chant restored him. He took
+courage, and
+began again to hope that this frightful desertion might cease; he
+prayed, and his petitions found vent; he understood that they were at
+last heard.</p>
+<p>The Office was at an end; he gained the guest-house, and when
+he
+appeared so worn out and pale before Father Etienne and the oblate,
+they
+cried: "What is the matter with you?"</p>
+<p>He sank on a chair, and endeavoured to describe to them the
+terrible
+Calvary he had climbed. "This has lasted," he said, "for more than nine
+hours; I wonder that I have not gone mad;" and he added, "Yet I never
+could have believed that the soul could suffer so much."</p>
+<p>The face of the father was illuminated. He pressed Durtal's
+hands and
+said,</p>
+<p>"Rejoice, my brother, you have been treated here like a monk."</p>
+<p>"How is that?" said Durtal, surprised.</p>
+<p>"Yes, this agony, for there is no other word to define the
+horror of the
+state, is one of the most serious trials which God inflicts on us; it
+is
+one of the operations of the purgative life. Be happy, for it is a
+great
+grace which Jesus does to you."</p>
+<p>"And this proves that your conversion is good," affirmed the
+oblate.</p>
+<p>"God! But it was not He at any rate who insinuated doubts
+about the
+Faith, who caused to be born in me that madness of scruples, who raised
+in me that spirit of blasphemy, who caressed my face with disgusting
+apparitions."</p>
+<p>"No, but He allows it. It is frightful, I know it," said the
+guest-master. "God conceals Himself, and however you may call on Him,
+He
+does not answer you. You think yourself deserted, yet He is very near
+you; and while He effaces Himself, Satan advances. He twists you about,
+places a microscope over your faults, his malice gnaws your brain like
+a
+dull file, and when to all this are joined, to try you to the utmost,
+impure visions...."</p>
+<p>The Trappist stopped; then, speaking to himself, he said,
+slowly,</p>
+<p>"It would be nothing to be in presence of a real temptation,
+of a true
+woman in flesh and bone, but these appearances on which imagination
+works, are horrible!"</p>
+<p>"And I used to think there was peace in the cloister!"</p>
+<p>"No, we are here on this earth to strive, and it is just in
+the cloister
+that the Lowest works; there, souls escape him, and he will at all
+price
+conquer them. No place on earth is more haunted by him than a cell, no
+one is more harassed than a monk."</p>
+<p>"A story which is told in the Lives of the Fathers in the
+Desert, is
+typical from this point of view. One demon only was charged to watch a
+town; and he went to sleep while two or three hundred demons who had
+orders to guard a monastery had no rest, but behaved themselves, here
+is
+the place for the phrase, like very devils.</p>
+<p>"And indeed, the mission to increase the sin of the towns is a
+sinecure,
+for Satan holds them, though they are not aware of it; all then he has
+to do is to torment them so as to take from them trust in God, since
+all
+obey him without his taking the least trouble about it.</p>
+<p>"And so he keeps his legions to besiege convents where
+resistance is
+determined. And indeed, you see the way in which he conducts the
+attack."</p>
+<p>"Ah!" exclaimed Durtal, "it is not he who makes you suffer the
+most; for
+what is worse than scruples, worse than temptations against purity, or
+against the Faith, is the supposed abandonment of Heaven; no, nothing
+can describe that."</p>
+<p>"That is what mystical theology calls 'the Night Obscure,'"
+answered M.
+Bruno.</p>
+<p>And Durtal exclaimed,</p>
+<p>"Ah! now I am with you; I remember.... That is why Saint John
+of the
+Cross declares that it is impossible to describe the sorrows of that
+night, and why he exaggerates nothing when he says, that one is then
+plunged alive into hell.</p>
+<p>"And I doubted the veracity of his books, I accused him of
+excess;
+rather he minimized. Only one must have felt this oneself to believe
+it."</p>
+<p>"And you have seen nothing," the oblate replied quietly; "you
+have
+passed through the first portion of that night, through the night of
+the
+senses; it is terrible enough, as I know by experience, but it is
+nothing in comparison with the Night of the Spirit which sometimes
+succeeds it. That is the exact image of the sufferings which our Lord
+endured in the Garden of Olives, when, sweating blood, He cried at the
+end of His force, 'Lord, let this chalice pass from me.'</p>
+<p>"This is so terrible ..." and M. Bruno was silent and grew
+pale.
+"Whoever has undergone that martyrdom," he said, after a pause, "knows
+beforehand what awaits the damned in another life."</p>
+<p>"But," said the monk, "the hour of bed-time has struck. There
+exists but
+one remedy for all these evils, the Holy Eucharist; to-morrow, Sunday,
+the community approaches the Sacrament; you must join us."</p>
+<p>"But I cannot communicate in the state in which I am...."</p>
+<p>"Well, then, be up to-night, at three o'clock. I will come for
+you to
+your cell, and will take you to Father Maximin, who confesses us at
+that
+time."</p>
+<p>And without waiting for his answer, the guest-master pressed
+his hand
+and went.</p>
+<p>"He is right," said the oblate; "it is the true remedy."</p>
+<p>And when he had regained his room, Durtal thought,</p>
+<p>"I now understand why the Abbé Gévresin made such a point of
+lending me
+Saint John of the Cross; he knew that I should enter into the 'Night
+Obscure'; he did not dare warn me clearly, for fear of alarming me, and
+yet he would put me on my guard against despair, and aid me by the
+remembrance here of that reading. Only how could he think that in such
+a
+shipwreck I should remember anything!</p>
+<p>"All this makes me think that I have omitted to write to him,
+and that
+to-morrow I must keep my promise by sending him a letter."</p>
+<p>And he thought again of Saint John of the Cross, that
+extraordinary
+Carmelite who described so placidly that terrible phase of the mystic
+genesis.</p>
+<p>He took count of the lucidity, the power of spirit of this
+saint,
+explaining the most obscure vicissitude of the soul and the least
+known,
+catching and following the operations of God, who dealt with that soul,
+pressed it in His hands, squeezed it like a sponge, then let it suck up
+again, fill itself out with sorrows, then wrung it again; making it
+drip
+tears of blood to cleanse it.</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_VI" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER
+VI.</h2>
+<p>"No," said Durtal, in a whisper, "I will not take the place of
+these
+good people."</p>
+<p>"But I assure you it is quite the same to them."</p>
+<p>And while Durtal was still refusing to go before the lay
+brothers who
+were waiting their turn for confession, Father Etienne insisted: "I
+will
+stay with you, and as soon as the cell is free, you will enter."</p>
+<p>Durtal was then on the landing of a staircase on every step of
+which was
+posted a brother kneeling or standing, his head wrapped in his hood,
+his
+face turned to the wall. All were sifting and closely examining their
+souls.</p>
+<p>"Of what sins can they really accuse themselves?" thought
+Durtal. "Who
+knows?" he continued, perceiving Brother Anacletus, his head sunk on
+his
+breast, and his hands joined, "who knows if he does not reproach
+himself
+for the discreet affection he has for me; for in monasteries all
+friendship is forbidden!"</p>
+<p>And he called to memory in the "Way of Perfection" of Saint
+Teresa, a
+page at once glowing and icy in which she cries out on the nothingness
+of human ties, declares that friendship is a weakness, and asserts
+clearly that every nun who desires to see her relations is imperfect.</p>
+<p>"Come," said Father Etienne, who interrupted these
+reflections, and
+pushed him towards the door of the cell out of which a monk came.
+Father
+Maximin was there, seated close to a prie-Dieu.</p>
+<p>Durtal knelt, and told him briefly his scruples and strifes of
+the
+evening before.</p>
+<p>"What has happened to you is not surprising after a
+conversion; indeed,
+it is a good sign, for those persons alone for whom God has views are
+submitted to these proofs," said the monk slowly, when Durtal had ended
+his story.</p>
+<p>And he continued,</p>
+<p>"Now that you have no more grave sins, the Demon endeavours to
+drown you
+by spitting at you. In fact, in these episodes of malice at bay, there
+is for you temptation and no sin.</p>
+<p>"You have, if I may sum up what you have said, undergone
+temptation of
+the flesh, and of Faith, and you have been tortured by scruples.</p>
+<p>"Let us leave on one side the sensual visions; such as they
+have been
+were produced independently of your will, painful no doubt, but
+ineffectual.</p>
+<p>"Doubts about Faith are more dangerous.</p>
+<p>"Steep yourself in this truth that besides prayer there exists
+but one
+efficacious remedy against this evil, to despise it.</p>
+<p>"Satan is pride; despise him, and at once his audacity gives
+way; he
+speaks; shrug your shoulders and he is silent. You must not discuss
+with
+him; however good a reasoner you may be, you will be worsted, for he is
+a most tricky dialectician."</p>
+<p>"Yes, but what can I do? I do not wish to listen to him, but I
+hear him
+all the same. I was obliged to answer him if only to refute him."</p>
+<p>"And it was just on that he counted to subdue you; keep this
+carefully
+in your mind; in order to let you give him an easy throw, he will
+present you at need grotesque arguments, and so soon as he sees you
+confident, simply satisfied with the excellence of your replies, he
+will
+involve you in sophisms so specious that you will fight in vain to
+solve
+them.</p>
+<p>"No; I repeat to you, had you the best reasons to oppose to
+him, do not
+riposte, refuse the strife."</p>
+<p>The prior was silent; then he began again, quietly,</p>
+<p>"There are two ways of getting rid of a thing which troubles
+you&#8212;to
+throw it far away, or let it fall. To throw it to a distance demands an
+effort of which one may not be capable; to let it fall imposes no
+fatigue, is simple, without danger, within the reach of all.</p>
+<p>"To throw to a distance implies again a certain interest, a
+certain
+animation, perhaps even a certain fear; to let it fall is indifference,
+complete contempt; believe me, use this means and Satan will fly.</p>
+<p>"This weapon of contempt will be also all-powerful to conquer
+the
+assault of scruples, if in combats of this nature the person assailed
+sees clear. Unfortunately, the peculiarity of scruples is to alarm
+people, to make them lose at once the clearing breeze, and then it is
+indispensable to have recourse to a priest to defend oneself.</p>
+<p>"Indeed," pursued the monk, who had interrupted himself a
+moment to
+think&#8212;"the closer one looks the less one sees; one becomes
+short-sighted the moment one observes; it is necessary to place oneself
+at a certain point of view to distinguish objects, for when they are
+very close they become as confused as if they were far. Therefore in
+such a case we must have recourse to the confessor, who is neither too
+distant, nor too near, who holds himself precisely at the spot where
+objects detach themselves in their relief. Only it is with scruples as
+with certain maladies which, when they are not taken in time, become
+almost incurable.</p>
+<p>"Do not allow them, then, to become implanted in you; scruple
+cannot
+resist being told as soon as it begins. The moment you formulate it
+before the priest it dissolves; it is a kind of mirage which a word
+effaces.</p>
+<p>"You will object to me," continued the monk, after a silence,
+"that it
+is very mortifying to avow delusions which generally are absurd; but it
+is for this very reason that the demon suggests to you less clever
+arguments than foolish. He takes hold of you thus by vanity, by false
+shame."</p>
+<p>The monk was silent again; then he continued,</p>
+<p>"Scruples not treated, scruples not cured, lead to
+discouragement which
+is the worst of temptations; for in other cases Satan attacks one
+virtue
+only in particular, and he shows himself; while in this case he attacks
+all at once, and he hides himself.</p>
+<p>"And this is so true that if you are seduced by lust, by the
+love of
+money, or by pride, you can, in examining yourself, give yourself
+account of the nature of the temptation which exhausts you; in
+discouragement, on the contrary, your understanding is obscured to such
+a degree that you do not even suspect that the state in which you
+succumb is only a diabolic man&#339;uvre which you must combat; and you
+let go all, you give up the only arm which can save you, prayer, from
+which the demon turns you aside as a vain thing.</p>
+<p>"Never hesitate, then, to cut the evil at its root, to take
+care of a
+scruple as soon as it is born.</p>
+<p>"Now tell me; you have nothing else to confess?"</p>
+<p>"No, except the indesire for the Eucharist, the languor in
+which I now
+faint."</p>
+<p>"There is some fatigue in your case, for no one can endure
+such a shock
+with impunity; do not be uneasy about that, have confidence, do not
+attempt to present yourself before God all neat and trim; go to Him
+simply, naturally, in undress even, just as you are; do not forget that
+if you are a servant you are also a son; have good courage, our Lord
+will dispel all these nightmares."</p>
+<p>And when he had received absolution, Durtal went down to the
+church to
+await the hour of mass.</p>
+<p>And when the moment for communion came, he followed M. Bruno
+behind the
+lay brothers. All were kneeling on the pavement, and one after the
+other
+rose to exchange the kiss of peace, and reach the altar.</p>
+<p>Though he repeated to himself the counsels of Father Maximin,
+though he
+exhorted himself to dismiss all his unrest, Durtal could not help
+thinking as he saw these monks approach the Table, "The Lord will find
+a
+change when I advance in my turn; after having descended into the
+sanctuaries, He will be reduced to visit hovel." And sincerely, humbly,
+he was sorry for Him.</p>
+<p>And as the first time that he approached this peace-giving
+mystery, he
+experienced a sensation of stifling, as if his heart were too large
+when
+he returned to his place. As soon as the mass was over, he quitted the
+chapel and escaped into the park.</p>
+<p>Then gently, without sensible effects, the Sacrament worked;
+Christ
+opened, little by little, his closed house and gave it air, light
+entered into Durtal in a flood. From the windows of his senses which
+had
+looked till then into he knew not what cesspool, into what enclosure,
+dank, and steeped in shadow; he now looked suddenly, through a burst of
+light, on a vista which lost itself in heaven.</p>
+<p>His vision of nature was modified; the surroundings were
+transformed;
+the fog of sadness which visited them vanished; the sudden clearness of
+his soul was repeated in its surroundings.</p>
+<p>He had the sensation of expansion, the almost childlike joy of
+a sick
+man who takes his first outing, of the convalescent, who having long
+crawled in a chamber, sets foot without; all grew young again. These
+alleys, this wood, through which he had wandered so much, which he
+began
+to know in all their windings, and in every corner, began to appear to
+him in a new aspect. A restrained joy, a repressed gladness emanated
+from this site, which appeared to him, instead of extending as
+formerly,
+to draw near and gather round the crucifix, to turn, as it were, with
+attention towards the liquid cross.</p>
+<p>The trees rustled trembling, in a whisper of prayers,
+inclining towards
+the Christ, who no longer twisted His painful arms in the mirror of the
+pool, but He constrained these waters, and displayed them before Him,
+blessing them.</p>
+<p>They were themselves different; the dark fluid was covered
+with monastic
+visions, in white robes, which the reflections of clouds left there in
+passing, and the swan scattered them, in a splash of sunlight, making
+as
+he swam great oily circles round him.</p>
+<p>One might have said that these waves were gilt by the oil of
+the
+catechumens, and the sacred Chrism, which the Church exorcises on the
+Saturday of Holy Week, and above them heaven half-opened its tabernacle
+of clouds, out of which came a clear sun like a monstrance of molten
+gold in a Blessed Sacrament of flames.</p>
+<p>It was a Benediction of nature, a genuflection of trees and
+flowers,
+singing in the wind, incensing with their perfume the sacred Bread
+which
+shone on high, in the flaming custody of the planet.</p>
+<p>Durtal looked on in transport. He desired to cry aloud his
+enthusiasm
+and his Faith to the landscape; he felt a joy in living. The horror of
+existence counted for nothing when there were such moments, as no
+earthly happiness can give. God alone had the power of thus filling a
+soul, of making it overflow, and rush in floods of joy; and He alone
+could also fill the basin of sorrows, as no event in this world could
+do. Durtal had just tried it; his spiritual sufferings and joys
+attained
+under the divine imprint an acuteness, which people most humanly happy
+or unhappy cannot even suspect.</p>
+<p>This idea brought him back to the terrible distresses of the
+evening
+before. He endeavoured to sum up what he had been able to observe of
+himself in this Trappist monastery.</p>
+<p>First, the clear distinction between body and soul; then the
+action of
+the demon, insinuating and obstinate, almost visible, while the
+heavenly
+action remained, on the contrary, dull and veiled, appeared only at
+certain moments, and seemed at others to vanish for ever.</p>
+<p>And all this, when felt and understood, had an appearance
+simple in
+itself, but scarcely explaining itself. The body appearing to throw
+itself forward to the rescue of the soul, and no doubt borrowing from
+it
+its will, to help it when it fainted, was unintelligible. How a body
+could itself react obscurely, and yet show, all at once, so strong a
+decision that it pressed its companion into a vice, and prevented its
+flight&#8212;</p>
+<p>"It is as mysterious as the rest," thought Durtal, and as in a
+dream he
+continued,</p>
+<p>"The secret action of Jesus in His Sacrament is not less
+strange. If I
+may judge by what has happened to me; a first communion exasperates the
+action of the devil, while a second represses it.</p>
+<p>"Ah, and how I put myself in line with all my calculations! In
+taking
+shelter here I thought myself pretty sure of my soul, and that my body
+would trouble me; whereas just the contrary has been the case.</p>
+<p>"My stomach has grown vigorous and shown itself fit to support
+an effort
+of which I should never have thought it capable, and my soul has been
+below everything, vacillating and dry, so fragile, so feeble!</p>
+<p>"But we will let all that alone."</p>
+<p>He walked about, lifted from earth by a confused joy. He grew
+vaporized
+in a sort of intoxication, in a vague etherization, in which arose,
+without his even thinking of formulating words, acts of thanksgiving;
+it
+was an effort of thanks of his soul, of his body, of his whole being,
+to
+that God whom he felt living in him, and diffused in that kneeling
+landscape which also seemed to expand in mute hymns of gratitude.</p>
+<p>The hour which struck by the clock in the portico reminded him
+it was
+breakfast time. He went to the guest-house, cut himself a slice of bread
+and butter with some cheese, drank half a glass of wine, and was about
+to go out again when he reflected that the horary of the offices was
+changed.</p>
+<p>"They must be different from those of the week," he thought;
+and he went
+up into his cell to consult his placards.</p>
+<p>He found only one, that of the rule of the monks themselves,
+which
+contained the regulations for the Sunday practices for the cloister;
+and
+he read:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Exercises
+of the Community
+for all ordinary Sundays.</span></p>
+<br />
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Morning.</span><br />
+</p><br />
+<table summary="" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">1.</td>
+<td align="left">Rise. Little Office. Prayer till
+1.30.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">2.</td>
+<td align="left">Grand Canonical Office chanted.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">5.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Prime, Morning Mass, 6 o'clock.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">6.45.</td>
+<td align="left">Chapter Instructions. Great Silence.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">9.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Asperges, Tierce, Procession.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">10.</td>
+<td align="left">High Mass.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">11.10.</td>
+<td align="left">Sext and special examination.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">11.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Angelus, Dinner.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">12.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Siesta, Great Silence.</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<br />
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">Evening.</span>
+</p>
+
+<br />
+<table summary="" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">2.</td>
+<td align="left">End of Repose. None.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">4.</td>
+<td align="left">Vespers and Benediction.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">5.45.</td>
+<td align="left">Quarter of an hour for Prayer.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">6.</td>
+<td align="left">Supper.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.</td>
+<td align="left">Reading before Compline.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.15.</td>
+<td align="left">Compline.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.30.</td>
+<td align="left">Salve, Angelus.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">7.45.</td>
+<td align="left">Examination of conscience and
+Retreat.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td align="left">8.</td>
+<td align="left">Bed time, Great Silence.</td>
+</tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+<br />
+<p>Note.&#8212;After the Cross of September, no siesta. None is at 2
+o'clock; Vespers at 3; Supper at 5; Compline at 6, and bed time at
+7. </p>
+</div>
+<p>Durtal copied this rule for his use on a scrap of paper. "In
+fact," he
+said to himself, "I have to be in chapel at 9.15 for Asperges, High
+Mass
+and the Office of Sext, afterwards at 2 for None, then at 4 for Vespers
+and Benediction, and lastly at 7.30 for Compline.</p>
+<p>"Here is a day which will be occupied, without counting that I
+got up at
+half-past two this morning," he concluded; and when he reached the
+chapel, about nine o'clock, he found the greater part of the lay
+brothers on their knees, the others saying their rosary; and when the
+clock struck all returned to their place.</p>
+<p>Assisted by two fathers in cowls, the prior, vested in a white
+alb,
+entered, and while the antiphon "Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et
+mundabor" was sung, all the monks in succession defiled before Father
+Maximin, standing on the steps, turning his back to the altar; and he
+sprinkled them with holy water, while they regained their stalls, each
+making the sign of the cross.</p>
+<p>Then the prior descended from the altar, and came to the
+entrance to the
+vestibule, where he dispersed the water crosswise, traced by the
+sprinkler over the oblate, and over Durtal.</p>
+<p>At last he vested, and went to celebrate the sacrifice.</p>
+<p>Then Durtal was able to think over his Sundays at the
+Benedictine nuns.</p>
+<p>The "Kyrie Eleison" was the same but slower and more sonorous,
+more
+grave on the prolonged termination of the last word; at Paris the
+voices
+of the nuns drew it out and put a gloss on it at the same time, turned
+into satin its final sound, rendered it less dull, less spaced, less
+ample. The "Gloria in Excelsis" differed; that of La Trappe was more
+primitive, more mounting, more sombre, interesting by its very
+barbarism, but less touching, for in its forms of adoration, in the
+"Adoramus te," for example, the "te" did not detach itself, did not
+drop
+like a tear of amorous essence, like an avowal retained by humility on
+the tip of the lips; but it was when the Credo arose, that Durtal could
+uplift himself at ease.</p>
+<p>He had never yet heard it so authoritative, and so imposing;
+it
+advanced, chanted in unison, developing its slow procession of dogmas,
+in sounds well furnished and rigid, of a violet almost obscure, a red
+almost black, growing lighter towards the end, till it expired in a
+long
+and plaintive Amen.</p>
+<p>In following the Cistercian office Durtal could recognize the
+morsels of
+plain chant still preserved in parish masses. All the part of the
+Canon,
+the "Sursum Corda," the "Vere Dignum," the Antiphons, the "Pater,"
+remained intact. Only the "Sanctus" and the "Agnus Dei" were changed.</p>
+<p>Massive, built up, as it were, in the Roman style, they draped
+themselves in the colour, glowing and dull, which clothes, in fact, the
+offices of La Trappe.</p>
+<p>"Well," said the oblate, when, after the ceremony, they sat at
+the table
+of the refectory; "well, what do you think of our High Mass?"</p>
+<p>"It is superb," answered Durtal. And he said dreamily, "Would
+that one
+could have the whole complete! to bring here, instead of this
+uninteresting chapel, the apse of St. Severin; hang on the walls the
+pictures of Fra Angelico, Memling, Grünewald, Gerard David, Roger van
+den Weyden, Bouts; add to these, admirable sculptures such as those of
+the great door of Chartres, altar screens of sculptured wood, such as
+those of the Cathedral of Amiens, what a dream!"</p>
+<p>"Yet," he went on after a silence, "this dream has been a
+reality, it is
+evident. This ideal church existed for ages, everywhere in the Middle
+Ages! The chant, the goldsmith's work, the panels, the sculptures, the
+tissues were all attractive; the liturgies possessed, to give them
+value, fabulous caskets, but all that is far off."</p>
+<p>"But you certainly cannot say," replied M. Bruno, with a
+smile, "that
+the church ornaments are ugly here!"</p>
+<p>"No; they are exquisite. First, the chasubles have not the
+shapes of a
+miner's apron, and they do not hoist themselves up on the shoulders of
+the priest, that excrescence, that puffing like the ear of a little
+donkey lying back, which the vestment makers use at Paris.</p>
+<p>"Nor is it any more that cross in stripe or woven, filling all
+the
+stuff, falling like a sack-coat over the back of the celebrant; the
+Trappist chasubles have kept the old form, as the old image makers and
+the old painters preserved them in their religious scenes; and that
+cross with four leaves, like those which the Gothic style chiselled on
+the walls of its churches, is related to the very expanded lotus a
+flower so full-blown that its falling petals droop."</p>
+<p>"Without counting," pursued Durtal, "that the stuff which
+seems cut in a
+sort of flannel or thick soft felt must have been plunged in threefold
+dyes, for it takes a depth, and a magnificent clearness of tone. The
+religious trimming-makers could trim these watered and plain silks with
+silver and gold, yet never attain to give a colour at once so vehement
+and so familiar to the eye as that crimson with sulphur-yellow flowers,
+which Father Maximin wore the other day."</p>
+<p>"Yes, and the mourning chasuble with its lobed crosses, and
+its discreet
+white fullings, in which the Father abbot vested himself, the day on
+which he communicated us, is not it also a caress for the eyes?"</p>
+<p>Durtal sighed: "Ah! if the statues in the chapel showed a like
+taste!"</p>
+<p>"By the way," said the oblate, "come and salute that Notre
+Dame de
+l'Atre, of which I have spoken to you, found among the remains of the
+old cloister."</p>
+<p>They rose from table, passed along a corridor, and struck into
+a lateral
+gallery, at the end of which they stopped before a statue of life size,
+in stone.</p>
+<p>It was heavy and massive, representing in a robe of long
+folds, a
+peasant woman, crowned, and round-cheeked, holding on her arm a child
+who blessed a ball.</p>
+<p>But in this portrait of a robust peasant woman, sprung from
+Burgundy or
+Flanders, there was a candour, a goodness almost tumultuous, which
+sprang from her smiling face, her innocent eyes, her good and large
+lips, indulgent, ready for all forgiveness.</p>
+<p>She was a rustic Virgin made for the humble lay brothers; she
+was not a
+great lady who could hold them at a distance, but she was indeed the
+nursing mother of their souls, their true mother. "How was it they had
+not understood her here? how instead of presiding in the chapel, did
+she
+grow chill at the end of a corridor?" cried Durtal.</p>
+<p>The oblate turned the conversation&#8212;"I warn you," he said,
+"that
+Benediction will not take place after Vespers as your placard
+indicates,
+but directly after Compline; this latter office will therefore be
+advanced a quarter of an hour at least."</p>
+<p>And the oblate went up to his cell, while Durtal went towards
+the large
+pond. There he lay down on a bed of dry reed, looking at the water
+which
+broke in wavelets at his feet. The coming and going of these limited
+waters, folding back on themselves, yet never overpassing the basin
+they
+had hollowed for themselves, led him on into long reveries.</p>
+<p>He said to himself that a river was the most exact symbol of
+the active
+life; one follows it from its source through all its courses across the
+territories it fertilizes; it has fulfilled its assigned task before it
+dies, immersing itself in the gaping sepulchre of the seas; but the
+pond, that tamed water, imprisoned in a hedge of reeds which it has
+itself caused to grow in fertilizing the soil of its bank, has
+concentrated itself, lived on itself, not seemed to achieve any known
+work, save to keep silence and reflect on the infinite of heaven.</p>
+<p>"Still water troubles me," continued Durtal. "It seems to me
+that unable
+to extend itself, it grows deeper, and that while running waters borrow
+only the shadows of things they reflect, it swallows them without
+giving
+them back. Most certainly in this pond is a continued and profound
+absorption of forgotten clouds, of lost trees, even of sensations
+seized
+on the faces of monks who hung over it. This water is full, and not
+empty, like those which are distracted in wandering about the country
+and in bathing the towns. It is a contemplative water, in perfect
+accord
+with the recollected life of the cloisters.</p>
+<p>"The fact is," he concluded, "that a river would have here no
+meaning;
+it would only be passing, would remain indifferent and in a hurry,
+would
+be in all cases unfit to pacify the soul which the monastic water of
+the
+ponds appeases. Ah! in founding Notre Dame de l'Atre, Saint Bernard
+knew
+how to fit the Cistercian rule and the site.</p>
+<p>"But we must leave these fancies," he said, rising; and,
+remembering
+that it was Sunday, he transferred himself to Paris, and revisited in
+thought his halts on this day in the churches.</p>
+<p>In the morning St. Severin enchanted him, but he ought not to
+thrust
+himself into that sanctuary for the other Offices. Vespers there were
+botched and mean; and if it were a feast day the organ master showed
+himself possessed by the love of ignoble music.</p>
+<p>Occasionally Durtal had taken refuge at St. Gervais, where at
+least they
+played at certain times motets of the old masters; but that church was,
+as well as St. Eustache, a paying concert, where Faith had nothing to
+do. No recollection was possible in the midst of ladies who fainted
+behind, their faces in their hands, and grew agitated in creaking
+chairs. These were frivolous assemblies for pious music, a compromise
+between the theatre and God.</p>
+<p>St. Sulpice was better, where at least the public was silent.
+There,
+moreover, Vespers were celebrated with more solemnity and less haste.</p>
+<p>In general the seminary reinforced the choir, and rendered by
+this
+imposing choir they rolled on majestically sustained by the grand organ.</p>
+<p>Chanted, only in half, and not in unison, reduced to a state
+of
+couplets, given, some by a baritone, others by the choir, they were
+twisted and frizzled by a curling iron, but as they were not less
+adulterated at the other churches, there was every advantage in
+listening to them at St. Sulpice, whose powerful choir, very well led,
+had not, as for example at Notre Dame, those dusty voices which break
+at
+the least whisper.</p>
+<p>This only became really odious when, with a formidable
+explosion, the
+first strophe of the Magnificat struck the arches.</p>
+<p>The organ then swallowed up one stanza out of two, and under
+the
+seditious pretext that the length of the Office of incensing was too
+long to be filled up entirely by singing, M. Widor, seated at his desk,
+rolled forth stale fragments of music splashed about above, imitating
+the human voice and the flute, the bagpipe and the bassoon, or indeed,
+tired of affectations, he blew furiously on the keys, ending by
+imitating the roll of locomotives over iron bridges, letting all the
+stops go.</p>
+<p>And the choirmaster, not wishing to show himself inferior to
+the
+organist in his instinctive hatred of plain chant, was delighted, when
+the Benediction began, to put aside Gregorian melodies and make his
+choristers gurgle rigadoons.</p>
+<p>It was no longer a sanctuary, but a howling place. The "Ave
+Maria," the
+"Ave Verum," all the mystical indecencies of the late Gounod, the
+rhapsodies of old Thomas, the capers of indigent musicasters, defiled
+in
+a chain wound by choir leaders from Lamoureux, chanted unfortunately by
+children, the chastity of whose voices no one feared to pollute in
+these
+middle-class passages of music, these by-ways of art.</p>
+<p>"Ah," thought Durtal, "if only this choirmaster, who is
+evidently an
+excellent musician; for indeed, when he must, he knows how to get
+executed better than anywhere else in Paris, the 'De Profundis' with
+organ accompaniment, and the 'Dies Irĉ'; if only this man would as at
+St. Gervais give us some Palestrina and Vittoria, some Aichinger and
+Allegri, some Orlando Lasso and De Près; but no, he must detest these
+masters also, consider them as archaic rubbish, good to send into the
+dust-heaps."</p>
+<p>And Durtal continued,</p>
+<p>"What we hear now at Paris, in the churches, is wholly
+incredible! Under
+pretence of managing an income for the singers, they suppress half the
+stanzas of canticles and hymns, and substitute, to vary the pleasure,
+the tiresome divagations of an organ.</p>
+<p>"There they howl the 'Tantum Ergo' to the Austrian National
+air; or what
+is still worse, muffle it up with operatic choruses, or refrains from
+canteens. The very text is divided into couplets which are ornamented
+like a drinking song with a little burthen.</p>
+<p>"The other Church sequences are treated in the same manner.</p>
+<p>"And yet the Papacy has formally forbidden, in many bulls,
+that the
+sanctuary should be soiled by those liberties. To cite one only, John
+XXII., in his Extravagant 'Doctor Sanctorum,' expressly forbade profane
+voices and music in churches. He prohibited choirs at the same time to
+change plain chant into fiorituri. The decrees of the Council of Trent
+are not less clear from this point of view, and more recently still a
+regulation of the Sacred Congregation of Rites has intervened to
+proscribe musical rioting in holy places.</p>
+<p>"Then what are the parish-priests doing who, in fact, have
+musical
+police charge in their churches? Nothing, they laugh at it.</p>
+<p>"Nor is this a mere phrase, but with those priests who, hoping
+for
+receipts, permit on fête days the shameless voices of actresses to
+dance
+gambols to the heavy sounds of the organ, the poor Church has become
+far
+from clean.</p>
+<p>"At St. Sulpice," Durtal went on, "the priest tolerates the
+villainy of
+jolly songs which are served up to him; but at least he does not, like
+the one at St. Severin, allow strolling women players to lighten up the
+Office by the shouts of such voices as remain to them. Nor has he
+accepted the solo on the English horn which I heard at St. Thomas one
+evening during the Perpetual Adoration. In short, if the grand
+Benedictions at St. Sulpice are a shame, the Complines remain in spite
+of their theatrical attitude really charming."</p>
+<p>And Durtal thought of those Complines of which the paternity
+is often
+attributed to Saint Benedict; they were in fact the integral prayer of
+the evenings, the preventive adjuration, the safeguard against the
+attempts of the Demon, they were in some measure the advanced sentinels
+of the out-posts placed round the soul to protect it during the night.</p>
+<p>And the regulation of this entrenched camp of prayer was
+perfect. After
+the benediction the best trained voice, the most threadlike of the
+choir, the voice of the smallest of the children, sang forth the short
+lesson taken from the first Epistle of Saint Peter, warning the
+faithful
+that they must be sober and watch, not allow themselves to be surprised
+unexpectedly. A priest then recited the usual evening prayers; the
+choir
+organ gave the intonation, and the psalms fell, chanted one by one, the
+twilight psalms, in which before the approaches of night peopled with
+goblins, and furrowed by ghosts, man calls God to aid, and prays Him to
+guard his sleep from the violence of the ways of hell, the rape of the
+lamias that pass.</p>
+<p>And the hymn of Saint Ambrose, the "Te lucis ante terminum,"
+made still
+more precise the scattered meaning of these psalms, gathering it up in
+its short stanzas. Unfortunately, the most important, that which
+foresees and declares the luxurious dangers of darkness, was swallowed
+up by the full organ. This hymn was not rendered in plain chant at St.
+Sulpice as at La Trappe, but was sung to a pompous and elaborate air,
+an
+air full of glory, with a certain proud attractiveness, originating no
+doubt in the eighteenth century.</p>
+<p>Then there was a pause&#8212;and man, feeling himself more
+sheltered, behind
+a rampart of prayers, recollected himself, more assured, and borrowed
+innocent voices to address new supplications to God. After the chapter
+read by the officiant, the children of the choir chanted the short
+response "In manus tuus Domine, commendo spiritum meum," which rolled
+out, dividing in two parts, then doubled itself, and resolved at the
+last its two separate portions by a verse, and part of an antiphon.</p>
+<p>And after that prayer there was still the canticle of Simeon,
+who, as
+soon as he had seen the Messiah, desired to die. This "Nunc dimittis,"
+which the Church has incorporated in Compline to stimulate us at
+eventide to self-examination&#8212;for none can tell whether he shall wake on
+the morrow&#8212;was raised by the whole choir, which alternated with the
+responses of the organ.</p>
+<p>In fact, to end this Office of a besieged town, to take its
+last
+dispositions and try to repose in shelter from a violent attack, the
+Church built up again a few prayers, and placed her parishes under the
+tutelage of the Virgin, to whom it chanted one of the four antiphons
+which follow, according to the Proper.</p>
+<p>"At La Trappe Compline was evidently less solemn, less
+interesting than
+at St. Sulpice," concluded Durtal, "for the monastic breviary is, for a
+wonder, less complete for that Office than the Roman breviary. As for
+Sunday Vespers, I am curious to hear them."</p>
+<p>And he heard them; but they hardly differed from the Vespers
+adopted by
+the Benedictine nuns of the Rue Monsieur; they were more massive, more
+grave, more Roman, if it may be said, for necessarily the voice of
+women
+drew them out into sharp points, made them like acute arches, as it
+were, in Gothic style, but the Gregorian tunes were the same.</p>
+<p>On the other hand they resembled in nothing those at St.
+Sulpice, where
+the modern sauces spoilt the very essences of the plain chants. Only
+the
+Magnificat of La Trappe, abrupt, and with dry tone, was not so good as
+the majestic, the admirable Royal Magnificat chanted at Paris.</p>
+<p>"These monks are astonishing with their superb voices," said
+Durtal to
+himself, and he smiled as they finished the antiphon of Our Lady, for
+he
+remembered that in the primitive Church the chanter was called
+"Fabarius
+cantor," "eater of beans," because he was obliged to eat that vegetable
+to strengthen his voice. Now, at La Trappe, dishes of beans were
+common;
+perhaps that was the secret of the ever young monastic voices.</p>
+<p>He thought over the liturgy and plain chant while smoking
+cigarettes, in
+the walks, after Vespers.</p>
+<p>He brought to mind the symbolism of those canonical hours
+which recalled
+every day to the Christian the shortness of life in summing up for him
+its image from infancy to death.</p>
+<p>Recited soon after dawn, Prime was the figure of childhood;
+Tierce of
+youth; Sext the full vigour of age; None the approaches of old age,
+while Vespers were an allegory of decrepitude. They belonged, moreover,
+to the Nocturns, and were sung about six o'clock in the evening, at
+that
+hour when, at the time of the Equinoxes, the sun sets in the red cinder
+of the clouds. As for Compline, it resounds when night, the symbol of
+death, has come.</p>
+<p>This canonical Office was a marvellous rosary of psalms; every
+bead of
+each of these hours bore reference to the different phases of human
+existence, followed, little by little, the periods of the day, the
+decline of destiny, to end in the most perfect of offices, in Compline,
+that provisional absolution of a death, itself represented by sleep.</p>
+<p>And if, from these texts so wisely selected, these Sequences
+so solemnly
+sealed, Durtal passed to the sacerdotal robe of their sounds, to those
+neumatic chants, that divine psalmody all uniform, all simple, which is
+plain chant, he had to admit, that except in Benedictine cloisters, an
+organ accompaniment was everywhere added, that plain chant had been put
+forcibly in modern tonality, and it disappeared under vegetations which
+stifled it, became everywhere discoloured, amorphous and
+incomprehensible.</p>
+<p>One only of its executioners, Niedermayer, showed himself at
+least
+pitiful. He tried a system more ingenious and more honest. He reversed
+the terms of torture. Instead of wishing to make plain chant supple and
+to thrust it into the mould of modern harmony, he constrained that
+harmony to bend itself to the austere tonality of plain chant. He thus
+preserved its character, but how far more natural would it have been to
+leave it solitary and not obliged it to tow an useless companion and
+awkward following?</p>
+<p>Here at least at La Trappe it lived and spread in all
+security, without
+treason on the part of the monks. There was always sameness of sound,
+it
+was always chanted without accompaniment in unison.</p>
+<p>He was able to satisfy himself about this truth once more
+after supper,
+that evening, when at the end of Compline the father sacristan lighted
+all the candles on the altar.</p>
+<p>At that moment, in the silence of the Trappists on their
+knees, their
+head in their hands, or their cheek resting on the sleeve of their
+great
+cowl, three lay brothers entered, two carrying torches, and another
+preceding them with a censer, and behind them a few paces, came the
+prior with his hands joined.</p>
+<p>Durtal looked at the changed costume of the three brothers.
+They had no
+longer their robes of serge, made of bits and scraps, stained mud
+colour, but robes of violet-brown, like plums on which was spread the
+white twilling of a new surplice.</p>
+<p>While Father Maximin, vested in a copy of milky white, woven
+with a
+cross in orange yellow, placed the Host in the monstrance, the thurifer
+put down the censer, on the coals of which melted tears of real
+incense.
+Contrary to what takes place in Paris, where the censer, swung before
+the altar, sounds against its chains, and is like the clear tinkling of
+a horse which, as he lifts his head, shakes his curb and bit, the
+censer
+at La Trappe remained immovable before the altar, and smoked by itself
+behind the officiants.</p>
+<p>And everyone chanted the imploring and melancholy antiphon
+"Parce
+Domine," then the "Tantum Ergo," that magnificent song, which could be
+almost acted, so clear in their changes are the sentiments which
+succeed
+each other in their rhymed sequence.</p>
+<p>In the first stanza it seems indeed to shake the head gently,
+to put
+forward the chin, so to speak, so as to affirm the insufficiency of the
+senses to explain the dogma of the real presence, the finished avatar
+of
+the Bread. It is then admiring and reflective; then that melody so
+attentive, so respectful, does not wait to affirm the weakness of the
+reason, and the power of faith, but in the second stanza it goes
+forward, adores the glory of the three Persons, exults with joy, only
+recovers itself at the end, where the music adds a new sense to the
+text
+of Saint Thomas, in avowing in a long and mournful Amen the
+unworthiness
+of those present to receive the Benediction of the Flesh placed upon
+that cross which the monstrance is about to trace in the air.</p>
+<p>And slowly, while unrolling its coil of smoke, the censer
+spread, as it
+were, a blue gauze before the altar, while the Blessed Sacrament was
+lifted like a golden moon, amid the stars of the tapers, sparkling in
+the growing darkness of that fog, the bells of the abbey sounded with
+musical and sweet strokes. And all the monks bowed low with their eyes
+closed, then recovered themselves and entoned the "Laudate" to the old
+melody which is also sung at Notre Dame des Victoires at the
+Benediction
+in the evening.</p>
+<p>Then one by one, having genuflected before the altar, they
+went out,
+while Durtal and the oblate returned to the guest-house, where Father
+Etienne was waiting for them.</p>
+<p>He said to Durtal: "I would not go to bed without knowing how
+you have
+borne the day;" and as Durtal thanked him, assuring him that this
+Sunday
+had been very peaceful, Father Etienne smiled and revealed in a word,
+that under their reserved attitude all at La Trappe were more
+interested
+in their guest than he had himself believed.</p>
+<p>"The reverend Father abbot and the Father prior will be glad
+when I give
+them this answer," said the monk, who wished Durtal good-night,
+pressing
+his hand.</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_VII" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+<p>At seven o'clock, just as he was preparing to eat his bread,
+Durtal
+encountered Father Etienne.</p>
+<p>"Father," he said, "to-morrow is Tuesday; the time of my
+retreat has
+expired, and I am going; how should I order a carriage for Saint
+Landry?"</p>
+<p>The monk smiled. "When the postman brings the letters I can
+charge him
+with the commission, but let us see; are you in a great hurry to leave
+us?"</p>
+<p>"No, but I would not trespass...."</p>
+<p>"Listen, since you are so well broken in to the life at La
+Trappe, stay
+here two days more. The Father procurator must go to settle a dispute
+at
+Saint Landry. He will take you to the station in our carriage. So you
+will avoid some expense, and the journey hence to the railroad will
+seem
+to you less long, since there will be two of you."</p>
+<p>Durtal accepted, and as it rained, he went up to his room. "It
+is
+strange," he said, as he sat down, "how impossible one finds it in a
+cloister to read a book; one wants nothing, one thinks of God by
+Himself, and not by the volumes which speak about Him."</p>
+<p>Mechanically he had taken up from a heap of books one in
+octavo, which
+he had found on his table the day he took possession of his cell; it
+bore the title "Manresa," or the "Spiritual Exercises" of Ignatius of
+Loyola.</p>
+<p>He had already run through the work at Paris, and the pages
+which he
+turned over afresh did not change the harsh, almost hostile, opinion
+which he had retained of this book.</p>
+<p>The fact is that these exercises leave no initiative to the
+soul; they
+consider it as a soft paste good to run into a mould; they show it no
+horizon, no sky. Instead of trying to stretch it, and make it greater,
+they make it smaller deliberately; they put it back into the cases of
+their wafer box, nourish it only on faded trifles, on dry nothings.</p>
+<p>This Japanese culture of deformed toes which remain dwarf;
+this Chinese
+deformation of children planted in pots, horrified Durtal, who closed
+the volume.</p>
+<p>He opened another, the "Introduction to the Devout Life," by
+Saint
+Francis de Sales.</p>
+<p>Certainly he found no need to read it again, in spite of its
+affectations, and its good nature, at first charming, but which ends by
+making you sick, by making the soul sticky with sweets with liqueurs in
+them, and lollypops; in a word, that work so much praised by Catholics
+was a julep scented with bergamot and ambergris. It was like a fine
+handkerchief shaken in a church in which a musty smell of incense
+remained.</p>
+<p>But the man himself, the Bishop Saint Francis de Sales, was
+suggestive;
+with his name was called up the whole mystical history of the
+seventeenth century.</p>
+<p>And Durtal recalled the memories he had kept of the religious
+life of
+that time. There were then in the Church two currents:</p>
+<p>That of the high Mysticism, as it was called, originating from
+Saint
+Teresa and Saint John of the Cross; and this current was concentrated
+on
+Marie Guyon.</p>
+<p>And another that of so-called temperate Mysticism, of which
+the adepts
+were Saint Francis de Sales and his friend the celebrated Baroness de
+Chantal.</p>
+<p>It was naturally this second current which triumphed. Jesus,
+putting
+Himself within the reach of drawing-rooms, descending to the level of
+women of the world, a moderate and proper Jesus, only dealing with the
+soul of His creature just enough to give it one attraction the more,
+this elegant Jesus became all the fashion; but Madame Guyon, whose
+source was above all Saint Teresa, who taught the mystical theory of
+love, and familiar intercourse with heaven, raised the opposition of
+the
+whole clergy who abominated Mysticism without understanding it; she
+exasperated the terrible Bossuet, who accused her of the fashionable
+heresy, Molinism and Quietism. She refuted, unhappy as she was, this
+trouble without much difficulty, but he persecuted her for it none the
+less; he was furious against her, and had her imprisoned at Vincennes;
+revealed himself obstinate, surly, and atrocious.</p>
+<p>Fenelon, who tried to conciliate these two tendencies in
+preparing a
+small Mysticism neither too hot nor too cold, a little less lukewarm
+than that of Saint Francis de Sales, and above all things much less
+ardent than that of Saint Teresa, ended in his turn by displeasing the
+cormorant of Meaux, and though he abandoned and denied Madame de Guyon,
+whose friend he had been for long years, he was persecuted and tracked
+down by Bossuet, condemned at Rome, and sent in exile to Cambrai.</p>
+<p>And here Durtal could not but smile, for he remembered the
+desolate
+complaints of his partisans weeping for this disgrace, representing
+thus
+as a martyr this archbishop whose punishment consisted in quitting his
+post as courtier at Versailles to go at last and administer his
+diocese,
+in which he appeared till then to have never resided.</p>
+<p>This mitred Job, who remained in his misfortune Archbishop and
+Duke of
+Cambrai, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and rich, so unhappy because
+he was obliged to visit his flock, well shows the state of the
+episcopate under the redundant reign of the great king. It was a
+priesthood of financiers and valets.</p>
+<p>Only there was at any rate a certain attraction, there was
+talent in
+every case; while now bishops are not for the most part less intriguing
+nor less servile, but they have no longer either talent or manners.
+Caught in part, in the fishpond of bad priests, they show themselves
+ready for everything, and turn out to be souls of old usurers, low
+jobbers, beggars, when you press them.</p>
+<p>"It is sad to say it, but so it is," concluded Durtal. "As for
+Madame
+Guyon," he went on, "she was neither an original writer nor a saint;
+she
+was only an unwelcome substitute for the true mystics; she was
+presuming
+and certainly lacked that humility which magnified Saint Teresa and
+Saint Clare; but after all she burst into a flame, she was overcome by
+Jesus; above all, she was not a pious courtier, a bigot softened by a
+court like the Maintenon.</p>
+<p>"After all, what a time for religion it was? All its saints
+have
+something formal and restricted, wordy and cold, which turns me away
+from them. Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Chantal
+... No, I prefer Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Bernard, Saint Angela
+... The Mysticism of the seventeenth century is all the fashion with
+its
+emphatic and mean churches, its pompous and icy painting, its solemn
+poetry, its gloomy prose.</p>
+<p>"But look," he said, "my cell is still neither swept nor set
+in order,
+and I am afraid that in lingering here I may give some trouble to
+Father
+Etienne. It rains, however, too hard to allow of my walking in the
+wood;
+the simplest thing is to go and read the Little Office of Our Lady in
+the chapel."</p>
+<p>He went down there; it was at this hour almost empty; the
+monks were at
+work in the fields or in the factory; two fathers only, on their knees
+before the altar of Our Lady, were praying so absorbedly that they did
+not even hear the opening of the door.</p>
+<p>And Durtal, who had placed himself near them opposite the
+porch which
+gave upon the high altar, saw them reflected in the sheet of glass,
+placed before the shrine of the Blessed Guerric. This sheet had indeed
+the effect of a mirror, and the white fathers were in the depths of it,
+lived in prayers under the table, in the very heart of the altar.</p>
+<p>And he also appeared there in a corner, reflected, at the back
+of the
+shrine, near the sacred remains of the monk.</p>
+<p>At one moment he lifted his head, and saw that the round
+window in the
+apse, behind the altar, reproduced on its glass ornamented with grey
+and
+blue, the marks engraved on the reverse of the medal of Saint Benedict,
+the first letters of its imperative formulas, the initials of its
+distiches.</p>
+<p>It might have been called an immense clear medal, sifting a
+pale light,
+straining it through prayers, not allowing them to penetrate to the
+altar till sanctified and blessed by the Patriarch.</p>
+<p>And while he was dreaming, the clock struck; the two Trappists
+regained
+their stalls, while the others entered.</p>
+<p>Waiting thus in the chapel, the hour of Sext had struck. The
+abbot
+advanced. Durtal saw him again for the first time since their
+conversation; he seemed less ill, less pale; he marched majestically in
+his great white cowl, at the hood of which hung a violet acorn, and the
+fathers bowed, kissing their sleeve before him; he reached his place,
+which was designated by a wooden cross standing before a stall, and all
+enfolded themselves with a great sign of the cross, bowed to the altar,
+and the feeble imploring voice of the old Trappist rose: "Deus in
+adjutorium meum intende."</p>
+<p>And the Office continued, in the monotonous and charming pitch
+of the
+doxology, interrupted by profound reverences, large movements of the
+arm
+lifting the sleeve of the cowl as it fell to the ground, to allow the
+hand freedom to turn the pages.</p>
+<p>When Sext was over Durtal went to rejoin the oblate.</p>
+<p>They found on the table of the refectory a little omelette,
+leeks cooked
+in a sauce of flour and oil, haricots and cheese.</p>
+<p>"It is astonishing," said Durtal, "how in regard to mystics,
+the world
+errs on preconceived ideas, on the old string. Phrenologists declare
+that mystics have pointed skulls; now here that their form is more
+visible than elsewhere, because they are all hairless and shaven, there
+are no more heads like eggs than anywhere else. I looked this morning
+at
+the shape of their heads, no two are alike. Some are oval and
+depressed,
+others like a pear and straight, some have lumps on them, and some have
+none; and it is just the same with faces; when they are not
+transfigured
+by prayer they are ordinary. If they did not wear the habit of their
+order, no one could recognize in these Trappists predestined beings
+living out of modern society, in the full Middle Ages, in absolute
+dependence on a God. If they have souls which are not like those of
+other people, they have, after all, faces and bodies like those of the
+first comer."</p>
+<p>"All is within," said the oblate. "Why should elect souls be
+enclosed in
+fleshly prisons different to others?"</p>
+<p>This conversation, which continued on different points of
+Trappist life,
+ended by turning on death in a monastery, and M. Bruno revealed some
+details.</p>
+<p>"When death is near," he said, "the Father abbot traces on the
+ground a
+cross in blessed ashes covered with straw, and the dying man is placed
+on it wrapped in serge cloth.</p>
+<p>"The brothers recite near him the prayers of the dying, and at
+the
+moment of his death the response 'Subvenite Sancti Dei' is chanted in
+choir. The Father abbot incenses the body, which is washed while the
+monks sing the Office of the Dead in another room.</p>
+<p>"Then his regular habit is put on the dead monk, and he is
+borne in
+procession to the church, where he lies on a stretcher with his face
+uncovered, until the hour destined for the funeral.</p>
+<p>"Then on the way to the cemetery the community intones no
+longer the
+chant of the dead, the psalms of grief, and the sequences of regret,
+but
+rather 'In exitu Israel de Ĉgypto,' which is the psalm of deliverance,
+the free song of joy.</p>
+<p>"And the Trappist is buried without a coffin, in his robe of
+stuff, his
+head covered with his hood.</p>
+<p>"Lastly, during thirty days, his place remains empty in the
+refectory,
+his portion is served as usual, but the brother porter distributes it
+to
+the poor.</p>
+<p>"Ah! the happiness to die thus," said the oblate, as he ended,
+"for if
+one dies after having honestly fulfilled one's task in the order, one
+is
+assured of eternal happiness, according to the promises made by our
+Lord
+to Saint Benedict and to Saint Bernard!"</p>
+<p>"The rain is over," said Durtal; "I should like to visit
+to-day that
+little chapel at the end of the park of which you spoke to me the other
+day. Which is the shortest way to reach it?"</p>
+<p>M. Bruno told him the way, and Durtal went off, rolling a
+cigarette, to
+gain the great pond, thence he struck a path to the left and mounted a
+lane of trees.</p>
+<p>He slipped on the wet ground, and got on with difficulty. At
+last,
+however, he gained a clump of chestnuts, which he skirted. Behind these
+rose a dwarf tower topped by a very small dome, pierced by a door. To
+the left and right of this door, on sockets where ornaments of the
+Romanesque epoch still were seen under the velvety crust of moss, two
+stone angels were still standing.</p>
+<p>They belonged, evidently, to the Burgundian school, with their
+big round
+heads, their hair puffed and divided into waves, their fat faces with
+turned-up noses, their solid draperies with hard folds. They also came
+from the ruins of the old cloister, but the interior of the chapel was
+unfortunately thoroughly modern; it was so small that the feet of him
+who knelt at the altar almost touched the wall at the entrance.</p>
+<p>In a niche veiled by white gauze a Virgin smiled with extended
+hands.
+She had blue plaster eyes and apple-shaped cheeks. She was wearisome in
+her insignificance, but her sanctuary retained the warmth of places
+always shut up. The walls, hung with red calico, were dusted, the floor
+was swept, and the holy water basins full; superb tea roses flourished
+in pots between the candelabra. Durtal then understood why he had so
+often seen M. Bruno walking in this direction with flowers in his hand;
+he was going to pray in this place, which he loved no doubt because it
+was isolated in the profound solitude of this Trappist monastery.</p>
+<p>"Excellent man!" cried Durtal, thinking over the affectionate
+services,
+the fraternal care the oblate had had for him; and he added, "He is a
+happy man too, for he is self-contained, and lives so placidly here.</p>
+<p>"And, indeed," he went on, "where is the good of striving, if
+not
+against oneself? to agitate oneself for money, for glory, to conduct
+oneself so as to keep others down, and gain adulation from them, how
+vain a task!</p>
+<p>"Only the Church, in decking the temporary altars of the
+liturgical
+year, in forcing the seasons to follow step by step the life of Christ,
+has known how to trace for us a plan of necessary occupations, of
+useful
+ends. She has given us the means of walking always side by side with
+Jesus, to live day by day with the Gospels; for Christians she has made
+time the messenger of sorrows and the herald of joys; she has entrusted
+to the year the part of servant of the New Testament, the zealous
+emissary of worship."</p>
+<p>And Durtal reflected on the cycle of the liturgy which begins
+on the
+first day of the religious year, with Advent, then turns with an
+insensible movement on itself till it returns again to its
+starting-point, to the time when the Church prepares by penitence and
+prayer to celebrate Christmas.</p>
+<p>And turning over his prayer-book, seeing the extraordinary
+circle of
+offices, he thought of that prodigious jewel, that crown of King
+Recceswinthe preserved in the Museum of Cluny.</p>
+<p>The liturgical year was, like it, studded with crystals and
+jewels by
+its admirable canticles and its fervent hymns set in the very gold of
+Benedictions and Vespers.</p>
+<p>It seemed that the Church had substituted for that crown of
+thorns with
+which the Jews had surrounded the temples of the Saviour, the truly
+royal crown of the Proper of the Seasons, the only one which was
+chiselled in a metal precious enough, with art pure enough to dare to
+place itself on the brow of a God.</p>
+<p>And the grand Lapidary had begun his work by incrusting, in
+this diadem
+of offices, the hymn of Saint Ambrose, and the invocation taken from
+the
+Old Testament, the "Rorate C&#339;li," that melodious chant of expectation
+and regret, that obscure gem violet-coloured; the lustre declares
+itself
+then, when after each of its stanzas rises the solemn prayer of the
+patriarchs, calling for the longed-for presence of Christ.</p>
+<p>And the four Sundays of Advent disappeared with the turned
+pages of the
+prayer-book; the night of the Nativity was come. After the "Jesu
+Redemptor" of Vespers, the old Portuguese chant, the "Adeste Fideles,"
+arose at Benediction from every lip. It was a sequence of a truly
+charming simplicity, an old carving wherein defiled the shepherds and
+the kings to a popular air appropriate to great marches, apt to charm,
+to aid by the somewhat military rhythm of its steps, the long lines of
+the faithful quitting their cottages to go to the distant churches in
+the towns.</p>
+<p>And imperceptibly, like the year in an invisible rotation, the
+circle
+turned, and stopped at the Feast of the Holy Innocents, where there
+flourished out, like a flower from a slaughter-house, on a shoot culled
+from a soil irrigated by the blood of lambs, this sequence, red, and
+smelling of roses, the "Salvate Flores Martyrum" of Prudentius; the
+crown moved again, and the hymn of the Epiphany, the "Crudelis Herodes"
+of Sedudius, appeared in its turn.</p>
+<p>Now the Sundays grew heavy, the violet Sundays when the
+"Gloria in
+Excelsis" is no more heard, when the "Audi Benigne" of Saint Ambrose is
+chanted, and the "Miserere," that cinder-coloured psalm, which is
+perhaps the most perfect masterpiece which the Church has ever drawn
+from her store-houses of plain chants.</p>
+<p>It was Lent, when the amethysts fade in the moist grey of
+onyxes, in the
+embrowned white of quartz, and the magnificent invocation, "Attende
+Domine," rose beneath the arches. Sprung like the "Rorate C&#339;li" from
+the sequences of the Old Testament, this humble and contrite chant,
+enumerating the deserved punishments of sins, became, if not more
+sorrowful, at all events more grave and more pressing when it
+confirmed, when it resumed in the initial stanza of its burthen, the
+avowal of shame already confessed.</p>
+<p>And suddenly on this crown there burst out after the expiring
+fires of
+Lent, the flaming ruby of the Passion. On the upturned yellow of the
+sky
+a red cross was raised, while majestic shouts and despairing cries
+proclaimed the blood-stained fruit of the tree; and the "Vexilla Regis"
+was again repeated the following Sunday at the Feast of Palms, which
+joined to that Sequence of Fortunatus the green hymn which it
+accompanied with a silky noise of palms, the "Gloria laus et honor" of
+Theodulph.</p>
+<p>Then the fires of precious stones grew grey and died. To the
+glowing
+coals of gems succeeded the dead cinders of obsidians, black stones
+scarcely swelling, without a gleam above the tarnished gold of their
+mountings; one entered no Holy Week, everywhere the "Pange Lingua" and
+the "Stabat Mater" wailed under the arches, and then came the
+"Tenebrĉ,"
+the lamentations, and the psalms, whose knell shook the flame of the
+brown waxen tapers, and after each halt, at the end of each of the
+psalms, one of the tapers expired, and its column of blue smoke
+evaporated still under the lighted circumference of the arches, while
+the choir recommenced the interrupted series of complaints.</p>
+<p>And the crown turned once more; the beads of this musical
+rosary still
+ran on, and all changed. Jesus had risen, and songs of joy issued from
+the organs. The "Victimĉ Paschali Laudes" exulted before the gospel of
+the masses, and at the Benediction the "O Filii et Filiĉ," created
+indeed to be intoned by the wild jubilations of crowds, ran and sported
+in the joyous hurricane of the organs, which uprooted the pillars and
+unroofed the naves.</p>
+<p>And the feasts rung in with bells followed at longer
+intervals. At
+Ascension the heavy and clear crystals of Saint Ambrose filled with
+their luminous water the tiny basin of the catkins; the fire of rubies
+and garnets lighted up again with the crimson hymn and scarlet sequence
+of Pentecost the "Veni Creator" and "Veni Spiritus." The Feast of the
+Trinity passed, signalized by the stanzas of Gregory the Great; and for
+the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, the liturgy could exhibit the most
+marvellous jewel case of its dower, the Office of Saint Thomas, the
+"Pange Lingua," the "Adore Te," the "Sacris Solemniis," the "Verbum
+Supernum," and above all the "Lauda Sion," that pure masterpiece of
+Latin poetry and scholasticism, that hymn so precise, so lucid in its
+abstraction, so firm in its rhymed words, round which is rolled the
+melody perhaps the most enthusiastic, the most supple in plain chant.</p>
+<p>The circle displaced itself again, showing on its different
+faces the
+twenty-three to twenty-eight Sundays which defile after Pentecost, the
+green weeks of the time of Pilgrimage, and stopped at the last feast,
+at
+the Sunday after the Octave of All Saints, at the Dedication of
+Churches
+which the "C&#339;lestis Urbs" incensed, old stanzas of which the ruins
+were badly consolidated by the architects of Urban VIII., old jewels,
+on
+which the troubled water slept and was reanimated only in rare lights.</p>
+<p>The juncture of the religious crown, of the liturgical year,
+was then
+made at the masses, in which the gospel of the last Sunday after
+Pentecost, the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, repeats, as well as
+the Gospel according to Saint Luke, recited on the first Sunday in
+Advent, the terrible predictions of Christ on the desolation of the
+time, on the end of the world.</p>
+<p>"This is not all," Durtal continued, who was interested in
+this run
+through his prayer-book. "In this crown of the Proper of the Seasons
+are
+inserted, like smaller stones, the sequences of the Proper of Saints
+which fill the empty places, and finish the round of the circle.</p>
+<p>"First the pearls and gems of the Blessed Virgin, the limpid
+jewels, the
+blue sapphires and rose rubies of her antiphons; then the aquamarine,
+so
+lucid and pure, of the 'Ave Maris Stella,' the topaz, pale as tears, of
+the 'O Quot nudis Lacrymarum' on the Feast of the Seven Dolours, the
+hyacinth, colour of dried blood, of the 'Stabat;' then were told the
+feasts of the Angels and the Saints, the hymns dedicated to the
+Apostles
+and the Evangelists, to the Martyrs, whether solitary or in couples,
+both out of and during the Paschal season, to the Confessors, Pontiffs,
+and non-Pontiffs, to Virgins, to Holy Women, all Feasts differentiated
+by special Sequences, by special Proses of which some are very simple,
+like those stanzas made in honour of the Nativity of Saint John the
+Baptist, by Paul the Deacon.</p>
+<p>"There still remains All Saints, with the 'Placare Christe,'
+and the
+three blows on the alarm bell, the knell in triplets of the 'Dies Irĉ,'
+which resounds on the day set apart for the Commemoration of the Dead.</p>
+<p>"What an immense fund of poetry, what an incomparable estate
+of art the
+Church possesses!" he cried, closing his book; and many memories rose
+for him at this excursion into his prayer-book.</p>
+<p>On how many evenings had the sadness of life been dissipated
+in
+listening to these proses chanted in the churches!</p>
+<p>He thought over again of the suppliant voice of Advent, and
+recalled one
+evening, when he had wandered under a fine rain along the quays. He had
+been driven from home by ignoble visions, and at the same time had been
+harassed by the increasing disgust of his vices. He had ended by being
+brought up against his will at St. Gervais.</p>
+<p>In the chapel of the Virgin, some poor women were prostrate.
+He had
+knelt, tired and dazed, his soul so ill at ease, that he slumbered
+without power to wake himself. Some men and boys of the choir were
+installed in the chapel, with two or three priests; they had lighted
+candles, and the voice, light and sustained, of a child, had in the
+dark
+of the church chanted the long antiphons of the "Rorate."</p>
+<p>In the state of overwhelming sadness in which he was stagnant,
+Durtal
+felt himself open and bleeding to the bottom of his soul; then a voice
+older and less trembling, which understood the words it said, narrated
+ingenuously, almost without confusion, to the Just One, "Peccavimus et
+facti sumus tanquam immundus nos."</p>
+<p>And Durtal took up these words, and spelt them over in terror,
+thinking,
+"Ah! yes, we have sinned and become like the leprous, O Lord!" And the
+chant continued, and in His turn, the Most High borrowed that same
+innocent organ of childhood, to declare to man His pity, and to confirm
+to him the pardon assured by the coming of the Son.</p>
+<p>And the evening had ended by the Benediction in plain chant,
+in the
+midst of the silence and prostration of unhappy women.</p>
+<p>Durtal remembered how he left the church refreshed, freed from
+his
+hauntings, and he had gone away in the drizzling rain, surprised that
+the way was so short, humming the "Rorate," of which the air had taken
+possession of him, ending by seeing in it the personal touch of a
+kindly
+unknown.</p>
+<p>And there were other evenings ... the Octave of the Feast of
+All Souls
+at St. Sulpice and at St. Thomas Aquinas, where, after the Vespers of
+the Dead, they brought out again the old Sequence which has disappeared
+from the Roman Breviary, the "Lanquentilus in Purgatorio."</p>
+<p>This church was the only one in Paris which had retained these
+pages of
+the Gallican hymnal, and had them sung by two basses without a choir;
+but these singers, so poor as a rule, no doubt were fond of this air,
+for if they did not sing it with art, at least they put a little soul
+into its delivery.</p>
+<p>And this invocation to the Madonna, in which she was adjured
+to save the
+souls in Purgatory, was as sorrowful as the souls themselves, and so
+melancholy, so languid, that the surroundings were forgotten, the
+ugliness of that sanctuary of which the choir was a theatre scene,
+surrounded by closed dressing-rooms and garnished with lustres, one
+might think oneself for a few moments far from Paris, far from that
+population of devout women and servant girls, which attend that place
+in
+the evening.</p>
+<p>"Ah! the Church," he said to himself, as he descended the path
+which led
+to the great pond, "what a mother of art is she!" and suddenly the
+noise
+of a body falling into the water interrupted his reflections.</p>
+<p>He looked behind the hedge of reeds and saw nothing but great
+circles
+running on the water, and all at once in one of these rings a small
+dog-like head appeared holding a fish in its mouth; the beast raised
+itself a little out of the water, showed a thin body covered with fur,
+and gazed on Durtal quietly with its little black eyes.</p>
+<p>Then in a flash it passed the distance which separated it from
+the bank,
+and disappeared under the grasses.</p>
+<p>"It is the otter," he said to himself, remembering the
+discussion at
+table between the stranger priest and the oblate.</p>
+<p>And he went to gain the other pond, when he encountered Father
+Etienne.</p>
+<p>He told him his adventure.</p>
+<p>"Impossible!" cried the monk, "no one has ever seen the otter;
+you must
+have mistaken it for a water rat, or some other animal, for that beast,
+for which we have watched for years, is invisible."</p>
+<p>Durtal gave him a description of it.</p>
+<p>"It is certainly the otter," admitted the guest-master,
+surprised.</p>
+<p>It was evident that this otter lived in the pond in a
+legendary state.
+In monotonous lives, in days like those in a cloister, it took the
+proportions of a fabulous subject, of an event whereof the mystery
+would
+occupy intervals seized between prayers and offices.</p>
+<p>"We must point out to M. Bruno the exact spot where you
+remarked it, for
+he will begin to hunt it again," said Father Etienne after a silence.</p>
+<p>"But how can it trouble you in eating your fish, since you do
+not angle
+for them?"</p>
+<p>"I beg your pardon; we fish for them to send them to the
+Archbishop,"
+answered the monk, who went on: "Still, it is very strange that you saw
+the beast!"</p>
+<p>"When I leave this," thought Durtal, "they will certainly
+speak of me as
+the gentleman who saw the otter."</p>
+<p>While talking, they had arrived at the cross pond.</p>
+<p>"Look," said the father, pointing out the swan, who rose in a
+fury, beat
+his wings, and hissed.</p>
+<p>"What is the matter with him?"</p>
+<p>"The matter is that the white hue of my habit infuriates him."</p>
+<p>"Ah! and why?"</p>
+<p>"I do not know; perhaps he wants to be the only one who is
+white here;
+he spares the lay brothers, while as for a father ... wait, you will
+see."</p>
+<p>And the guest-master walked quietly towards the swan.</p>
+<p>"Come," he said to the angry creature, who splashed him with
+water; and
+he held out his hand which the swan snapped.</p>
+<p>"See," said the monk, showing the mark of a red pinch printed
+on the
+flesh.</p>
+<p>And he smiled, holding his hand, and quitted Durtal, who asked
+himself
+whether, in acting thus, the Trappist were not wishing to inflict on
+himself some corporal punishment to atone for some distraction the
+evening before; some peccadillo.</p>
+<p>"That stroke of the beak must have pinched him horribly, for
+the tears
+came into his eyes. How could he expose himself with joy to such a
+bite?"</p>
+<p>And he remembered that one day at the office of None, one of
+the young
+monks made a mistake in the tone of an antiphon; at the moment that the
+office ended, he knelt before the altar, then he lay his whole length
+on
+the tiles on his face, his mouth pressed on the ground, till the stroke
+of the prior's bell gave him the order to get up.</p>
+<p>This was a voluntary punishment for a negligence committed, a
+forgetfulness. Who knows whether Father Etienne did not in his turn
+punish himself for a thought he deemed to border on sin, in getting
+himself thus pinched?</p>
+<p>He consulted the oblate on the point in the evening, but M.
+Bruno
+contented himself with a smile, without answering.</p>
+<p>And when Durtal spoke to him of his speedy departure for
+Paris, the old
+man shook his head.</p>
+<p>"Considering," he said, "the fear and the discomfort that
+Communion
+caused you, you would act wisely if you approach the Holy Table
+immediately on your return."</p>
+<p>And seeing that Durtal did not reply, but hung his head,</p>
+<p>"Believe a man who has known these trials; if you do not force
+yourself
+while you are still under the warm impression of La Trappe, you will
+float between desire and regret without advancing; you will be
+ingenious
+in discovering excuses for not making your confession; you will try to
+think it impossible to find in Paris an abbé who understands you. Now
+allow me to assure you nothing is more false. If you desire an expert
+and easy confidant, go to the Jesuits; if you wish above all a
+zealous-souled priest, go to St. Sulpice.</p>
+<p>"You will find there honest and intelligent ecclesiastics,
+excellent
+hearts. In Paris, where the clergy of the parishes are so mixed, they
+are at the top of the basket of the priesthood, and, as may be
+imagined,
+they form a community, live in cells, do not dine out; and as the
+Sulpician rule forbids them to aspire to honours, or places, they do
+not
+run the chance of becoming bad priests by ambition. Do you know them?"</p>
+<p>"No; but to resolve that question, which in fact constantly
+troubles me,
+I count on a priest whom I often see, on the very man who, in fact,
+sent
+me into this Trappist monastery.</p>
+<p>"And that," he went on, "makes me remember," and he rose to go
+to
+Compline, "that I have as yet forgotten to write to him. It is true
+that
+now it is too late, I should arrive at his house almost as soon as my
+letter. It is strange, but by force of walking in one's own, by force
+of
+living to oneself, the days run by, and there is no time to do anything
+here!"</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_VIII" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+<p>He had hoped for his last day at La Trappe a morning of quiet,
+when his
+mind might lounge, a mixture of spiritual siesta and of working,
+charmed
+by a round of offices, and not at all that the idea persistent and
+obstinate that he must quit the monastery next day, would spoil all the
+pleasures he had promised himself.</p>
+<p>Now that he had no longer to cleanse himself, and pass under
+the
+winnowing of confession, to present himself for the Communion in the
+morning, he remained irresolute, not knowing any longer how to occupy
+his time, terrified by the recommencement of that life of the world
+which would upset all the barriers of forgetfulness, and would get at
+him at once above all the broken defences of the cloister.</p>
+<p>Like a captured animal, he began to rub against the bars of
+his cage,
+made the tour of the enclosure, filling his sight with those places
+where he had tasted hours so kindly and so cruel.</p>
+<p>He felt in himself a shaking of the ground, a disturbance of
+soul, an
+absolute discouragement before the prospect of re-entering into his
+habitual existence, of mixing himself anew with the coming and going of
+men, and he experienced at the same time a great fatigue of brain.</p>
+<p>He dragged himself along the walks in a state of complete
+discomfort, in
+one of those attacks of religious spleen which determine, while they
+last during years, the "tĉdium vitĉ" of the cloisters. He had a horror
+of any life but this, and the soul overwrought by prayers was failing
+in
+a body insufficiently rested and ill-nourished; it had no further
+desire, asked only to be let alone, to sleep, to fall into one of those
+states of torpor in which everything becomes indifferent, in which one
+ends by losing consciousness gently, by being stifled without
+suffering.</p>
+<p>He might well, to re-act on him as a consolation, promise
+himself to
+assist in Paris at the offices of the Benedictine nuns, that he would
+keep himself on the outskirts of society, to himself; and he was at
+once
+obliged to answer that these subterfuges are impossible, that the very
+movement of the town is against all decoys, that isolation in a chamber
+is in no degree like the solitude of a cell, that masses celebrated in
+a
+chapel open to the public cannot be likened to the private Offices of
+the Trappists.</p>
+<p>Then what is the good of trying to misunderstand? It is with
+the soul as
+with the body, which is better on the sea shore, or in the mountains,
+than shut up in a town. There is a better spiritual air even at Paris,
+in certain religious quarters of the left bank, than in the districts
+situated on the other bank, more lively in certain churches, more pure,
+for example, at Notre Dame des Victoires than in churches such as La
+Trinité and the Madeleine.</p>
+<p>But the monastery was, as it were, the true shore and high
+plateau of
+the soul. There the atmosphere was balsamic, strength returned, lost
+appetite for God was there recovered, there was health succeeding
+weakness, a regimen, fortified and sustained, instead of languor and
+the
+restricted exercises of the towns.</p>
+<p>The conviction that no trickery was possible to him at Paris
+brought him
+to the ground. He wandered from cell to chapel, from chapel to woods,
+awaiting the dinner hour with impatience, in order to be able to speak
+to someone, for in his disorder a new need arose. For more than a week
+he had spent the whole afternoon without opening his lips; he did not
+suffer from it, was even satisfied with his silence, but since he was
+pressed by this idea of departure he could not keep silence any longer,
+thought aloud in the walks to assuage the sensations of his swelling
+heart, that stifled him.</p>
+<p>M. Bruno was too sagacious not to guess the uneasiness of his
+companion,
+who became by turns taciturn and over talkative during the meal. He
+made, however, as though he saw nothing, but after he had said grace he
+disappeared, and Durtal, who was strolling near the great pond, was
+surprised to see him coming in his direction with Father Etienne.</p>
+<p>They greeted him, and the Trappist with a smile proposed to
+him, if he
+had made no other plan, to pass his time in visiting the convent, and
+especially the library, which the Father prior would be delighted to
+show him.</p>
+<p>"If convenient to me! I shall be delighted!" cried Durtal.</p>
+<p>All three returned towards the abbey; the monk lifted the
+latch of a
+little door fashioned in a wall near the church, and Durtal entered a
+minute cemetery, planted with wooden crosses on grass graves.</p>
+<p>There was no inscription, no flower in this enclosure which
+they
+traversed; the monk pushed another door, which opened on a long
+corridor
+smelling of rats. At the end of this gallery, Durtal recognized the
+staircase he had ascended one morning for his confession in the prior's
+room. They left it on their right, turned into another gallery, and the
+guest-master led them into an immense hall, pierced by high windows,
+decorated with eighteenth century pier-glasses, and <i>grisailles</i>;
+it was
+furnished only with benches and stalls, above which was a single chair
+sculptured and painted with abbatial arms, which marked the place of
+Dom
+Anselm.</p>
+<p>"Oh! this chapter-house has nothing monastic," said Father
+Etienne,
+designating the profane pictures on the walls; "we have kept just as it
+was the drawing-room of this old chateau, but I beg you to believe that
+this decoration hardly pleases us."</p>
+<p>"And what takes place in this hall?"</p>
+<p>"Well, we meet here after mass; the chapter opens by reading
+the
+martyrology, followed by the concluding prayers of Prime. Then we read
+a
+passage from the rule, and the Father abbot comments on it. Lastly, we
+practise the exercise of humility, that is to say, that whoever among
+us
+has committed any fault against the rule, prostrates himself, and avows
+it before his brethren."</p>
+<p>They went thence to the refectory. This room had also a high
+ceiling,
+but was smaller, and garnished with tables in form of a horse-shoe. A
+kind of large cruets, each containing two half-bottles of wine and
+water, separated by a water bottle, and before them, instead of
+glasses,
+cups of brown earthenware, with two handles, were placed at equal
+distances. The monk explained that these sham cruets with three
+branches
+indicated the place of two covers, each monk having a right to his half
+bottle of drink, and partaking with his neighbour the water in the
+bottle.</p>
+<p>"This pulpit," said Father Etienne, pointing out a large
+wooden box
+fixed against the wall, "is destined for the reader of the week, the
+father who reads during the meal."</p>
+<p>"How long does the meal last?"</p>
+<p>"Just half an hour."</p>
+<p>"Yes; and the cookery which we eat is delicate in comparison
+with that
+which is served to the monks," said the oblate.</p>
+<p>"I should lie if I were to affirm that we make good cheer,"
+answered the
+guest-master. "Do you know that the hardest thing to bear, in the
+earlier time especially, is the want of seasoning in our dishes. Pepper
+and spices are forbidden by our rule, and as no salt-cellar has place
+on
+our table, we swallow our food just as it is, and it is for the most
+part scarcely salted.</p>
+<p>"On certain days in summer, when one sweats in big drops, this
+becomes
+almost impossible, the gorge rises. Yet one must begin upon this warm
+paste, and at least swallow a sufficient quantity not to give out
+before
+the next day; we look at each other discouraged, unable to get any
+further; there is not another word to define our dinner in the month of
+August, it is a punishment."</p>
+<p>"And all, the Father abbot, the prior, the fathers, the
+brethren, have
+the same food?"</p>
+<p>"All. Now come and see the dormitory."</p>
+<p>They ascended to the first floor. An immense corridor,
+furnished like a
+stable with wooden boxes, extended before them, closed at each end by a
+door.</p>
+<p>"This is our lodging," said the monk, as he stopped before one
+of these
+cases. Cards were placed on them, affixing the name of each monk, and
+the first bore a ticket with this inscription: "The Father Abbot."</p>
+<p>Durtal felt the bed against one of the two walls.</p>
+<p>It was as rough as a carding comb, and as biting as a file. It
+was
+composed of a simple quilted paillasse extended on a plank; no sheets,
+but a prison coverlet of grey wool, a sack of straw instead of pillows.</p>
+<p>"God! it is very hard," said Durtal, and the monk laughed.</p>
+<p>"Our habits soften the roughness of this straw mattress," he
+said; "for
+our rule does not allow us to undress, we may only take off our shoes,
+therefore we sleep entirely clad, our head wrapped in our hood."</p>
+<p>"And it must be cold in this corridor swept by all the winds,"
+added
+Durtal.</p>
+<p>"No doubt the winter is rough here, but it is not that season
+which
+alarms us; we live pretty well, even without fire in time of frost, but
+the summer&#8212;! If you knew what it is to wake in habits still steeped in
+sweat, not dried since the evening before, it is terrible!</p>
+<p>"Then, though because of the great heat we have often hardly
+slept, we
+must before dawn jump out of bed, and begin at once the great night
+office, the Vigils, which last at least two hours. Even after twenty
+years of Trappist life, one cannot but suffer at that getting up; in
+chapel you fight against sleep which crushes you, you sleep while you
+hear a verse chanted, you strive to keep awake, in order to be able to
+chant another, and fall asleep again.</p>
+<p>"One ought to be able to turn the key on thought, and one is
+incapable
+of it.</p>
+<p>"Truly, I assure you that even beyond the corporal fatigue
+which
+explains that state in the morning, there is then an aggression of the
+demon, an incessant temptation to make us recite the office badly."</p>
+<p>"And you all undergo this strife?"</p>
+<p>"All; and this does not hinder," concluded the monk, whose
+face was
+radiant, "this does not hinder us from being very happy here.</p>
+<p>"Because all these trials are nothing beside the deep and
+intimate joys
+which our good God gives us. Ah! He is a generous Master; he pays us a
+hundred-fold for our poor sorrows."</p>
+<p>As they spoke, they had passed through the corridor and had
+arrived at
+its other end.</p>
+<p>The monk opened the door, and Durtal was astounded to find
+himself in a
+vestibule just opposite his own cell.</p>
+<p>"I did not think," he said, "that I was living so near you."</p>
+<p>"This house is a regular labyrinth&#8212;but M. Bruno will take you
+to the
+library where the Father prior is waiting for you; for I must go to my
+business. We shall meet presently," he said, with a smile.</p>
+<p>The library was situated on the other side of the staircase by
+which
+Durtal reached his chamber. It was large, furnished with shelves from
+top to bottom, occupied in the middle by a sort of counter table on
+which also were spread rows of books.</p>
+<p>Father Maximin said to Durtal,</p>
+<p>"We are not very rich, but at any rate we possess tools for
+work fairly
+complete on theology and the monography of the cloisters."</p>
+<p>"You have superb volumes," cried Durtal, who looked at
+magnificent
+folios in splendid bindings with armorial bearings.</p>
+<p>"Wait; here are the works of Saint Bernard in a fine edition,"
+and the
+monk presented to Durtal enormous volumes, printed in heavy letters on
+crackling paper.</p>
+<p>"When I think that I promised myself to make acquaintance with
+Saint
+Bernard in this very abbey which he founded, and here I am on the eve
+of
+my departure, and have read nothing!"</p>
+<p>"You do not know his works?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; scattered fragments of his sermons and of his letters. I
+have run
+through some <i>selectĉ mediocres</i> of his works, but
+that is all."</p>
+<p>"He is our chief master here; but he is not the only one of
+our
+ancestors in Saint Benedict whom the convent possesses," said the monk
+with a certain pride. "See," and he pointed out on the shelves some
+heavy folios, "here: 'Saint Gregory the Great,' 'Venerable Bede,'
+'Saint
+Peter Damian,' 'Saint Anselm.' ... And your friends are there," he
+said,
+following Durtal with a glance as he read the titles of the volumes,
+"'Saint Teresa,' 'Saint John of the Cross,' 'Saint Magdalen of Pazzi,'
+'Saint Angela,' 'Tauler,' ... and she who like Sister Emmerich dictated
+her conversations with Jesus during her ecstasy." And the prior took
+from the range of books in octavo, "The Dialogues of Saint Catherine of
+Siena."</p>
+<p>"That Dominican nun is terrible for the priests of her time,"
+the monk
+went on. "She insists on their misdeeds, reproaches them roundly with
+selling the Holy Spirit, with practising sortilege, and with using the
+Sacrament to compose evil charms."</p>
+<p>"And there are besides the disorderly vices of which she
+accuses them
+in the series concerning the sin of the flesh," added the oblate.</p>
+<p>"Certainly, she does not mince her words, but she had the
+right to take
+up that tone, and menace in the name of the Lord, for she was truly
+inspired by Him. Her doctrine was drawn from divine sources. 'Doctrina
+ejus infusa non acquisita,' says the Church in the bull of her
+canonization. Her Dialogues are admirable; the pages in which God
+exposes the holy frauds which He sometimes uses to recall men to good,
+the passages in which she treats of the monastic life, of that barque
+which possesses three ropes: chastity, obedience, and poverty, and
+which
+faces the tempest under the conduct of the Holy Spirit, are delightful.
+She reveals herself in her work the pupil of the well-beloved disciple
+and of Saint Thomas Aquinas. One might believe that one heard the Angel
+of the School paraphrasing the last of the Evangelists."</p>
+<p>"Yes," said the oblate, striking in, "if Saint Catherine of
+Siena does
+not give herself to the high speculations of Mysticism; if she does not
+analyze like Saint Teresa the mysteries of divine love, nor trace the
+itinerary of souls destined to the perfect life, she reflects directly
+at least the conversations of Heaven. She calls, she loves! You have
+read, sir, her treatises on Discretion and Prayer?"</p>
+<p>"No. I have read Saint Catherine of Genoa, but the books of
+Saint
+Catherine of Siena have never fallen into my hands."</p>
+<p>"And what do you think of this collection?"</p>
+<p>Durtal looked at the title, and made a face.</p>
+<p>"I see that Suso hardly delights you."</p>
+<p>"I should tell a lie if I assured you that the dissertations
+of this
+Dominican pleased me. First, however illuminated the man may be, he
+does
+not attract me. Without speaking of the frenzy of his penances, what
+scrupulousness of devotion and narrowness of piety was his! Think that
+he could not decide on drinking till he had first, as a preliminary,
+divided his beverage into five parts. He thought thus to honour the
+five
+wounds of the Saviour, and, moreover, he swallowed his last mouthful in
+two gulps to call up before himself the water and the blood which
+flowed
+from the side of the Word.</p>
+<p>"No! these sort of things would never enter into my head; I
+would never
+admit that such practices would glorify Christ.</p>
+<p>"And remark well that this love of pounding things small, this
+passion
+for small blessings, is found in all his work. His God is so difficult
+to content, so scrupulous, so meddling, that no one would ever get to
+heaven if they believed what he said. This God of his is the
+fault-finder of eternity, the miser of paradise.</p>
+<p>"On the whole, Suso expands himself in impetuous discourses on
+trifles;
+then what with his insipid allegories, his morose 'Colloquy on the Nine
+Rocks' knocks me down."</p>
+<p>"You will, however, admit that his study on the Union of the
+Soul is
+substantial, and that the 'Office of the Eternal Wisdom' which he
+composed is worth reading?"</p>
+<p>"I cannot say, Father, I do not now remember that Office; but
+I
+recollect tolerably well the treatise on 'Union with God,' it seems to
+me more interesting than the rest, but you will admit that it is very
+short ... and then Saint Teresa has also elucidated that question of
+human renunciation and divine fruition; and, hang it then...!"</p>
+<p>"Come," said the oblate, with a smile, "I give up the attempt
+to make
+you a fervent reader of the good Suso."</p>
+<p>"For us," said Father Maximin, "if we had a little time to
+work, this
+ought to be the leaven of our meditations, the subject of our reading;"
+and he took down a folio which contained the works of Saint Hildegarde,
+abbess of the Convent of Rupertsberg.</p>
+<p>"She, you see, is the great prophetess of the New Testament.
+Never,
+since the visions of Saint John at Patmos, has the Holy Spirit
+communicated to an earthly being with such fulness and light. In her
+'Heptachronon' she predicts Protestantism and the captivity of the
+Vatican; in her 'Scivias, or Knowledge of the Ways of the Lord,' which
+was edited, according to her recital, by a monk of the Convent of Saint
+Désibode, she interprets the symbols of the Scriptures, and even the
+nature of the elements. She also wrote a diligent commentary on our
+rules and enthusiastic pages on sacred music, on literature, on art,
+which she defines admirably; a reminiscence, half-effaced, of a
+primitive condition from which we have fallen since Eden.
+Unfortunately,
+to understand her, it is necessary to give oneself to minute researches
+and patient studies. Her apocalyptic style has something retractile,
+which retreats and shuts itself up all the more when one will open it."</p>
+<p>"I am well aware that I am losing my little Latin," said M.
+Bruno. "What
+a pity there is not a translation of her works, with glosses to help."</p>
+<p>"They are untranslatable," said the father, who went on,</p>
+<p>"Saint Hildegarde is, with Saint Bernard, one of the purest
+glories of
+the family of Saint Benedict. How predestinate was that virgin, who was
+inundated with interior light at the age of three, and died at
+eighty-two, having lived all her life in the cloister!"</p>
+<p>"And add that she was as a permanent state, prophetical!"
+cried the
+oblate. "She is like no other woman saint; all in her is astonishing,
+even the way in which God addresses her, for He forgets that she is a
+woman, and calls her 'man.'</p>
+<p>"And she," added the prior, "employs, when she wishes to
+designate
+herself, the singular expression, 'the paltry form.' But here is
+another
+writer who is dear to us," and he showed Durtal the two volumes of
+Saint
+Gertrude. "She is again one of our great nuns, an abbess truly
+Benedictine, in the exact sense of the word, for she caused the Holy
+Scriptures to be explained to her nuns, wished that the piety of her
+daughters should be based on science, that this faith should be
+sustained by liturgical food, if I may say so."</p>
+<p>"I know nothing of her but her 'Exercises,'" observed Durtal,
+"and they
+have left with me the memory of echoed words, of things said again from
+the sacred books. So far as one may judge from simple extracts, she
+does
+not appear to have original expression, and to be far below Saint
+Teresa
+or Saint Angela."</p>
+<p>"No doubt," answered the monk. "But she comes near Saint
+Angela by the
+gift of familiarity when she converses with Christ, and also by the
+loving vehemence of what she says; only all this is transformed on
+leaving its proper source; she thinks liturgically; and this is so
+true,
+that the least of her reflections at once presents itself to her
+clothed
+in the language of the Gospels and the Psalms.</p>
+<p>"Her 'Revelations,' her 'Insinuations,' her 'Herald of Divine
+Love,' are
+marvellous from this point of view; and then her prayer to the Blessed
+Virgin is exquisite which opens with this phrase: 'Hail, O white lily
+of the Trinity, resplendent, and always at rest....'</p>
+<p>"As a continuation of her works, the Benedictine Fathers of
+Solesmes
+have edited also the 'Revelations' of Saint Mechtilde, her book on
+'Special Grace,' and her 'Light of the Divinity'; they are there on
+that
+shelf...."</p>
+<p>"Let me show you," said in his turn M. Bruno, "guides wisely
+marked out
+for the soul which escapes from itself, and will attempt to climb the
+eternal mountains," and he handed to Durtal the "Lucerna Mystica" of
+Lopez Ezquerra, the quartos of Scaramelli, the volumes of Schram, the
+"Christian Asceticism" of Ribet, the "Principles of Mystic Theology" of
+Father Seraphin.</p>
+<p>"And do you know this?" continued the oblate; the volume he
+offered was
+called "On Prayer," was anonymous, and bore at the bottom of its first
+page "Solesmes, printed at the Abbey of Saint Cecilia," and above the
+printed date, 1886, Durtal made out the word written in ink,
+"Confidential."</p>
+<p>"I have never seen this little book, which seems moreover to
+have never
+been brought into the market. Who is the author?"</p>
+<p>"The most extraordinary nun of our time, the abbess of the
+Benedictine
+nuns at Solesmes. I regret only that you are going so soon, for I
+should
+have been happy to let you read it.</p>
+<p>"As far as the document is concerned, it is of a most
+extraordinary
+science, and it contains admirable quotations from Saint Hildegarde and
+Cassien: as far as Mysticism is concerned, Mother Saint Cecilia
+evidently only reproduces the works of her predecessors, and she tells
+us nothing very new. Nevertheless, I remember a passage which seems to
+me more special, more personal. Wait...."</p>
+<p>And the oblate turned over a few pages. "Here it is:</p>
+<p>"'The spiritualized soul does not appear exposed to temptation
+properly
+so-called, but by a divine permission it is called upon to conflict
+with
+the Demon, spirit against spirit.... The contact with the Demon is then
+perceived on the surface of the soul, under the form of a burn at once
+spiritual and sensible.... If the soul hold good in its union with God,
+if it be strong, the pain, however sharp, is bearable; but if the soul
+commit any slight imperfection, even inwardly, the Demon makes just so
+much way, and carries his horrible burning more forward, until by
+generous acts the soul can repulse him further."</p>
+<p>"This touch of Satan, which produces an almost material effect
+on the
+most intangible parts of our being, is, you will admit, at least
+curious," concluded the oblate, as he closed the volume.</p>
+<p>"Mother Saint Cecilia is a remarkable strategist of the soul,"
+said the
+prior, "but ... but ... this work, which she edited for the daughters
+of
+her abbey, contains, I think, some rash propositions which have not
+been
+read without displeasure at Rome."</p>
+<p>"To have done with our poor treasures," he continued, "we have
+only on
+this side," and he pointed out a portion of the book-cases which
+covered
+the room, "long-winded works, the 'Cistercian Menology,' 'Migné's
+Patrology,' dictionaries of the lives of the saints, manuals of sacred
+interpretation, canon law, Christian apology, Biblical exegesis, the
+complete works of Saint Thomas, tools of work which we rarely employ,
+for as you know we are a branch of the Benedictine trunk vowed to a
+life
+of bodily labour and penance; we are men of sorrow for God, above all
+things. Here is M. Bruno, who uses these books; so do I at times, for I
+have special charge of spiritual matters in this monastery," added the
+monk with a smile.</p>
+<p>Durtal looked at him; he handled the volumes with caressing
+hands,
+brooded over them with the blue lustre of his eye, laughed with the joy
+of a child as he turned their pages.</p>
+<p>"What a difference between this monk who evidently adores his
+books, and
+the prior with his imperious profile and silent lips who heard his
+confession the second day;" then thinking of all these Trappists, the
+severity of their countenances, the joy of their eyes, Durtal said to
+himself that these Cistercians were not at all as the world believed,
+solemn and funereal people, but that, quite the contrary, they were the
+gayest of men.</p>
+<p>"Now," said Father Maximin, "the reverend Father abbot has
+charged me
+with a commission; knowing that you will leave us to-morrow, he is
+anxious, now that he is better, to pass at least some minutes with you.
+He will be free this evening: will it trouble you to join him after
+Compline?"</p>
+<p>"Not at all; I shall be glad to talk with Dom Anselm."</p>
+<p>"That is understood, then."</p>
+<p>They went downstairs. Durtal thanked the prior, who re-entered
+the
+enclosure of the corridors, and the oblate, who went up to his cell. He
+trifled about, and in spite of the torment of his departure, which
+haunted him, reached the evening without too much trouble.</p>
+<p>The "Salve Regina," which he heard perhaps for the last time
+thus sung
+by male voices; that airy chapel built of sound, and evaporating with
+the close of the antiphon, in the smoke of the tapers, stirred him to
+the bottom of his soul; the Trappist monastery showed itself truly
+charming this evening. After the office, they said the Rosary, not as
+at
+Paris, where they recite a Pater, ten Aves, and a Gloria, and so over
+again; here they said in Latin a Pater, an Ave, a Gloria, and began
+again till in that manner they had finished several decades.</p>
+<p>This rosary was said on their knees, half by the prior, half
+by all the
+monks. It went at so rapid a pace that it was scarcely possible to
+distinguish the words, but as soon as it was ended, at a signal there
+was a great silence, and each one prayed with his head in his hands.</p>
+<p>And Durtal took notice of the ingenious system of conventual
+prayers:
+after the prayers purely vocal like these, came mental prayer, personal
+petitions, stimulated and set a-going by the very machine of
+paternosters.</p>
+<p>"Nothing is left to chance in religion; every exercise which
+seems at
+first useless has a reason for its being," he said to himself, as he
+went out into the court. "And the fact is, that the rosary, which seems
+to be only a humming-top of sounds, fulfils an end. It reposes the soul
+wearied with the supplications which it has recited, applying itself to
+them, thinking of them; it hinders it from babbling and reciting to God
+always the same petitions, the same complaints; it allows it to take
+breath, to take rest, in prayers in which it can dispense with
+reflection, and, in fact, the rosary occupies in prayer, those hours of
+fatigue in which one would not pray.... Ah! here is the Father abbot."</p>
+<p>The Trappist expressed to him his regret at visiting him only
+thus for a
+few moments; then after he had answered Durtal, who inquired after the
+state of his health, which he hoped was at last re-established, he
+proposed to him to walk in the garden, and begged him not to
+inconvenience himself by not smoking cigarettes if he had a mind to do
+so.</p>
+<p>And the conversation turned on Paris. Dom Anselm asked for
+some
+information, and ended by saying with a smile, "I see by scraps of
+newspapers which come to me, that society just now is infected with
+socialism. Everyone wishes to solve the famous social question. How
+does
+that get on?"</p>
+<p>"How does that get on? Why, not at all! Unless you can change
+the souls
+of workmen and masters, and make them disinterested and charitable
+between to-day and to-morrow, in what can you expect these systems to
+end?"</p>
+<p>"Well," said the monk, enwrapping the monastery with a
+gesture, "the
+question is solved here.</p>
+<p>"As wages do not exist, all sources of conflicts are
+suppressed.</p>
+<p>"As every task is according to aptitudes and powers, the
+fathers who are
+not strong-shouldered and big-armed fold the packages of chocolate, or
+make out the bills, and those who are robust dig the ground.</p>
+<p>"I add that the equality in our cloisters is such that the
+prior and the
+abbot have no advantage over the other monks. At table the portions,
+and
+in the dormitory the paillasses, are identical. The sole profits of the
+abbot consist on the whole in the inevitable cares arising from the
+moral conduct and the temporal administration of an abbey. There is
+therefore no reason why the workmen of a convent should go on strike,"
+concluded the abbot with a smile.</p>
+<p>"Yes, but you are minimists, you suppress the family and
+woman, you live
+on nothing, and expect the only real recompense for your labours after
+death. How can you make the people in the towns understand that?"</p>
+<p>"The social system may thus be summed up, as I think: the
+masters wish
+to profit by the workmen, who in their turn desire to be paid as much
+as
+possible for as little work as possible. Well, then, there is no way
+out
+of that."</p>
+<p>"Exactly, and there is the sad part of it, for socialism in
+fact arises
+from kindly ideas, just ideas, and will always run up against egotism
+and gain, against the inevitable breakers of the sins of man.</p>
+<p>"And your little chocolate factory gives you at least some
+income?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; that saves us."</p>
+<p>The abbot was silent for a second; then he went on,</p>
+<p>"You know, sir, how a convent is founded. I take for example
+our Order.
+A domain and the lands about it are offered the Order on condition that
+it peoples them. The Order takes a handful of its monks, and settles
+them as a swarm on the soil given to it. There its task stops. The
+grain
+must spring up of itself, or to put it differently, the Trappists,
+severed from their mother-house, must gain their livelihood, and
+suffice
+for themselves.</p>
+<p>"So when we took possession of these buildings we were so
+poor, that
+from bread to shoes everything was lacking; but we had no anxiety for
+the future, for there is no example in monastic history that Providence
+has not succoured abbeys who trusted in it. Little by little we drew
+our
+food from the estate, and we learnt useful trades; now we make our
+habits and our shoes; we reap our wheat and make our bread; our
+material
+existence is therefore assured, but the taxes crush us; therefore we
+have founded this factory, of which the report becomes better from year
+to year.</p>
+<p>"In a year or two the building which shelters us, and for want
+of money
+we have been unable to repair, will tumble down, but if God then allows
+generous souls to come to our aid, perhaps we shall be in a condition
+to
+build a monastery, which is the wish of all of us; for indeed this
+hovel
+with its rooms in confusion, and its rotunda-chapel, is painful to us."</p>
+<p>The abbot was silent again, then after a pause he said in a
+low voice,
+speaking to himself,</p>
+<p>"It cannot be denied, a convent which has not the look of a
+cloister is
+an obstacle to vocations; the postulant has need&#8212;and this is quite
+natural&#8212;to mould himself in surroundings which please him, to encourage
+himself in a church which wraps him round, in a somewhat sombre chapel;
+and to obtain that result you want the Romanesque or Gothic style."</p>
+<p>"Ah, yes, indeed. And have you many novices?"</p>
+<p>"We have especially many subjects who desire to feel the life
+of
+Trappists, but the greater part do not succeed in supporting our way of
+life. Beside even the question of knowing whether the vocation of the
+beginners is imaginary or real, we are from the physical point of view
+clearly fixed after a fortnight's trial."</p>
+<p>"Eating vegetables only must crush the most robust
+constitutions; I do
+not even understand how, leading an active life, you can bear it."</p>
+<p>"The truth is that bodies obey where souls are resolute. Our
+ancestors
+endured the life of the Trappists very well. We want souls at the
+present day. I remember that when I made my probation in a Cistercian
+cloister I had no health, and yet had it been necessary I would have
+eaten stones!</p>
+<p>"Moreover, the rule will soon be softened," pursued the abbot;
+"but in
+any case there is a country which, if there should be scarcity, assures
+us a good number of recruits, Holland."</p>
+<p>And seeing Durtal's look of astonishment, the father said,</p>
+<p>"Yes, in that Protestant country mystic vegetation is
+flourishing.
+Catholicism is all the more fervent that it is, if not persecuted, at
+least despised, drowned in the mass of Calvinists. Perhaps this belongs
+also to the nature of the soil, to its solitary plains, its silent
+canals, to the very taste of the Dutch for a regular and peaceable
+life;
+but in that little knot of Catholics the Cistercian vocation is always
+very common."</p>
+<p>Durtal looked at the Trappist as he walked majestic and quiet,
+his head
+buried in his hood, his hands passed under his cincture.</p>
+<p>From time to time his eyes grew bright inside his hood, and
+the amethyst
+which he wore on his finger sparkled in brief flames.</p>
+<p>No sound was heard; at this hour the monastery was asleep.
+Durtal and
+the abbot were walking on the banks of the great pond, where the water
+was alive, it alone wakeful in the slumber of the woods, for the moon,
+which shone in a cloudless sky, sowed a myriad of goldfish, and this
+luminous spawn, fallen from the planet, mounted, descended, sparkled in
+a thousand little points of fire, of which the wind as it blew
+increased
+the brightness.</p>
+<p>The abbot spoke no longer, and Durtal, who was thinking,
+intoxicated by
+the sweetness of the night, groaned suddenly. He had just considered
+that at this same hour the next day he would be at Paris, and seeing
+the
+monastery, whose pale front appeared at the end of a walk as at the end
+of a dark tunnel, he cried, thinking of all the monks who inhabited it,</p>
+<p>"Ah! they are happy!"</p>
+<p>And the abbot answered, "Too happy."</p>
+<p>Then gently, in a low voice,</p>
+<p>"Yes, it is true we enter here to do penance, to mortify
+ourselves, and
+we have hardly begun to suffer when God consoles us. He is so good that
+He Himself wishes to deceive Himself about our merits. If at certain
+moments He allows the Demon to persecute us, He gives us in exchange so
+much happiness that there is no proportion preserved between the
+recompense and the sorrow. Sometimes when I think of it, I ask myself
+how there still subsists that equilibrium that nuns and monks are
+charged to maintain, since neither of us suffer enough to neutralize
+the
+repeated sins of towns?"</p>
+<p>The abbot stopped, and then went on pensively,</p>
+<p>"The world does not even conceive that the austerity of the
+abbeys can
+profit it. The doctrine of mystical compensation escapes it entirely.
+It
+cannot represent to itself that the substitution of the innocent for
+the
+guilty is necessary when to suffer merited punishment is concerned. Nor
+does it explain to itself any more that in wishing to suffer for
+others,
+monks turn aside the wrath of heaven, and establish a solidarity in the
+good which is a counter-weight against the federation of evil. God
+knows, moreover, with what cataclysms the unconscious world would be
+menaced, if in consequence of a sudden disappearance of all the
+cloisters, the equilibrium which saves it were broken."</p>
+<p>"The case has already presented itself," said Durtal, who
+while
+listening to the Trappist thought of the Abbé Gévresin, and remembered
+how that priest had expressed himself on the same subject in nearly
+similar terms. "The Revolution, in fact, suppressed all convents with
+one stroke of a pen, but I think that the history of that time when so
+many hucksters were busy is still to be written. Instead of searching
+for documents on the acts, and even on the persons of the Jacobins, the
+archives of the religious orders which existed at that time should be
+ransacked.</p>
+<p>"In working thus at the side of the Revolution, in sounding
+its
+neighbourhood, its foundations will be exhumed. Its causes will be
+brought to the surface, and it will certainly be discovered that in
+proportion to the suppression of convents, monstrous excesses had
+birth.
+Who knows if the demoniacal madness of Carrier or Marat do not accord
+with the death of an abbey whose sanctity preserved France for years."</p>
+<p>"To be just," answered the abbot, "it is right to say that the
+Revolution destroyed ruins only. The rule of <i>in commendam</i>
+ended by
+giving the monasteries over to Satan. It was they, alas! that by the
+relaxation of their morals, inclined the balance, and drew down the
+lightning on the land.</p>
+<p>"The Terror was only a consequence of their impiety. God, whom
+nothing
+longer withheld, let things take their course."</p>
+<p>"Yes; but how can you now prove the necessity of compensations
+to a
+world which wanders out of the way in continued accesses of gain; how
+persuade it that it is an urgent need, as a preventive against new
+crises, to shelter towns behind the sacred bulwarks of cloisters?</p>
+<p>"After the siege of 1870, Paris was wisely sheltered behind an
+immense
+net of impregnable forts; but is it not also indispensable to surround
+it with a cincture of prayers, to buttress its neighbourhood with
+conventual houses, to build everywhere in its suburbs convents of Poor
+Clares, Carmelites, Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament,
+monasteries which will be in some degree powerful citadels, destined to
+arrest the forward march of the armies of evil?</p>
+<p>"Certainly the towns have great need of being guaranteed
+against
+infernal invasions by a sanitary defence of Orders.... But come, sir, I
+must not deprive you of necessary rest, I will join you to-morrow,
+before you quit our solitude. I have now but to say that you have only
+friends here, and that you will be always welcome. I hope that on your
+side you will keep no unfavourable memory of our poor hospitality, and
+that you will prove it in coming to see us again."</p>
+<p>As they talked they had come in front of the guest-house.</p>
+<p>The father pressed Durtal's hands, and slowly ascended the
+stairs,
+sweeping with his robe the silver dust of the steps, as he mounted, all
+white, in a ray of the moon.</p>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;" />
+<h2><a name="Part_II_CHAPTER_IX" id="Part_II_CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER
+IX.</h2>
+<p>Durtal wished immediately after Mass to visit for the last
+time that
+wood through which he had walked, in turn so languidly and so rapidly.
+He went at first to the old lime alley, whose pale emanations were
+verily for his spirit what an infusion of their leaves is for the body,
+a sort of very weak panacea, a kindly and soothing sedative.</p>
+<p>Then he sat down in their shade on a stone bench. As he leant
+forward a
+little he could see through the moving spaces in the branches, the
+solemn front of the abbey, and opposite it, separated by the kitchen
+garden, the gigantic cross standing before that liquid plan of a church
+which the pond simulated.</p>
+<p>He rose, and approached the watery cross, of which the sky
+turned the
+marble water blue, and he contemplated the great crucifix in white
+marble, which towered above the whole monastery, and seemed to rise
+opposite to it as a permanent reminder of the vows of suffering which
+he
+had accepted, and reserved to himself to change at length into joys.</p>
+<p>"The fact is," said Durtal, who thought over again the
+contradictory
+declarations of the monks, confessing that they led at once the most
+attractive and the most atrocious life; "the fact is that the good God
+deceives them. They attain here below Paradise, while they seek hell
+there. I have myself tasted how strange is existence in this cloister,
+for I have been here, almost at the same time, very unhappy and very
+happy; and now I feel well the mirage which is already beginning:
+before
+two days are over the remembrance of the sorrows which then were, if I
+recall them with care, greatly above the joys, will have disappeared,
+and I shall only recall those interior emotions in the chapel, those
+delicious stolen moments in the morning in the pathways of the park.</p>
+<p>"I shall regret the open-air prison of this convent. It is
+curious I
+find myself attached to it by obscure bonds; when I am in my cell,
+there
+return to me all kinds of memories, like those of an ancient race. I
+find myself at once at home again, in a place I had never seen; I
+recognize from the first moment a very special life, of which
+nevertheless I know nothing. It seems to me that something which
+interests me, which is indeed personal to me, passed here before I was
+born. Truly, if I believed in metempsychosis I might imagine I had been
+a monk in anterior existences; a bad monk then," he said, smiling at
+his
+reflections, "since I should have been obliged to be reincarnate and to
+return to a cloister to expiate my sins."</p>
+<p>While thus talking with himself, he had passed across a long
+alley which
+led to the end of the enclosure, and, cutting across the road, and
+through the thickets, he strayed into the wood of the great pond.</p>
+<p>It was not in motion, as on certain days when the wind made
+hollows in
+it, and swelled it, made it flow and return on itself as soon as it
+touched its banks. It remained immovable, and was only stirred by the
+reflections of the moving clouds and of the trees. At moments a leaf
+fallen from the neighbouring poplars swam on the image of a cloud, at
+others bubbles of air came from the bottom and burst on the surface in
+the reflected blue of heaven.</p>
+<p>Durtal looked for the otter, but it did not show itself; he
+saw only the
+swallows which skimmed the water with their wing, the dragon-flies
+which
+sparkled like jewels, flashing like the blue flames of sulphur.</p>
+<p>If he had suffered near the cross-pond, before the sheet of
+water of the
+other pond he could only call up the memory of healing hours, which he
+had passed lying on a bed of moss, or a couch of dry reeds, and he
+looked at it tenderly, trying to fix and carry it away in his memory to
+re-live again in Paris, shutting his eyes on the bank.</p>
+<p>He pursued his walk, and stopped in an alley of chestnuts
+along the
+walls above the monastery; thence he went into the court in front of
+the
+cloister, the outbuildings, the stables, the woodsheds, even the
+pig-styes. He tried to see Brother Simeon, but he was probably engaged
+in the stables, for he did not appear. The buildings were silent, the
+pigs were shut up; only some lean cats prowled about in silence,
+scarcely looking when they met each other, going each on its own side,
+no doubt seeking some nourishing game which would console them for the
+eternal meals of vegetable soup served them at the monastery.</p>
+<p>Time was getting on; he prayed for the last time in the
+chapel, and went
+to his cell to get his portmanteau ready.</p>
+<p>While putting his things in order he thought of the inutility
+of
+decorated rooms. He had spent all his money at Paris in buying
+ornaments
+and books, for till now he had detested bare walls.</p>
+<p>But now, considering the blank walls of this room, he admitted
+to
+himself that he had done better between these four white-washed walls
+than in his room at Paris, hung with stuffs.</p>
+<p>Suddenly he recognized that La Trappe had weaned him from his
+preferences, had in a few days completely upset him. "The power of such
+an environment!" he said to himself, a little alarmed at feeling how he
+was transformed. And he thought in buckling his portmanteau, "I must
+however, go and find Father Etienne, for I must settle my account; I
+cannot be altogether a debtor to these good people."</p>
+<p>He went along the corridors, and ended by meeting the father
+in the
+court.</p>
+<p>He was a little confused how to open the question; at the
+first words
+the guest-master smiled.</p>
+<p>"The rule of Saint Benedict is formal," he said; "we must
+receive our
+guests as we receive our Lord Jesus Himself, that is to tell you that
+we
+cannot exchange our poor care for money."</p>
+<p>And when Durtal insisted, embarrassed,</p>
+<p>"If it does not suit you to have partaken of our meagre
+pittance without
+paying, do as you please; only the sum which you may give will be
+distributed in coins of ten or twenty sous, to the poor who come each
+morning, often from a great distance, to knock at our monastery gate."</p>
+<p>Durtal bowed and handed the money, which he had ready in his
+pocket, to
+the father, but he inquired if he might not have a word with Father
+Maximin before his departure.</p>
+<p>"Certainly; moreover, Father prior would not have let you go
+without
+shaking hands with you. I will go and make certain if he be free. Wait
+for me in the refectory." And the monk disappeared, and came back a few
+minutes afterwards, preceded by the prior.</p>
+<p>"Ah, well," said he, "then you are going to plunge again into
+the
+hurly-burly?"</p>
+<p>"Oh! without any pleasure, Father."</p>
+<p>"I understand that. It is so good, is it not, no longer to
+hear anything
+and to be silent. However, take courage; we will pray for you."</p>
+<p>And as Durtal thanked both of them for their kind attentions,</p>
+<p>"It is a pleasure to receive a retreatant such as you," cried
+Father
+Etienne, "nothing repulses you, and you are so exact that you are about
+before the hour: you rendered my task of overseer easy. If all were as
+little exacting and as pliable."</p>
+<p>And he admitted that he had given lodging to priests sent by
+their
+bishops as a penance, ecclesiastics of ill-repute whose complaints
+about
+food, lodging, the need of rising early in the morning, never ceased.</p>
+<p>"If, again," said the prior, "one could hope to recall them to
+good, to
+send them back healed to their parishes; but no, they go away still
+more
+rebellious than before, the Devil does not let them alone."</p>
+<p>During this conversation a lay brother brought in some dishes
+covered
+with plates and placed them on the table.</p>
+<p>"We have changed the hour of your dinner, because of the
+train," said
+Father Etienne.</p>
+<p>"Good appetite, adieu, and may the Lord bless you," said the
+prior.</p>
+<p>He raised his hand, and enwrapped Durtal, with a great sign of
+the
+cross, who knelt surprised at the sudden emotion in the monk's tone.
+But
+Father Maximin recovered himself at once, and he bowed to him as M.
+Bruno entered.</p>
+<p>The meal was silent; the oblate was visibly distressed at the
+departure
+of the companion whom he loved, and Durtal looked with a swelling heart
+at the old man, who had so charitably come out of his solitude to give
+him aid.</p>
+<p>"Will you not come some day to see me in Paris?" he said.</p>
+<p>"No. I have quitted life without any mind to return to it. I
+am dead to
+the world. I do not wish to see Paris again. I have no wish to live
+again.</p>
+<p>"But if God lend me still a few years of existence I hope to
+see you
+here again, for it is not in vain that one has crossed the threshold of
+mystic asceticism, to verify by one's own experience the reality of the
+requirements which our Lord brings about. Now, as God does not proceed
+by chance, He will certainly finish His work by sifting you as wheat. I
+venture to recommend you to try not to give way, and attempt to die in
+some measure to yourself, in order not to run counter to His plans."</p>
+<p>"I know well," said Durtal, "that all is displaced in me, that
+I am no
+longer the same, but what frightens me is that I am now sure that the
+works of the Teresan school are exact ... then, then ... if one must
+pass-through the cylinders of the rolling mill which Saint John of the
+Cross describes...."</p>
+<p>The noise of a carriage in the court interrupted him. M. Bruno
+went to
+the window and looked out.</p>
+<p>"Your luggage is down."</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>They looked at each other.</p>
+<p>"Listen! I would wish indeed to say to you...."</p>
+<p>"No, no, do not thank me," cried the oblate. "See, I have
+never so
+thoroughly understood the misery of my being. Ah! if I had been another
+man, I might, by praying better, have aided you more."</p>
+<p>The door opened and Father Etienne declared,</p>
+<p>"You have not a minute to lose, if you do not wish to miss the
+train."</p>
+<p>Thus hurried, Durtal had only time to press the hand of his
+friend, who
+accompanied him to the court. He found waiting a sort of open wagon
+driven by a Trappist, who, below a bald head, and cheeks streaked with
+rose threads, had a great black beard.</p>
+<p>Durtal pressed the hands of the guest-master and the oblate
+for the last
+time, when the Father abbot came in his turn to wish him a safe
+journey;
+and at the end of the court Durtal perceived two eyes fixed on him,
+those of Brother Anacletus, who, at a distance, said adieu by a slight
+bow, but without other gesture.</p>
+<p>Even this poor man, whose eloquent look told of a truly
+touching
+affection, had a saint's pity for the stranger whom he had seen so
+tumultuous and so sad in the desolate solitude of the wood!</p>
+<p>Certainly the stiffness of the rule forbade all show of
+feeling to these
+monks, but Durtal felt thoroughly that for him they had gone to the
+limit of concessions allowed, and his affliction was great as he cast
+them in parting a last expression of thanks.</p>
+<p>And the door of the monastery closed; that door at which he
+had trembled
+in arriving, and at which he now looked with tears in his eyes.</p>
+<p>"We must get on fast," said the procurator, "for we are late,"
+and the
+horse went at a great speed along the lanes.</p>
+<p>Durtal recognized his companion, as having seen him in the
+chapel,
+singing in the choir during the Office.</p>
+<p>He had an air at once good-natured and firm, and his little
+grey eye
+smiled as it glanced behind his branched spectacles.</p>
+<p>"Well," said he, "how have you borne our regimen?"</p>
+<p>"I have had every chance; I came herewith my stomach out of
+order, my
+body ill, and the simple Trappist meals have cured me."</p>
+<p>And when Durtal narrated briefly the stages of soul he had
+undergone,
+the monk murmured,</p>
+<p>"That is nothing in regard to demoniacal attacks; we have had
+here true
+cases of possession."</p>
+<p>"And Brother Simeon discovered them!"</p>
+<p>"Ah! you know that...." And he replied quite simply to Durtal,
+who spoke
+to him of his admiration for the poor lay brothers,</p>
+<p>"You are right, sir; if you could talk with these peasants and
+illiterate men, you would be surprised at the often profound answers
+which these people give you; then they alone at the monastery are
+really
+courageous; we, the Fathers, when we think ourselves too weak, accept
+willingly the authorized addition of an egg; they never; they pray
+more,
+and it must be admitted that our Lord listens to them, since they get
+well again, and indeed are never ill."</p>
+<p>And to a question of Durtal who asked him in what consisted
+the
+functions of procurator, the monk answered,</p>
+<p>"They consist in keeping the accounts, in being the commercial
+agent, in
+travelling, in managing, alas! everything which does not concern the
+life of the cloister; but we are so few in number at Notre Dame de
+l'Atre, that we become necessarily Jacks-of-all-trades. For instance,
+Father Etienne is cellarer of the Abbey and guest-master, he is also
+sacristan and bell-ringer. I too, am first cantor and professor of
+plain
+song."</p>
+<p>And while the carriage rolled along, shaken by the ruts, the
+procurator
+declared to Durtal, who told him how much the offices chanted at the
+monastery had delighted him,</p>
+<p>"It is not with us that you ought to hear them; our choirs are
+too
+restricted, too weak to be able to raise the giant mass of those
+chants.
+You ought to go to the black monks of Solesmes or Ligugé if you wish to
+find the Gregorian melodies executed as they were in the Middle Ages.
+By
+the way, do you know in Paris, the Benedictine nuns in the Rue
+Monsieur?"</p>
+<p>"Yes; but do you not think they coo a little?"</p>
+<p>"I cannot say; all the same their collection of tunes is
+authentic, but
+at the little seminary at Versailles, you have better still, since they
+chant there exactly as at Solesmes; note this well, moreover, at Paris,
+when the churches decline to repudiate liturgical music, they use for
+the most part the false notation printed and spread in abundance in all
+the dioceses in France by the house of Pustet of Ratisbon."</p>
+<p>"But the errors and frauds with which those editions abound
+are well
+known."</p>
+<p>"The legend on which its partisans rely is incorrect. To
+assert, as they
+do, that this version is no other than that of Palestrina who was
+charged by Pope Paul V. to revive the musical liturgy of the Church, is
+an argument destitute of truth and void of force, for everyone knows
+that when Palestrina died, he had hardly begun the correction of the
+Gradual.</p>
+<p>"I will add that even if that musician had finished his work,
+that would
+not prove that his interpretation ought to be preferred to that which
+has been recently constituted after patient researches by the Abbey of
+Solesmes, for the Benedictine texts are based on the copy preserved at
+the monastery of St. Gall of the antiphonary of Saint Gregory, which
+represents the most ancient and the most certain monument which the
+Church preserves of the true plain chant.</p>
+<p>"This manuscript, of which photographic facsimiles exist, is
+the code of
+Gregorian melodies, and it ought to be, if I may use the expression,
+the
+neumatic Bible of choirs.</p>
+<p>"The disciples of Saint Benedict are then absolutely right
+when they
+declare that their version alone is faithful, alone correct."</p>
+<p>"How then comes it that so many churches get their music from
+Ratisbon?"</p>
+<p>"Alas, how comes it that Pustet has so long acquired the
+monopoly of
+liturgical books, and ... but no, better hold one's peace ... take this
+only for certain, that the German volumes are the absolute negation of
+the Gregorian tradition, the most complete heresy of plain chant."</p>
+<p>"By the way, what time is it? We must make haste," said the
+procurator,
+looking at the watch which Durtal held up to him. "Come up, my beauty,"
+and he whipped up the mare.</p>
+<p>"You drive with spirit," cried Durtal.</p>
+<p>"It is true; I forgot to say to you, that over and above my
+other
+functions, I also have, if need be, that of coachman."</p>
+<p>Durtal thought all the same that these people were
+extraordinary who
+lived an interior life in God. As soon as they consented to redescend
+on
+earth they revealed themselves as the most sagacious and the boldest of
+business men. An abbot founded a factory with the few pence he
+succeeded
+in gathering; he discerned the employment which suited each of his
+monks, and with them he improvised artisans, writing clerks,
+transformed
+a professor of plain chant into an agent, plunged into the tumult of
+purchases and sales, and little by little the house which scarcely was
+raised above the soil, grew, put forth shoots, and ended by nourishing
+with its fruit the abbey which had planted it.</p>
+<p>Transported into another environment these people would have
+as easily
+created great manufactories and started banks. And it was the same with
+the women. When one thinks of the practical qualities of a man of
+business, and the coolness of an old diplomatist which a mother abbess
+ought to possess in order to rule her community, one is obliged to
+admit
+that the only women, truly intelligent, truly remarkable are, outside
+of
+drawing-rooms, outside of the world, at the head of cloisters.</p>
+<p>And as he expressed his wonder aloud, that monks were so
+expert at
+setting up business.</p>
+<p>"It must be so," sighed the father, "but if you believe that
+we do not
+regret the time necessarily spent in digging the ground! then our
+spirit
+at least was free, then we could sanctify ourselves in silence which to
+a monk is as necessary as bread, for it is thanks to it, that he
+stifles
+vanity as it rises, that he represses disobedience as it murmurs, that
+he turns all his aspirations, all his thoughts towards God, and becomes
+at last attentive to His presence.</p>
+<p>"Instead of that ... but here we are at the station; do not
+trouble
+yourself about your portmanteau, but go and take your ticket, for I
+hear
+the whistle of the train."</p>
+<p>And in fact Durtal had only time to shake hands with the
+father, who put
+his luggage into the carriage.</p>
+<p>There, when he was alone, seated, looking at the monk as he
+departed, he
+felt his heart swell, ready to break.</p>
+<p>And in the clatter of the rails the train started.</p>
+<p>Sharply, clearly, in a minute, Durtal took stock of the
+frightful
+disorder into which he had thrown the monastery.</p>
+<p>"Ah! and outside it, all is the same to me, and nothing
+matters to me,"
+he cried. And he groaned, knowing that he should never more succeed in
+interesting himself in all that makes the joy of men. The uselessness
+of
+caring about any other thing than Mysticism and the liturgy, of
+thinking
+about aught else save God, implanted itself in him so firmly that he
+asked himself what would become of him at Paris with such ideas.</p>
+<p>He saw himself submitting to the confusion of controversies,
+the
+cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity
+of
+proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of
+everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute or hold
+his tongue?</p>
+<p>In any case peace was for ever lost. How in fact was he to
+rally and
+recover when he was obliged to dwell in a place of passage, in a soul
+open to all winds, visited by a crowd of public thoughts?</p>
+<p>His contempt for relations, his disgust for acquaintances grew
+on him.
+"No, everything rather than mix myself again with society," he declared
+to himself, and then he was silent in despair, for he was not ignorant
+that he could not, apart from the monastic zone, live in isolation.
+After a short time would come weariness and a void, therefore why had
+he reserved nothing for himself, why had he trusted all to the
+cloister?
+He had not even known how to arrange the pleasure of entering into
+himself, he had discovered how to lose the amusement of bric-à-brac,
+how
+to extirpate that last satisfaction in the white nakedness of a cell!
+he
+no longer held to anything, but lay dismantled, saying, "I have
+renounced almost all the happiness which might fall to me, and what am
+I
+going to put in its place?"</p>
+<p>And terrified, he perceived the disquiet of a conscience ready
+to
+torment itself, the permanent reproaches of an acquired lukewarmness,
+the apprehensions of doubts against Faith, fear of furious clamours of
+the senses stirred by chance meetings.</p>
+<p>And he repeated to himself that the most difficult thing would
+not be to
+master the emotions of his flesh, but indeed to live Christianly, to
+confess, to communicate at Paris, in a church. He never could get so
+far
+as that, and he imagined discussions with the Abbé Gévresin, his
+gaining
+time, his refusal, foreseeing that their friendship would come to an
+end
+in these disputes.</p>
+<p>Then where should he fly? At the very recollection of the
+Trappist
+monastery the theatrical representations of St. Sulpice made him jump.
+St. Severin seemed to him distracted and worn. How could he live among
+stupid people like the devout, how listen without gnashing his teeth to
+the affected chants of the choirs? How, lastly, could he seek again in
+the chapel of the Benedictine nuns, and even at Notre Dame des
+Victoires, that dull heat radiating from the souls of the monks, and
+thawing little by little the ice of his poor being?</p>
+<p>And then it was not even that. What was truly crushing, truly
+dreadful,
+was to think that doubtless he would never again feel that admirable
+joy
+which lifts you from the ground, carries you, you know not where, nor
+how, above sense.</p>
+<p>Ah, those paths at the monastery wandered in at daybreak,
+those paths
+where one day after a communion, God had dilated his soul in such a
+fashion that it seemed no longer his own, so much had Christ plunged
+him
+in the sea of His divine infinity, swallowed him in the heavenly
+firmament of His person.</p>
+<p>How renew that state of grace without communion and outside a
+cloister?
+"No; it is all over," he concluded.</p>
+<p>And he was seized with such an access of sadness, such an
+outburst of
+despair, that he thought of getting out at the first station, and
+returning to the monastery; and he had to shrug his shoulders, for his
+character was not patient enough nor his will firm enough, nor his body
+strong enough to support the terrible trials of a noviciate. Moreover,
+the prospect of having no cell to himself, of sleeping dressed
+higgledy-piggledy in a dormitory, alarmed him.</p>
+<p>But what then? And sadly he took stock of himself.</p>
+<p>"Ah!" he thought, "I have lived twenty years in ten days in
+that
+convent, and I leave it, my brain relaxed, my heart in rags; I am done
+for, for ever. Paris and Notre Dame de l'Atre have rejected me each in
+their turn like a waif, and here I am condemned to live apart, for I am
+still too much a man of letters to become a monk, and yet I am already
+too much a monk to remain among men of letters."</p>
+<p>He leapt up and was silent, dazzled by jets of electric light
+which
+flooded him as the train stopped.</p>
+<p>He had returned to Paris.</p>
+<p>"If they," he said, thinking of those writers whom it would no
+doubt be
+difficult not to see again, "if they knew how inferior they are to the
+lowest of the lay brothers! if they could imagine how the divine
+intoxication of a Trappist swine-herd interests me more than all their
+conversations and all their books! Ah! Lord, that I might live, live in
+the shadow of the prayers of humble Brother Simeon!"</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EN ROUTE***</p>
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+</pre>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/24096.txt b/24096.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..37e46ce
--- /dev/null
+++ b/24096.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,13467 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, En Route, by J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans,
+Translated by W. Fleming
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: En Route
+
+
+Author: J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 31, 2007  [eBook #24096]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EN ROUTE***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Camille François, Suzanne Shell, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+EN ROUTE
+
+by
+
+J. K. HUYSMANS
+
+Translated by W. Fleming
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+EN ROUTE.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+During the first week in November, the week within the Octave of All
+Souls, Durtal entered St. Sulpice, at eight o'clock in the evening. He
+often chose to turn into that church, because there was a trained choir,
+and because he could there examine himself at peace, apart from the
+crowd. The ugliness of the nave, with its heavy vaulting, vanished at
+night, the aisles were often empty, it was ill-lighted by a few
+lamps--it was possible for a man to chide his soul in secret, as if at
+home.
+
+Durtal sat down behind the high altar, on the left, in the aisle along
+the Rue de St. Sulpice; the lamps of the choir organ were lighted. Far
+off, in the almost empty nave, an ecclesiastic was preaching. He
+recognized, by the unctuousness of his delivery, and his oily accent, a
+well-fed priest who poured on his audience, according to his wont, his
+best known commonplaces.
+
+"Why are they so devoid of eloquence?" thought Durtal. "I have had the
+curiosity to listen to many of them, and they are much the same. They
+only vary in the tones of their voice. According to their temperament,
+some are bruised down in vinegar, others steeped in oil. There is no
+such thing as a clever combination." And he called to mind orators
+petted like tenors, Monsabre, Didon, those Coquelins of the Church, and
+lower yet than those products of the Catholic training school, that
+bellicose booby the Abbe d'Hulst.
+
+"Afterwards," he continued, "come the mediocrities, each puffed by the
+handful of devotees who listen to them. If those cooks of the soul had
+any skill, if they served their clients with delicate meats, theological
+essences, gravies of prayer, concentrated sauces of ideas, they would
+vegetate misunderstood by their flocks. So, on the whole, it is all for
+the best. The low-water mark of the clergy must conform to the level of
+the faithful, and indeed Providence has provided carefully for this."
+
+A stamping of shoes, then the movement of chairs grinding on the flags
+interrupted him. The sermon was over.
+
+Then a great stillness was broken by a prelude from the organ, which
+dropped to a low tone, a mere accompaniment to the voices.
+
+A slow and mournful chant arose, the "De Profundis." The blended voices
+sounded under the arches, intermingling with the somewhat raw sounds of
+the harmonicas, like the sharp tones of breaking glass.
+
+Resting on the low accompaniment of the organ, aided by basses so hollow
+that they seemed to have descended into themselves, as it were
+underground, they sprang out, chanting the verse "De profundis ad te
+clamavi, Do--" and then stopped in fatigue, letting the last syllables
+"mine" fall like a heavy tear; then these voices of children, near
+breaking, took up the second verse of the psalm, "Domine exaudi vocem
+meam," and the second half of the last word again remained in suspense,
+but instead of separating, and falling to the ground, there to be
+crushed out like a drop, it seemed to gather itself together with a
+supreme effort, and fling to heaven the anguished cry of the
+disincarnate soul, cast naked, and in tears before God.
+
+And after a pause, the organ, aided by two double-basses, bellowed out,
+carrying all the voices in its torrent--baritones, tenors, basses, not
+now serving only as sheaths to the sharp blades of the urchin voices,
+but openly with full throated sound--yet the dash of the little soprani
+pierced them through all at once like a crystal arrow.
+
+Then a fresh pause, and in the silence of the church, the verses mourned
+out anew, thrown up by the organ, as by a spring board. As he listened
+with attention endeavouring to resolve the sounds, closing his eyes,
+Durtal saw them at first almost horizontal, then rising little by
+little, then raising themselves upright, then quivering in tears, before
+their final breaking.
+
+Suddenly at the end of the psalm, when the response of the antiphon
+came--"Et lux perpetua luceat eis"--the children's voices broke into a
+sad, silken cry, a sharp sob, trembling on the word "eis," which
+remained suspended in the void.
+
+These children's voices stretched to breaking, these clear sharp voices
+threw into the darkness of the chant some whiteness of the dawn, joining
+their pure, soft sounds to the resonant tones of the basses, piercing as
+with a jet of living silver the sombre cataract of the deeper singers;
+they sharpened the wailing, strengthened and embittered the burning salt
+of tears, but they insinuated also a sort of protecting caress, balsamic
+freshness, lustral help; they lighted in the darkness those brief gleams
+which tinkle in the Angelus at dawn of day; they called up, anticipating
+the prophecies of the text, the compassionate image of the Virgin,
+passing, in the pale light of their tones, into the darkness of that
+sequence.
+
+The "De Profundis" so chanted was incomparably beautiful. That sublime
+prayer ending in sobs, at the moment when the soul of the voices was
+about to overpass human limits, gave a wrench to Durtal's nerves, and
+made his heart beat. Then he wished to abstract himself, and cling
+especially to the meaning of that sorrowful plaint, in which the fallen
+being calls upon its God with groans and lamentations. Those cries of
+the third verse came back to him, wherein calling on his Saviour in
+despair from the bottom of the abyss, man, now that he knows he is
+heard, hesitates ashamed, knowing not what to say. The excuses he has
+prepared appear to him vain, the arguments he has arranged seem to him
+of no effect, and he stammers forth; "If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe
+iniquities, Lord, who shall endure it?"
+
+"It is a pity," said Durtal to himself, "that this psalm, which in its
+first verses chants so magnificently the despair of humanity, becomes in
+those which follow more personal to King David. I know well," he went
+on, "that we must accept the symbolic sense of this pleading, admit that
+the despot confounds his own cause with that of God, that his
+adversaries are the unbelievers and the wicked, that he himself,
+according to the doctors of the Church, prefigures the person of Christ;
+but yet the memory of his fleshly desires, and the presumptuous praise
+he gives to his incorrigible people, contracts the scope of the poem.
+Happily the melody has a life apart from the text, a life of its own,
+not arising out of mere tribal dissensions, but extending to all the
+earth, chanting the anguish of the time to be born, as well as of the
+present day, and of the ages which are no more."
+
+The "De Profundis" had ceased; after a silence, the choir intoned a
+motet of the eighteenth century, but Durtal was only moderately
+interested in human music in churches. What seemed to him superior to
+the most vaunted works of theatrical or worldly music, was the old plain
+chant, that even and naked melody, at once ethereal and of the tomb, the
+solemn cry of sadness and lofty shout of joy, those grandiose hymns of
+human faith, which seem to well up in the cathedrals, like irresistible
+geysers, at the very foot of the Romanesque columns. What music, however
+ample, sorrowful or tender, is worth the "De Profundis" chanted in
+unison, the solemnity of the "Magnificat," the splendid warmth of the
+"Lauda Sion," the enthusiasm of the "Salve Regina," the sorrow of the
+"Miserere," and the "Stabat Mater," the majestic omnipotence of the "Te
+Deum"? Artists of genius have set themselves to translate the sacred
+texts: Vittoria, Josquin de Pres, Palestrina, Orlando Lasso, Handel,
+Bach, Haydn, have written wonderful pages; often indeed they have been
+uplifted by the mystic effluence, the very emanation of the Middle Ages,
+for ever lost; and yet their works have retained a certain pomp, and in
+spite of all are pretentious, as opposed to the humble magnificence, the
+sober splendour of the Gregorian chant--with them the whole thing came
+to an end, for composers no longer believed.
+
+Yet in modern times some religious pieces may be cited of Lesueur,
+Wagner, Berlioz, and Caesar Franck, and in these again we are conscious
+of the artist underlying his work, the artist determined to show his
+skill, thinking to exalt his own glory, and therefore leaving God out.
+We feel ourselves in the presence of superior men, but men with their
+weaknesses, their inseparable vanity, and even the vice of their senses.
+In the liturgical chant, created almost always anonymously in the depth
+of the cloisters, was an extraterrestrial well, without taint of sin or
+trace of art. It was an uprising of souls already freed from the slavery
+of the flesh, an explosion of elevated tenderness and pure joy, it was
+also the idiom of the Church, a musical gospel appealing like the Gospel
+itself at once to the most refined and the most humble.
+
+Ah! the true proof of Catholicism was that art which it had founded, an
+art which has never been surpassed; in painting and sculpture the Early
+Masters, mystics in poetry and in prose, in music plain chant, in
+architecture the Romanesque and Gothic styles. And all this held
+together and blazed in one sheaf, on one and the same altar; all was
+reconciled in one unique cluster of thoughts: to revere, adore and serve
+the Dispenser, showing to Him reflected in the soul of His creature, as
+in a faithful mirror, the still immaculate treasure of His gifts.
+
+Then in those marvellous Middle Ages, wherein Art, foster-child of the
+Church, encroached on death and advanced to the threshold of Eternity,
+and to God, the divine concept and the heavenly form were guessed and
+half-perceived, for the first and perhaps for the last time by man. They
+answered and echoed each other--art calling to art.
+
+The Virgins had faces almond-shaped, elongated like those ogives which
+the Gothic style contrived in order to distribute an ascetic light, a
+virginal dawn in the mysterious shrine of its naves. In the pictures of
+the Early Masters the complexion of holy women becomes transparent as
+Paschal wax, and their hair is pale as golden grains of frankincense,
+their childlike bosoms scarcely swell, their brows are rounded like the
+glass of the pyx, their fingers taper, their bodies shoot upwards like
+delicate columns. Their beauty becomes, as it were, liturgical. They
+seem to live in the fire of stained glass, borrowing from the flaming
+whirlwind of the rose-windows the circles of their aureoles. The ardent
+blue of their eyes, the dying embers of their lips, keeping for their
+garments the colours they disdain for their flesh, stripping them of
+their light, changing them, when they transfer them to stuffs, into
+opaque tones which aid still more by their contrast to declare the
+seraphic clearness of their look, the grievous paleness of the mouth, to
+which, according to the Proper of the season, the scent of the lily of
+the Canticles or the penitential fragrance of myrrh in the Psalms lend
+their perfume.
+
+Then among artists was a coalition of brains, a welding together of
+souls. Painters associated themselves in the same ideal of beauty with
+architects, they united in an indestructible relation cathedrals and
+saints, only reversing the usual process--they framed the jewel
+according to the shrine, and modelled the relics for the reliquary.
+
+On their side the sequences chanted by the Church had subtle affinities
+with the canvases of the Early Painters.
+
+Vittoria's responses for Tenebrae are of a like inspiration and an equal
+loftiness with those of Quentin Matsys' great work, the Entombment of
+Christ. The "Regina Coeli" of the Flemish musician Lasso has the same
+good faith, the same simple and strange attraction, as certain statues
+of a reredos, or religious pictures of the elder Breughel. Lastly, the
+Miserere of Josquin de Pres, choirmaster of Louis XII., has, like the
+panels of the Early Masters of Burgundy and Flanders, a patient
+intention, a stiff, threadlike simplicity, but also it exhales like them
+a truly mystical savour, and its awkwardness of outline is very
+touching.
+
+The ideal of all these works is the same and attained by different
+means.
+
+As for plain chant, the agreement of its melody with architecture is
+also certain; it also bends from time to time like the sombre Romanesque
+arcades, and rises, shadowy and pensive, like complete vaulting. The "De
+Profundis," for instance, curves in on itself like those great groins
+which form the smoky skeleton of the bays; it is like them slow and
+dark, extends itself only in obscurity and moves only in the shadow of
+the crypts.
+
+Sometimes, on the other hand, the Gregorian chant seems to borrow from
+Gothic its flowery tendrils, its scattered pinnacles, its gauzy rolls,
+its tremulous lace, its trimmings light and thin as the voices of
+children. Then it passes from one extreme to another, from the amplitude
+of sorrow to an infinite joy; at other times again, the plain music, and
+the Christian music to which it gave birth, lend themselves, like
+sculpture, to the gaiety of the people, associate themselves with simple
+gladness, and the sculptured merriment of the ancient porches; they take
+the popular rhythm of the crowd, as in the Christmas carol "Adeste
+Fideles" and in the Paschal hymn "O Filii et Filiae;" they become trivial
+and familiar like the Gospels, submitting themselves to the humble
+wishes of the poor, lending them a holiday tune easy to catch, a
+running melody which carries them into pure regions where these simple
+souls can cast themselves at the indulgent feet of Christ.
+
+Born of the Church, and bred up by her in the choir-schools of the
+Middle Ages, plain chant is the aerial and mobile paraphrase of the
+immovable structure of the cathedrals; it is the immaterial and fluid
+interpretation of the canvases of the Early Painters; it is a winged
+translation, but also the strict and unbending stole of those Latin
+sequences, which the monks built up or hewed out in the cloisters in the
+far-off olden time.
+
+Now it is changed and disconnected, foolishly overwhelmed by the crash
+of organs, and is chanted, God knows how!
+
+Most choirs when they intone it, like to imitate the rumbling and
+gurgling of water-pipes, others the grating of rattles, the creaking of
+pullies, the grinding of a crane, but, in spite of all, its beauty
+remains, unextinguished, dulled though it be, by the wild bellowing of
+the singers.
+
+The sudden silence in the church roused Durtal. He rose and looked about
+him; in his corner was no one save two poor women, asleep, their feet on
+the bars of chairs, their heads on their knees. Leaning forward a
+little, he saw, hanging above him in a dark chapel, the light of a lamp,
+like a ruby in its red glass; no sound save the military tread of the
+Suisse, making his round in the distance.
+
+Durtal sat down again; the sweetness of his solitude was enhanced by the
+aromatic perfume of wax, and the memories, now faint, of incense, but it
+was suddenly broken. As the first chords crashed on the organ Durtal
+recognized the "Dies irae," that despairing hymn of the Middle Ages;
+instinctively he bowed his head and listened.
+
+This was no more as in the "De Profundis" an humble supplication, a
+suffering which believes it has been heard, and discerns a path of light
+to guide it in the darkness, no longer the prayer which has hope enough
+not to tremble; it was the cry of absolute desolation and of terror.
+
+And, indeed, the wrath divine breathed tempestuously through these
+stanzas. They seemed addressed less to the God of mercy, to the Son who
+listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him whom the Old
+Testament shows us, overcome with anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke
+of the pyres, the inconceivable attractions of burnt-offerings. In this
+chant it asserted itself still more savagely, for it threatened to
+strike the waters, and break in pieces the mountains, and to rend
+asunder the depths of heaven by thunder-bolts. And the earth, alarmed,
+cried out in fear.
+
+A crystalline voice, a clear child's voice, proclaimed in the nave the
+tidings of these cataclysms, and after this the choir chanted new
+strophes wherein the implacable judge came with shattering blare of
+trumpet, to purify by fire the rottenness of the world.
+
+Then, in its turn, a bass, deep as a vault, as though issuing from the
+crypt, accentuated the horror of these prophecies, made these threats
+more overwhelming, and after a short strain by the choir, an alto
+repeated them in yet more detail. Then, so soon as the awful poem had
+exhausted the enumeration of chastisement and suffering, in shrill
+tones--the falsetto of a little boy--the name of Jesus went by, and a
+light broke in on the thunder-cloud, the panting universe cried for
+pardon, recalling, by all the voices of the choir, the infinite mercies
+of the Saviour, and His pardon, pleading with Him for absolution, as
+formerly He had spared the penitent thief and the Magdalen.
+
+But in the same despairing and headstrong melody the tempest raged
+again, drowned with its waves the half-seen shores of heaven, and the
+solos continued, discouraged, interrupted by the recurrent weeping of
+the choir, giving, with the diversity of voices, a body to the special
+conditions of shame, the particular states of fear, the different ages
+of tears.
+
+At last, when still mixed and blended, these voices had borne away on
+the great waters of the organ all the wreckage of human sorrows, all the
+buoys of prayers and tears, they fell exhausted, paralyzed by terror,
+wailing and sighing like a child who hides its face, stammering "Dona
+eis requiem," they ended, worn out, in an Amen so plaintive, that it
+died away in a breath above the sobbing of the organ.
+
+What man could have imagined such despair, dreamed of such disasters?
+And Durtal made answer to himself: "No man."
+
+In fact the attempt has been vain to discover the author both of the
+music and of the sequence. They have been attributed to Frangipani,
+Thomas of Celano, St. Bernard and a crowd of others, and they have
+remained anonymous, simply formed by the sad alluvial deposits of the
+age. The "Dies irae" seemed to have, at first, fallen, like a seed of
+desolation, among the distracted souls of the eleventh century; it
+germinated there and grew slowly, nurtured by the sap of anguish,
+watered by the rain of tears. It was at last pruned when it seemed ripe,
+and had, perhaps, thrown out too many branches, for in one of the
+earliest known texts, a stanza, which has since disappeared, called up
+the magnificent and barbarous image of an earth revolving as it belched
+forth flames, while the constellations burst into shards, and heaven
+shrivelled like a parched scroll.
+
+"All this," concluded Durtal, "does not prevent these triple stanzas
+woven of shadow and cold, full of reverberating rhymes, and hard echoes,
+this music of rude stuff which wraps the phrases like a shroud, and
+masks the rigid outlines of the work, from being admirable! Yet that
+chant which constrains, and renders with such energy the breadth of the
+sequence, that melodic period, which without variation, remaining always
+the same, succeeds in expressing by turns prayer and terror, moves me
+less than the 'De Profundis,' which yet has not its grandiose
+spaciousness nor that artistic cry of despair.
+
+"But chanted to the organ the psalm is earthy and suffocating. It comes
+from out the very depths of the sepulchre, while the 'Dies irae' has its
+source only on the sill of the tomb. The first is the very voice of the
+dead, the second that of the living who inter him, and the dead man
+weeps, but takes courage a little, when those that bury him despair.
+
+"To sum up," Durtal concluded, "I prefer the text of the 'Dies irae' to
+that of the 'De Profundis,' and the melody of the 'De Profundis' to that
+of the 'Dies irae.' It is true also that this last sequence is
+modernized, and chanted theatrically here, without the imposing and
+needful march of unison.
+
+"This time, for instance, it is devoid of interest," he continued,
+ceasing his thoughts for a moment, to listen to the piece of modern
+music which the choir was just then rendering. "Ah, who will take on
+himself to proscribe that pert mysticism, those fonts of toilet-water
+which Gounod invented!... There ought indeed to be astonishing
+penalties for choir masters who allow such musical effeminacy in church.
+This is, as it was this morning at the Madeleine, when I happened to be
+present at the interminable funeral of an old banker; they played a
+military march with violin and violoncello accompaniments, with trumpets
+and timbrels, a heroic and worldly march to celebrate the departure and
+the decomposition of a financier!... It is too absurd." And listening no
+more to the music in St. Sulpice, Durtal transferred himself in thought
+to the Madeleine, and went off at full speed in his dreams.
+
+"Indeed," he said to himself, "the clergy make Jesus like a tourist,
+when they invite Him daily to come down into that church whose exterior
+is surmounted by no cross, and whose interior is like the grand
+reception-room at an hotel. But how can you make those priests
+understand that ugliness is sacrilege, and that nothing is equal to the
+frightful sin of this confusion of Romanesque and Greek, these pictures
+of aged men, that flat ceiling studded with skylights, from which filter
+in all weathers the spoiled gleams of a rainy day, to that futile altar
+surmounted by a circle of angels who, in discreet abandonment, dance in
+honour of our Lady, a motionless marble rigadoon?"
+
+Yet in the Madeleine, at a funeral, when the door opens, and the corpse
+advances in a gap of daylight, all is changed. Like a superterrestrial
+antiseptic, an extrahuman disinfectant, the liturgy purifies and
+cleanses the impious ugliness of the place.
+
+And thinking over his memories of the morning, Durtal saw again, as he
+closed his eyes, at the end of the semicircular apse, the procession of
+red and black robes, white surplices, joining in front of the altar,
+descending the steps together, making their way together to the
+catafalque, dividing again on each aide, joining to mix afresh in the
+great gangway between the chairs.
+
+This slow and silent procession, led by incomparable Suisses, in
+mourning, their swords horizontal, and a general's epaulets in jet,
+advanced, preceded by a cross, in front of the corpse laid on tressels,
+and far-off in all that confusion of lights falling from the roof, and
+lighted flambeaux round the catafalque and on the altar, the white of
+the tapers disappeared, and the priests who bore them seemed to march
+with empty hands uplifted as though to point out the stars which
+accompanied them, twinkling above their heads.
+
+Then when the bier was surrounded by the clergy, the "De Profundis"
+burst forth from the depths of the sanctuary, intoned by invisible
+singers.
+
+"That was good," said Durtal to himself. At the Madeleine the voices of
+the children are sharp and feeble, and the basses are badly trained and
+failing; we are evidently far from the choir of St. Sulpice, but all the
+same it was superb; then what a moment was that of the priests'
+communion, when suddenly arising from the murmuring of the choir, the
+voice of the tenor threw above the corpse the magnificent plain chant
+antiphon--
+
+    "Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine
+    Et lux perpetua luceat eis."
+
+It seems that after all the lamentations of the "De Profundis" and the
+"Dies irae," the presence of God, who comes then upon the altar, brings
+consolation, and sanctions the confident and solemn pride of that
+melodious phrase, which then invokes Christ, without dread and without
+tears.
+
+The mass ended, the celebrant disappeared, and, as at the moment when
+the corpse entered, the clergy, preceded by the Suisses, advanced
+towards the body, and in the blazing circle of the tapers, a priest, in
+his cope, said the mighty prayers of the general absolution.
+
+Then the liturgy took a higher tone, and became still more admirable.
+Mediative between the sinner and the judge, the Church, by the mouth of
+her priest, implores the Lord to pardon the poor soul: "Non intres in
+judicium cum servo tuo Domine"--then after the amen given by the organ
+and all the choir, a voice arose in the silence, and spoke in the name
+of the dead:--
+
+"Libera me!"
+
+and the choir continued the old chant of the tenth century. Just as in
+the "Dies irae," which appropriates to itself fragments of these plaints,
+the Last Judgment flamed out, and pitiless responses declare to the dead
+the reality of his alarms, declare to him that at the end of Time the
+Judge will come with the crash of thunder to chastise the world.
+
+The priest marched round the catafalque, sprinkling it with beads of
+holy water, incensed it, gave shelter to the poor weeping soul, consoled
+it, took it to himself, covered it, as it were, with his cope, and
+again, intervened to pray that, after so much weariness and sorrow, the
+Lord will permit the unhappy one to sleep the sleep that knows no
+waking, far from earth's noises.
+
+Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more august
+mission been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above
+humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while
+earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and
+intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who
+has no doubt forgotten her since that day, and may even have persecuted
+her up to the hour of his death.
+
+Nor does the Church shrink from the task. Before that fleshly dust
+heaped in a chest, she thinks of that sewage of the soul, and cries:
+"From the gates of hell deliver him, O Lord!" but at the end of the
+general absolution, at the moment when the procession, turning its back,
+is on the way to the sacristy, she too seems disquieted. Perhaps
+recalling in an instant, the ill deeds done by that body while it was
+alive, she seemed to doubt if her supplications were heard, and the
+doubt her words would not frame, passed into the intonation of the last
+amen, murmured at the Madeleine, by children's voices.
+
+Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this amen said: "We have done
+what we could, but ... but ..." And in the funereal silence which
+followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble
+reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a
+carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be
+made into soap at the factories.
+
+"If," continued Durtal, "in opposition to these sad prayers, these
+eloquent absolutions, we call up before us a marriage mass, all is
+changed. There the Church is disarmed and her musical liturgy is as
+nought. Then she may well play Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and borrow
+from profane authors the gaiety of their songs to celebrate the brief
+and empty joy of the body. Imagine, and indeed it happens, the canticle
+of the Virgin used to magnify the glad impatience of a bride. Fancy the
+Te Deum, to hymn the blessedness of a bridegroom!"
+
+Far away from this infamous barter of the flesh, plain chant remains
+shut up in the antiphonaries, like a monk in the cloister, and when it
+goes forth, it is to cast up before Christ his garnered pains and
+sorrows. It gathers and sums them up in admirable supplications, and if,
+fatigued with pleading it adores, its impulse is to glorify eternal
+events, Palm Sunday and Easter, Pentecost and the Ascension, Epiphany
+and Christmas, then its joy bursts forth so magnificently, that it
+springs beyond the world to show its ecstatic joy at the feet of God.
+
+As to the very ceremonies of the funeral, they are now only the regular
+way of getting money, an official routine, a prayer-wheel which is
+turned mechanically without thought of it.
+
+The organist while he plays thinks of his family, and considers how
+wearied he is; the bellows-blower thinks, as he fills the pipes, of the
+half-pint which will dry his sweat; the tenors and basses are careful of
+their effects, and admire themselves in the more or less rippled water
+of their voices; the choir boys dream of their scampers after mass; and,
+moreover, not one of them at all understands a word of the Latin they
+sing and abridge, as for instance the "Dies irae," of which they suppress
+a part of the stanzas.
+
+In its turn beadledom calculates the sum the dead man brings in, and
+even the priest, wearied with the prayers of which he has read so many,
+and needing his breakfast, prays mechanically from the lips outward,
+while the assistants are in a hurry that the mass to which they have not
+listened should come to an end, that they may shake hands with the
+relations, and leave the dead.
+
+There is absolute inattention, profound weariness. Yet how terrible is
+that thing on the tressels that is waiting there in the church, that
+empty dwelling-place, that body which is already breaking up. Liquid
+manure that stinks, gases which evaporate, flesh that rots is all that
+remains!
+
+And the soul, now that life is over, and all begins? No one thinks of
+it, not even the family worn out by the length of the service, absorbed
+in their own sorrow; who in fact regret only the visible presence of the
+being they have lost; no one except myself, thought Durtal, and a few
+curious people, who associate themselves in their alarm with the "Dies
+irae" and the "Libera," of which they understand both the language and
+the meaning.
+
+Then by the external sound of the words, without the aid of
+contemplation, without even the help of thought, the Church acts.
+
+There it is, the miracle of her liturgy, the power of her word, the
+constantly renewed prodigy of phrases created by revolving time, of
+prayers arranged by ages which are dead. All has passed, nothing exists
+that was raised up in those bygone times. Yet those sequences remain
+intact, cried aloud by indifferent voices and cast out from empty
+hearts, plead, groan, and implore even with efficacy, by their virtual
+power, their talismanic might, their inalienable beauty by the almighty
+confidence of their faith. The Middle Ages have left us these to help us
+to save, if it may be, the soul of the modern and dead fine gentleman.
+
+At the present time, concluded Durtal, there is nothing left peculiar to
+Paris, but the ceremonies, very like each other, of taking the veil and
+of funerals. It is unfortunate that when we have to do with a sumptuous
+corpse, undertakers have their way.
+
+They then bring out their terrible upholstery, plated statues of our
+Lady in atrocious taste, zinc basins in which blaze bowls of green
+punch, tin candelabra at the end of a branch, like a cannon on end with
+its mouth upwards, supporting spiders on their backs, with burning
+candles set about their legs, all the funeral ironmongery of the First
+Empire, with curtain rods in relief, acanthus leaves, winged
+hour-glasses, lozenges and Greek frets. It is unfortunate, too, that to
+touch up the miserable furniture of these ceremonies they play Massenet
+and Dubois, Benjamin Godard and Widor, or, worse still, the sacristy
+orchestra, mystical bellowing, such as the women sing, who are
+affiliated to the confraternities of the month of May.
+
+And alas, we hear no longer the tempests of the great organs and the
+majestic dolours of plain chant, save at the funerals of the monied
+classes; for the poor, nothing--no choir, no organ, just a handful of
+prayers, then a few dips of the brush in the holy water stoup, and there
+is a dead man the more on whom the rain falls, who is carried away. But
+the Church knows that the carrion of the rich rots as much as that of
+the poor, while his soul stinks more, but she jobs indulgences and
+haggles about masses; she, even she, is consumed by the lust of gold.
+
+"Yet I must not think too ill of these wealthy fools," said Durtal,
+after silent thought, "for after all it is thanks to them that I can
+hear the admirable liturgy of the burial service, these people who
+perhaps have done no good action in their life, do at least this
+kindness to a few, without knowing it, after their death."
+
+A noise recalled him to St. Sulpice; the choir was going, the church was
+about to close. "I might as well have tried to pray," he said to
+himself, "it would have been better than to dream in the empty church on
+a chair. Pray indeed? I have no desire for it. I am haunted by
+Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and wax, I prowl
+about it, moved even to tears by its prayers, touched even to the marrow
+by its psalms and chants. I am thoroughly disgusted with my life, very
+tired of myself, but it is a far cry from that to leading a different
+existence! And yet--and yet ... If I am perturbed in these chapels, I
+become unmoved and dry again, as soon as I leave them. After all," he
+said to himself, getting up, and following the few persons who were
+moving towards a door, driven out by the Suisse, "after all, my heart is
+hardened and smoke-dried by dissipation, I am good for nothing."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+How had he again become a Catholic, and got to this point?
+
+Durtal answered himself: "I cannot tell, all that I know is that, having
+been for years an unbeliever, I suddenly believe.
+
+"Let us see," he said to himself, "let us try at least to consider if,
+however great the obscurity of such a subject, there be not common sense
+in it.
+
+"After all, my surprise depends on preconceived ideas of conversions. I
+have heard of sudden and violent crises of the soul, of a thunderbolt,
+or even of faith exploding at last in ground slowly and cleverly mined.
+It is quite evident that conversions may happen in one or other of these
+two ways, for God acts as may seem good to Him, but there must be also a
+third means, and this no doubt the most usual, which the Saviour has
+used in my case. And I know not in what this consists; it is something
+analogous to digestion in a stomach, which works though we do not feel
+it. There has been no road to Damascus, no events to bring about a
+crisis; nothing has happened, we awake some fine morning, and, without
+knowing how or why, the thing is done.
+
+"Yes, but in fact this manoeuvre is very like that of the mine which
+only explodes after it has been deeply dug. Yet not so, for in that case
+the operations are material, the objections in the way are resolved; I
+might have reasoned, followed the course of the spark along the thread,
+but in this case, no! I sprang unexpectedly, without warning, without
+even having suspected that I was so carefully sapped. Nor was it a clap
+of thunder, unless I admit that a clap of thunder can, be occult and
+silent, strange and gentle. And this again would be untrue, for sudden
+disorder of the soul almost always follows a misfortune or a crime, an
+act of which we are aware.
+
+"No, the one thing which seems certain, in my case, is that there has
+been divine impulse, grace.
+
+"But," said he, "in that case the psychology of conversion is
+worthless," and he made answer to himself,--
+
+"That seems to be so, for I seek in vain to retrace the stages through
+which I have passed; no doubt I can distinguish here and there some
+landmarks on the road I have travelled: love of art, heredity, weariness
+of life; I can even recall some of the forgotten sensations of
+childhood, the subterranean workings of ideas excited by my visits to
+the churches; but I am unable to gather these threads together, and
+group them in a skein, I cannot understand the sudden and silent
+explosion of light which took place in me. When I seek to explain to
+myself how one evening an unbeliever, I became without knowing it, on
+one night a believer, I can discover nothing, for the divine action has
+vanished, and left no trace.
+
+"It is certain," he continued, after silent thought, "that in these
+cases the Virgin acts upon us, it is she who moulds and places us in the
+hands of her Son, but her fingers are so light, so supple, so caressing,
+that the soul they have handled has felt nothing.
+
+"On the other hand, if I ignore the course and stages of my conversion,
+I can at least guess the motives which, after a life of indifference,
+have brought me into the harbours of the Church, made me wander round
+about her borders, and finally gave me a shove from behind to bring me
+in."
+
+And he said to himself, without more ado, there are three causes:--
+
+"First, the atavism of an old and pious family, scattered among the
+monasteries;" and the memories of childhood returned to him, of cousins,
+of aunts, seen in convent parlours; gentle women and grave, white as
+wafers, who alarmed him by their low voices, who troubled him by their
+looks, and asked if he were a good boy.
+
+He felt a sort of terror, and hid himself in his mother's skirts,
+trembling when he went away, and was obliged to bend his brow to those
+colourless lips, and undergo the touch of a chilly kiss.
+
+Now that he thought of them at a distance, the interviews which had
+wearied him so much in his childhood, seemed to him charming. He put
+into them all the poetry of the cloister, clothed those bare parlours
+with a faded scent of wainscotting and of wax, and he saw again the
+convent gardens through which he had passed, impregnated with the bitter
+salt scent of box, planted with clipped hedges, intermingled with
+trellises, whose green grapes never ripened, divided by benches whose
+mouldering stone kept the traces worn by water; and a thousand details
+came back to him of those silent lime alleys, of the paths where he ran
+in the interlaced shade which branches threw upon the ground. These
+gardens had seemed to him to become larger as he grew older, and he
+retained a somewhat confused memory of them, amid which was the vague
+recollection of an old stately park, and of a presbytery orchard in the
+north, always somewhat damp, even when the sun shone.
+
+It was not surprising that these sensations, transformed by time, had
+left in him some traces of pious thought, which grew deeper as his mind
+embellished them; all this might have fermented indistinctly for thirty
+years, and now began to work.
+
+But the two other causes which he knew, must have been still more
+active.
+
+These were his disgust for his life, and his passion for art; and the
+disgust was certainly aggravated by his solitude and his idleness.
+
+After having, in old days, made friends by chance, and having taken the
+impression of souls which had nothing in common with his own, he had at
+last chosen after much useless vagabondage; he had become the intimate
+friend of a certain Doctor des Hermies, a physician, who devoted much
+attention to demoniac possession and to mysticism, and of a Breton,
+named Carhaix, the bell-ringer at St. Sulpice.
+
+These friendships were not like those he had formerly made, entirely
+superficial and external, they were wide and deep, based on similarity
+of thought, and the indissoluble ties of soul, and these had been
+roughly broken; within two months of each other Des Hermies and Carhaix
+died, the former of typhoid fever, the latter of a chill that
+prostrated him in his tower, after he had rung the evening Angelus.
+
+These were frightful blows for Durtal. His life, now without an anchor,
+drifted; he wandered all astray, declaring to himself that this
+desolation was final, since he had reached an age at which new friends
+are not made.
+
+So he lived alone, apart among his books, but the solitude which he bore
+bravely, when he was occupied, when he was writing a book, became
+intolerable to him now that he was idle. He lounged in an arm-chair in
+the afternoons, and abandoned himself to his dreams: then, especially,
+fixed ideas took hold on him, and these ended by playing pantomimes of
+which the scenes never varied behind the lowered curtain of his eyes.
+Nude figures danced in his brain to the tune of psalms, and he woke from
+these dreams weak and panting, ready, if a priest had been there, to
+throw himself at his feet with tears, just as he would have abandoned
+himself to the basest pleasures, had the temptation suddenly come to
+him.
+
+"Let me chase away these phantoms by work," he cried. But at what should
+he work? He had just published the "Life of Gilles de Rais," which might
+interest a few artists, and he now remained without a subject, on the
+hunt for a book. As, in art, he was a man of extremes, he always went
+from one excess to the other, and after having dived into the Satanism
+of the Middle Ages, in his account of "Marshal de Rais," he saw nothing
+so interesting to investigate as the life of a saint. Some lines which
+he had discovered in Goerres' and Ribet's "Studies in Mysticism" had put
+him on the trace of a certain Blessed Lidwine in search of new
+documents.
+
+But admitting that he could unearth anything about her, could he write
+the life of a saint? He did not believe it, and the arguments on which
+he based his opinion seemed plausible.
+
+Hagiography was now a lost branch of art, as completely lost as wood
+carving, and the miniatures of the old missals. Nowadays it is only
+treated by church officers and priests, by those stylistic agents who
+seem when they write to put the embryos of their ideas on ballast
+trucks, and in their hands it has become a commonplace of goody-goody, a
+translation into a book of the statuettes of Froc Robert, and the
+coloured images of Bouasse.
+
+The way then was free, and it seemed at first easy enough to plan it
+out, but to extract the charm of the legends needed the simple language
+of bygone centuries, the ingenuous phrases of the days that are dead.
+Who in our time can express the melancholy essence, the pale perfume of
+the ancient translations of the Golden Legend of Voragine, how bind in
+one bright posy the plaintive flowers, which the monks cultivated in
+their cloistered enclosures, when hagiography was the sister of the
+barbaric and delightful art of the illuminators and glass stainers, of
+the ardent and chaste paintings of the Early Masters?
+
+Yet we may not think of giving ourselves over to studious imitations,
+nor coldly attempt to ape such works as these. The question remains,
+whether we can with the present artistic resources, succeed in setting
+up the humble yet lofty figure of a saint; and this is at least
+doubtful, for the lack of real simplicity, the over-ingenious art of
+style, the tricks of careful design and the false craft of colour would
+probably transform the elect lady into a strolling player. She would be
+no longer a saint, but an actress who rendered the part more or less
+adroitly; and then the charm would be destroyed, the miracles would seem
+mechanical, the episodes would be absurd, then ... then ... one must
+have a lively faith, and believe in the sanctity of one's heroine, if
+one would try to exhume her, and put her alive again in a book.
+
+This is so true that we may examine Gustave Flaubert's admirable pages
+on the legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller. Their development is like a
+dazzling yet regulated tumult, evolved in superb language whose apparent
+simplicity is only due to the complicated ingenuity of consummate skill.
+All is there, all except the accent which would have made this work a
+true masterpiece. Given the subject, the fire which should course
+through these magnificent phrases is absent, there lacks the cry of the
+love that faints, the gift of the superhuman exile, the mystical soul.
+
+On the other hand, Hello's "Physionomies de Saints" are worth reading.
+Faith flashes out in each of his portraits, enthusiasm runs over in each
+chapter, unexpected allusions form deep reservoirs of thought between
+the lines; but after all Hello was so little of an artist that the
+fairest legends fade when his fingers touch them; the meanness of his
+style impoverishes the miracles and renders them ineffectual. The art is
+lacking which would rescue the book from the category of pale and dead
+publications.
+
+The example of these two men, in complete opposition as ever writers
+were, neither of whom attained perfection, one in the legend of St.
+Julian because faith was wanting, the other because his art was poor and
+narrow, thoroughly discouraged Durtal. He ought to be both at once, and
+yet remain himself, if not, there was no good in buckling to for such a
+task, it were better to be silent; and he threw himself back in his
+chair sullen and hopeless. Then the contempt of his desolate life grew
+upon him, and once more he wondered what interest Providence could have
+in thus tormenting the descendants of the first convicts. If there were
+no answer, he was obliged to admit that the Church in these disasters
+gathered up the waifs, sheltered the shipwrecked, brought them home
+again, and assured them a resting-place.
+
+No more than Schopenhauer, whom he had once admired, but whose plan of
+labelling every one before death and whose herbarium of dry sorrows had
+wearied him, has the Church deceived man, nor sought to decoy him, by
+boasting the mercy of a life which she knew to be ignoble.
+
+In all her inspired books she proclaims the horror of fate, and mourns
+over the enforced task of living. Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, the book
+of Job, the Lamentations of Jeremias manifest this sorrow in their every
+line, and the Middle Ages too in the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" cursed
+existence, and cried out loudly for death.
+
+More plainly than Schopenhauer the Church declared that there is nothing
+to wish for here below, nothing to expect, but where the mere catalogues
+of the philosopher stop, the Church went on, overpassing the limits of
+the senses, declared the end of man, and defined his limitations.
+
+"Then," he said to himself, "if it be well considered, the vaunted
+argument of Schopenhauer against the Creator, drawn from the misery and
+injustice of the world, is not irrefutable, for the world is not as God
+made it, but as man has refashioned it."
+
+Before accusing heaven for our ills, it is, no doubt, fitting to examine
+through what phases of consent, through what voluntary falls the
+creature has passed, before ending in the gloomy disaster it deplores.
+We may well curse the vices of our ancestors and our own passions which
+beget the greater part of the woes from which we suffer; we may well
+loathe the civilization which has rendered life intolerable to cleanly
+souls, and not the Lord, who, perhaps, did not create us to be shot down
+by cannon in time of war, to be cheated, robbed, and stripped in time of
+peace, by the slave drivers of commerce and the brigands of the money
+market.
+
+But that which remains for ever incomprehensible is the initial horror,
+the horror imposed on each of us, of having to live, and that is a
+mystery no philosophy can explain.
+
+"Ah!" he went on, "when I think of that horror, that disgust of
+existence which has for years and years increased in me, I understand
+how I am forced to make for the Church, the only port where I can find
+shelter.
+
+"Once I despised her, because I had a staff on which to lean when the
+great winds of weariness blew; I believed in my novels, I worked at my
+history, I had my art. I have come to recognize its absolute inadequacy,
+its complete incapacity to afford happiness. Then I understood that
+Pessimism was, at most, good to console those who had no real need of
+comfort; I understood that its theories, alluring when we are young, and
+rich, and well, become singularly weak and lamentably false, when age
+advances, when infirmities declare themselves, when all around is
+crumbling.
+
+"I went to the church, that hospital for souls. There, at least, they
+take you in, put you to bed and nurse you, they do not merely turn their
+backs on you as in the wards of Pessimism and tell you the name of your
+disease."
+
+Finally Durtal had been brought back to religion by art. More even than
+his disgust for life, art had been the irresistible magnet which drew
+him to God. The day, when out of curiosity and to kill time, he had
+entered a church, and after so many years of forgetfulness, had heard
+the Vespers for the dead fall heavily, psalm after psalm, in antiphonal
+chant, as the singers threw up, like ditchers, their shovelful of
+verses, his soul had been shaken to its depths. The evenings when he had
+listened at St. Sulpice to the admirable chanting during the Octave of
+All Souls, he had felt himself caught once for all; but that which had
+put most pressure on him, and brought him yet more completely into
+bondage were the ceremonies and music of Holy Week.
+
+He had visited the churches during that week; and they had opened to him
+like palaces ruined, like cemeteries laid waste by God. They were
+forbidding with their veiled images, their crucifixes wrapped
+lozenge-wise in purple, their organs dumb, their bells silent. The crowd
+flowed in, busy, but noiseless, along the floor over the immense cross
+formed by the nave and the two transepts, and entering by the wounds of
+which the doors were figures, they went up to the altar, where the
+blood-stained head of Christ would lie, and there on their knees eagerly
+kissed the crucifix which marked the place of the chin below the steps.
+
+And the crowd itself, as it ran in the cruciform mould of the church,
+became itself an enormous cross, living and crawling, silent and sombre.
+
+At St. Sulpice, where the whole assembled seminary lamented the ignominy
+of human justice and the fore-ordained death of a God, Durtal had
+followed the incomparable offices of those mournful days, through all
+their black minutes, had listened to the infinite sadness of the
+Passion, so nobly and profoundly expressed at Tenebrae by the slow
+chanting of the Lamentations and the Psalms, but when he thought it
+over, that which above all made him shudder was the thought of the
+Virgin coming on the scene on the Thursday at nightfall.
+
+The Church, till then absorbed in her sorrow, and prostrate before the
+Cross, raised herself and fell a-weeping on beholding the Mother.
+
+By all the voices of the choir, it pressed round Mary, endeavouring to
+console her, mixing the tears of the "Stabat Mater" with her own,
+sighing out that music of plaintive weeping, pressing the wound of that
+sequence, which gave forth water and blood like the wound of Christ
+Himself.
+
+Durtal left the church, worn out with these long services, but his
+temptations to unbelief were gone; he had no further doubt; it seemed to
+him that at St. Sulpice, grace mixed with the eloquent splendours of the
+liturgies, and that in the dim sorrow of the voices there had been
+appeals to him; and he therefore felt filial gratitude to that church
+where he had lived through hours so sweet and sad.
+
+Yet, in ordinary weeks he did not go there; it seemed to him too great
+and too cold, and it was so ugly. He preferred warmer and smaller
+sanctuaries, in which there were still traces of the Middle Ages.
+
+Thus on idle days when he came out of the Louvre, where he had strayed
+for a long time before the canvases of the Early Painters, he was wont
+to take refuge in the old church of St. Severin, hidden away in a corner
+of the poorer part of Paris.
+
+He carried with him the visions of the canvases he had admired at the
+Louvre, and contemplated them again, in this surrounding where they were
+thoroughly at home.
+
+Then he spent delightful moments, in which he was carried away in the
+clouds of harmony, divided by the white splendour of a child's voice
+flashing out from the rolling thunder of the organ.
+
+There, without even praying, he felt a plaintive languor, a vague
+uneasiness steal over him; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more
+than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of
+joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth of his
+senses, to weave together the regret and the terror of his soul.
+
+He often went there, especially on Sunday mornings to High Mass at ten
+o'clock.
+
+He was wont to place himself behind the high altar, in that melancholy
+and delicate apse, planted like a winter garden with rare and somewhat
+fantastic trees. It might have been called a petrified arbour of very
+old trunks in flower, but stripped of leaf, forests of pillars, squared
+or cut in broad panels, carved with regular notches near the base,
+hollowed through their whole length like rhubarb stalks, channelled like
+celery.
+
+No vegetation expanded at the summit of those trunks which bent their
+naked boughs along the vaulting, joined and met and gathered at their
+junction, and thin, engrafted knots, extravagant bunches of heraldic
+roses, armorial flowers with open tracery; and for more than four
+hundred years no sap had run, no bud had formed in these trees. The
+shafts bent for ever remained untouched, the white bark of these pillars
+was scarcely worn, but the greater part of the flowers were withered,
+the heraldic petals were wanting, some keystones of the arches had only
+stratified calices, open like nests, with holes like sponges, in rags
+like handfuls of russet lace.
+
+And among this mystic flora, amid these petrified trees, there was one,
+strange and charming, which suggested the fanciful idea, that the blue
+smoke of the rolling incense had condensed, and, as it coagulated, had
+grown pale with age, to form, in twisting, the spiral of a column which
+was inverted on itself, and ended broadening out into a sheaf, whereof
+the broken stems fell from above the arches.
+
+The corner where Durtal took refuge was faintly lighted by pointed
+stained windows, with black diamond-shaped divisions set with minute
+panes darkened by the accumulated dust of years, rendered still more
+obscure by the woodwork of the chapels, which cut off half their
+surface.
+
+This apse might have been called a frozen grove of skeleton trees, a
+conservatory of dead specimens belonging to the palm family, calling up
+the memory of an impossible phoenix and unlikely palms; but it also
+recalled by its half-moon shape and doubtful light, the image of a
+ship's prow below water. In fact it allowed to filter through its bars,
+to its windows trellised with all black network, the murmur, suggested
+by the rolling of the carriages which shook the street, of a river which
+sifted the golden light of day through the briny course of its waters.
+
+On Sundays, at the time of High Mass, the apse was empty. The public
+filled the nave before the high altar, or spread themselves somewhat
+further into a chapel dedicated to Our Lady. Durtal was therefore almost
+alone, and even the people who crossed his refuge were neither stupid
+nor hostile, like the faithful in other churches. In this district were
+beggars, the very poor, hucksters, Sisters of Charity, rag pickers,
+street arabs; above all, there were women in tatters walking on tiptoe,
+who knelt without looking round, poor creatures overwhelmed by the
+piteous splendour of the altars, looking out of the corner of their
+eyes, and bending low when the Suisse passed them.
+
+Touched by the timidity of this silent misery, Durtal listened to the
+mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of
+St. Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plain chant, better than
+it was done at St. Sulpice, where, however, the offices were as a rule
+solemn and correct. It bore it, as it were, to the top of the choir,
+and let it spread with its great wings open and almost without motion,
+above the prostrate flock, when the verse "Et homo factus est" took its
+slow and reverent flight in the low voice of the singer. It was at once
+monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed
+itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in their
+last meeting, to the united apostles of Christ.
+
+At St. Severin a powerful voice declaimed a verse as a solo, then all
+the children, sustained by the rest of the singers, delivered the
+others, and the unchangeable truths declared themselves in their order,
+more attentive, more grave, more accentuated, even a little plaintive in
+the solo voice of a man, more timid perhaps, but also more familiar and
+more joyous, in the dash, however restrained, of the boys.
+
+At such a moment Durtal was roused, and exclaimed within himself: "It is
+impossible that the alluvial deposits of Faith which have created this
+musical certainty are false. The accent of these declarations is such as
+to be superhuman, and far from profane music, which has never attained
+to the solid grandeur of this naked chant."
+
+The whole mass, moreover, at St. Severin was perfect. The "Kyrie
+eleison," solemn and sumptuous, the "Gloria in excelsis," shared by the
+grand and the choir organs, the one taking the solos, the other guiding
+and sustaining the singers, was full of exultant joy; the "Sanctus,"
+concentrated, almost haggard, resounded through the arches when the
+choir shouted the "Hosanna in excelsis," and the "Agnus Dei" was sung
+low to a clear, suppliant melody, so humble that it dared not become
+loud.
+
+Indeed, except for a contraband "O Salutaris," introduced there as in
+other churches, St. Severin maintained, on ordinary Sundays, the musical
+liturgy, sang it almost reverentially with the fragile but well-toned
+voices of the boys, the solidly built basses bringing vigorous sounds
+from the deep.
+
+It was a joy to Durtal to linger in the delightful surroundings of the
+Middle Ages, in that shadowy loneliness, amid the chants which rose
+behind him, without being annoyed by tricks of the mouths which he could
+not see.
+
+He ended by being moved to the very marrow, choked by nervous tears, and
+all the bitterness of his life came up before him; full of vague fears,
+of confused prayers which stifled him, and found no words, he cursed the
+ignominy of his life and swore to master his carnal affections.
+
+When the mass was over, he wandered in the church itself, and was
+delighted with the spring of the nave, which four centuries built and
+sealed with their arms, placing on it those strange impressions, those
+wonderful seals which expand in relief under the reversed groining of
+the arches. These centuries combined to bring to the feet of Christ the
+superhuman effort of their art, and the gifts of each are still visible.
+The thirteenth century shaped those low and stunted pillars, whose
+capitals are crowned with water-lilies, water-parsley, foliage with
+large leaves, voluted with crochets and turned in the form of a crosier.
+The fourteenth century raised the columns of the neighbouring bays on
+the sides of which prophets, monks and saints uphold the spring of the
+arches. The fifteenth and sixteenth created the apse, the sanctuary,
+some windows pierced above the choir, and though they have been restored
+by incompetent builders, they have still retained a barbaric grace, and
+a really touching simplicity.
+
+They seem to have been designed by ancestors of the Epinal foundries,
+and stained by them with crude colours. The donors and the saints who
+pass through these bright, stone-framed pictures are all awkward and
+pensive, dressed in robes of gamboge, bottle-green, prussian-blue,
+gooseberry-red, pumpkin-purple and wine lees, and these are made still
+deeper by contact with the flesh tints, either omitted or destroyed,
+which have at any rate remained uncoloured like a thin skin of glass. In
+one of these windows Christ on His cross seems limpid, all in light,
+between blue splashes of sky, and the red and green patches, formed by
+the wings of the two angels whose faces also seem cut in crystal and
+full of light.
+
+These windows differ from those of other churches, in that they absorb
+the rays of the sun, without refracting them. No doubt they have been
+deliberately divested of reflection that they may not by the insolent
+joyousness of stones on fire insult the melancholy sorrow of this church
+which rises in the squalid haunts of a quarter inhabited by beggars and
+thieves.
+
+Then these thoughts assailed Durtal. In Paris the modern churches are
+useless, they remain deaf to the prayers which break against the icy
+indifference of their walls. No man recollects himself in those naves
+where souls have left nothing of themselves, or where they have perhaps
+given themselves away, have had to turn and fall back on themselves,
+rebuffed by the insolence of a photographic glare, darkened by the
+neglect of those altars at which no saint has ever said mass. It seemed
+that God had always gone out, and would only come home to keep His
+promise to appear at the moment of consecration, and that He would
+retire immediately afterwards, despising these edifices which have not
+been built expressly for Him, since by the baseness of their form they
+might be put to any profane use, since above all they do not bring Him,
+in default of sanctity, the only gift which might please Him, the gift
+of art which He has lent to man, and which allows Him to see Himself in
+the abridged restitution of His work, and to rejoice in the development
+of that flower of which He has sowed the seed in souls which He has
+carefully chosen, in souls which are truly the elect, second only to
+those of His Saints.
+
+Ah, those charitable churches of the Middle Ages, those chapels damp and
+smoky, full of ancient song, of exquisite paintings, of the odour of
+extinguished tapers, of the perfume of burning incense!
+
+In Paris there remain now only a few specimens of this art of other
+years, a few sanctuaries whose stones really exude the Faith; among
+these St. Severin seemed to Durtal the most exquisite and the most
+certain. He only felt at home there, he believed that if he could ever
+pray in earnest he could do it in that church; and he said to himself
+that there lived the spirit of the fabric. It is impossible but that the
+burning prayers, the hopeless sobs of the Middle Ages, have not for ever
+impregnated the pillars and stained the walls; it is impossible but that
+the vine of sorrows whence of old the Saints gathered warm clusters of
+tears, has not preserved from those wonderful times emanations which
+sustain, a breath which still awakes a shame for sin, and the gift of
+tears.
+
+As Saint Agnes remained immaculate in the brothels, this church remained
+intact amid infamous surroundings, when all near it in the streets from
+the Chateau Rouge to the Cremerie Alexandre, only two paces off, the
+modern rabble of rascality combine their misdeeds, mingling with
+prostitutes their brewage of crime, their adulterated absinthe and
+spirits.
+
+In this especial territory of Satanism, the church rises, delicate and
+little, closely enveloped in the rags of taverns and hovels, and seen
+far off, raises above the roofs its light spire, like a netting needle,
+its point below, and lifting its eye into the light and air, through
+which can be seen a minute bell surmounting a sort of anvil. Such it
+appears, at least, from the Place Saint Andre des Arts. Symbolically it
+might be called a piteous appeal, always rejected by souls hardened and
+hammered by vice, of that anvil which was only an optical illusion, and
+that very real bell.
+
+"They say," thought Durtal, "they say that ignorant architects and
+unskilled archaeologists wish to free St. Severin from its rags, and
+surround it with trees in an enclosed square. But it has always lived in
+its network of black streets, and is voluntarily humble, in accordance
+with the miserable district it aids. In the Middle Ages the church was a
+monument seen only within, and not one of those impetuous basilicas
+which are put up as a show in open spaces.
+
+"Then it was an oratory for the poor, a church on its knees, and not
+standing; it would, therefore, be the most absolute nonsense to free it
+from its surroundings, to take it out of the day of an eternal twilight,
+out of those hours of shadow which brighten the melancholy beauty of a
+servant in prayer behind the impious hedge of hovels.
+
+"Ah, were it possible to steep the church in the glowing atmosphere of
+Notre Dame des Victoires, and join to its meagre psalmody the powerful
+choir of St. Sulpice, that would be complete," said Durtal, "but alas,
+here below, nothing whole, nothing perfect exists!"
+
+Indeed from an artistic point of view, it was the only church which
+satisfied him, for Notre Dame de Paris was too grand, and too much
+overrun by tourists; there were few ceremonies there, just the necessary
+amount of prayers were weighed out, and the greater part of the chapels
+remained closed; and lastly the voices of the choir boys always wanted
+mending; they broke, while the advanced age of the basses made them
+hoarse. At St. Etienne du Mont it was worse still; the shell of the
+church was charming, but the choir was an offshoot of the school of
+Sanfourche, you might think yourself in a kennel, where a medley pack of
+sick beasts were growling; as for the other sanctuaries on the right
+bank of the river, they were worthless, plain chant was as far as
+possible suppressed, and the poverty of the voices was everywhere
+ornamented with promiscuous tunes.
+
+Yet on the right bank were the more self-respecting churches, for
+religious Paris stops on that side of the Seine, and comes to an end as
+you pass the bridges.
+
+In fact, to sum up all, he might believe that St. Severin by its scent,
+and the delightful art of its old nave, St. Sulpice by its ceremonies
+and its chanting, had brought him back towards Christian art, which in
+its turn had directed him to God.
+
+Then when once urged on this way, he had pursued it, had left
+architecture and music, to wander in the mystic territories of the other
+arts, and his long visits to the Louvre, his researches into the
+breviaries, into the books of Ruysbroeck, Angela da Foligno, Saint
+Teresa, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, had confirmed
+him in his belief.
+
+But the upheaval of all his ideas which he had undergone was too recent
+for his soul at once to regain its equilibrium. From time to time it
+seemed to wish to go back, and he discussed with himself in order to set
+it at rest. He spent himself in disputation, came to doubt the reality
+of his conversion, and said: "After all I am united to the church only
+on the side of art. I only go there to see or hear and not to pray; I do
+not seek the Lord, but my own pleasure. This is not business. Just as in
+a warm bath I do not feel the cold if I am motionless, but if I move I
+freeze, so in the church my impulses are upset when I move, I am almost
+on fire in the nave, less warm in the porch, and I become perfectly icy
+outside. These are literary postulates, vibrations of the nerves,
+skirmishes of thought, spiritual brawls, whatever you please, except
+Faith."
+
+But what disquieted him still more than the need of helps to feeling,
+was that his shameless senses rebelled at the contact of religious
+ideas. He floated like wreckage between Licentiousness and the Church,
+they each threw him back in turn, obliging him as he approached one to
+return at once to that which he had left, and he was inclined to ask if
+he were not a victim to some mystification of his lower instincts,
+seeking to revive themselves, without his consciousness, by the cordial
+of a false piety.
+
+In fact he had often seen realized in himself that unclean miracle, when
+he had left St. Severin, almost in tears. Insensibly, without connection
+of ideas, without any welding together of sensations, without the
+explosion of a spark, his senses took fire, and he was powerless to let
+them burn themselves out, to resist them.
+
+He loathed himself afterwards, and it was high time. Then came the
+reverse movement; he longed to run to some chapel, there to wash and be
+clean, and he was so disgusted with himself that now and then he went as
+far as the door and dared not enter.
+
+At other times, on the contrary, he rebelled against himself, and cried
+in fury: "It is monstrous, I have in fact spoiled for myself the only
+pleasure that remained to me--the flesh. Once I amused myself without
+blame, now I pay for my poor debauches with torments. I have added one
+more weariness to existence--would that I could undo it."
+
+He lied to himself in vain, trying to justify himself by suggesting
+doubts.
+
+"Suppose all this were not true, if there were nothing in it, if I were
+deceiving myself, what if the freethinkers were right?"
+
+But he was obliged to be sorry for himself, for he felt distinctly to
+the bottom of his soul, that he held unshaken the certitude of true
+Faith.
+
+"These discussions are miserable, and the excuses I make for my
+filthinesses are odious," he said to himself, and a flame of enthusiasm
+sprang up within him.
+
+How doubt the truth of dogmas, how deny the divine power of the Church,
+for she commands assent?
+
+First she has her superhuman art and her mysticism, then she is most
+wonderful in the persistent folly of conquered heresies. All since the
+world began have had the flesh as their spring-board. Logically and
+humanly speaking they should have triumphed, for they allowed man and
+woman to satisfy their passions, saying to themselves there was no sin
+in these, even sanctifying them as the Gnostics, rendering homage to God
+by the foulest uncleanness.
+
+All have suffered shipwreck. The Church, unbending in this matter, has
+remained upright and entire. She orders the body to be silent, and the
+soul to suffer, and contrary to all probability, humanity listens to
+her, and sweeps away like a dung-heap the seductive joys proposed to
+her.
+
+Again, the vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves her in
+spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the
+disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the
+awkwardness and lack of ability in her defenders, a very strong point.
+
+"No, the more I think of her," he cried, "the more I think her
+prodigious, unique, the more I am convinced that she alone holds the
+truth, that outside her are only weaknesses of mind, impostures,
+scandals. The Church is the divine breeding ground, the heavenly
+dispensary of souls; she gives them suck, nourishes them, and heals
+them; she bids them understand, when the hour of sorrow comes, that true
+life begins, not at birth, but at death. The Church is indefectible,
+before all things admirable, she is great--
+
+"Yes, but then we must follow her directions and practise the sacraments
+she orders!"
+
+And Durtal, shaking his head, gave himself no further answer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Before his conversion he had said like all unbelievers: "If I believed
+that Jesus Christ is God, and that eternal life is not a decoy, I would
+not hesitate to change all my habits, to follow as far as possible the
+rules of religion, and, in any case, to live chaste." And he was
+surprised that people he knew, who were in these conditions, did not
+maintain an attitude higher than his own. He who had so long indulgently
+forgiven himself became singularly intolerant, so soon as he had to do
+with a Catholic.
+
+He now understood the injustice of his judgments, and confessed that
+between faith and practice was a gulf difficult to overpass.
+
+He did not like to discuss this question with himself, but it returned
+and took possession of him all the same, and he was obliged to admit the
+meanness of his arguments, the despicable reasons for his resistance.
+
+He was still honest enough to say: "I am no longer a child; if I have
+Faith, if I admit Catholicism, I cannot conceive it as lukewarm and
+unfixed, warmed up again and again in the saucepan of a false zeal. I
+will have no compromise or truce, no alternations of debauch and
+communions, no stages of licentiousness and piety, no, all or nothing;
+to change from top to bottom, or not change at all."
+
+Then he drew back in alarm, endeavoured to escape the part he was about
+to take, endeavoured to exculpate himself, cavilling for hours, invoking
+the most wretched motives for remaining as he was, and not budging a
+jot.
+
+"What am I to do? If I do not obey orders, which I feel with increasing
+force, I am preparing for myself a life of uneasiness and remorse, for I
+know well I ought not to remain for ever on the threshold, but to
+penetrate into the sanctuary and stay there. And if I make up my
+mind--no indeed--for then I must bind myself to a heap of observances,
+bend to a series of rules, assist at mass on Sunday, abstain on Friday,
+live like a bigot, and look like a fool."
+
+And then to help his revolt, he thought of the air, the look of people
+who frequented the churches; for two men who looked intelligent and
+clean, how many were without doubt rascals and impostors!
+
+Almost all had a side-long look, an oily voice, downcast eyes, immovable
+spectacles, clothes like sacristans as if of black wood, almost all told
+thin beads ostentatiously, and with more strategy and more knavery than
+the wicked, took toll from their neighbours on leaving God.
+
+The devout women were still less reassuring, they invaded the church,
+walking about as if quite at home, disturbing everybody, upsetting
+chairs, knocking against you without begging pardon; then they knelt
+down with much ado, in the attitude of contrite angels, murmured
+interminable paternosters, and left the church more arrogant and sour
+than before.
+
+"It is not encouraging to have to mix with this flock of pious geese,"
+he exclaimed.
+
+But soon, against his will, he made answer to himself: "You have nothing
+to do with others, were you more humble, these people would certainly
+seem less offensive; at any rate they have the courage you lack, they
+are not ashamed of their faith, and are not afraid to kneel to God in
+public."
+
+And Durtal remained dumfounded, for he had to admit that the riposte
+struck home. It was clear his humility was at fault, but what was worse,
+he could not free himself from human respect.
+
+He was afraid of being taken for a fool; the prospect of being seen on
+his knees, in church, made his hair stand on end; the idea, that, if he
+ever had to communicate, he would have to rise and go to the altar in
+the sight of all, was intolerable to him.
+
+"If that moment ever come it will be hard to bear," said he; "and yet I
+am an idiot, for what have I to do with the opinion of people I do not
+know?" but much as he might repeat that his alarms were absurd, he
+could not get over them, or free himself from the fear of ridicule.
+
+"After all," he said, "even if I decide to jump the ditch, to confess
+and communicate, that terrible question of the senses would always have
+to be resolved. I must determine to fly the lusts of the flesh, and
+accept perpetual abstinence. I could never attain to that.
+
+"Without counting that in any case, the time would be ill-chosen were I
+now to make such an effort, for never have I been so tormented as since
+my conversion; Catholicism unfortunately excites unclean suggestions
+when I prowl about it, without entering."
+
+And to this exclamation another answered at once: "Yes, but you must
+enter."
+
+He was irritated at this change of front without change of place, and he
+tried to turn the conversation, as though it had been held with another,
+whose questions perplexed him; but he came back to it all the same, and,
+in his annoyance, summoned all his reasoning powers to his aid.
+
+"Come, let us try to take stock at any rate! It is plain that as I have
+drawn near the Church, my unclean desires have become more frequent and
+more persistent; and yet another fact is certain that I have been so
+used up by twenty years of debauchery that I ought not to have any
+further carnal appetites. In fact, if I chose it, I could perfectly well
+remain chaste; but then I must bid my miserable brain be silent, and I
+have no power to do so! It is frightful all the same that I am more
+excited than in youth, for now my desires go a-travelling, and since
+they have not their ordinary shelter they go off in search of evil
+haunts. How may this be explained? It is a sort of dyspepsia of the
+soul, which cannot digest ordinary meats, and tries to feed on spiced
+dreams, highly seasoned thoughts; it is then want of appetite for
+wholesome meals which has begotten this greediness for strange dishes,
+this trouble of the mind, this wish to escape from myself, and jump were
+it but for a moment over the permitted limits of the senses.
+
+"In that case Catholicism would play a part at once repellent and
+depressing. It would stimulate these sick desires, and weaken me at the
+same time, would give me over to nervous emotions without strength to
+resist them."
+
+Wandering thus in self-examination, he came to a dead stand where was no
+issue, arriving at this conclusion: "I do not practise my religion,
+because I yield to my baser instincts, and I yield to these instincts
+because I do not practise my religion."
+
+Brought up thus by a dead wall, he resisted, asking if this last
+observation were indeed true; for, after all, nothing proved that if he
+approached the Sacraments he would not be attacked with even greater
+violence. It was even probable he would be, for the devil makes a dead
+set at pious people.
+
+Then he rebelled against the cowardice of these remarks, and cried: "I
+lie, for I know well, that if I made the least sign of resistance, I
+should be powerfully aided from on high."
+
+Clever at self-torture, he continued to harass his soul, always on the
+same line. "Suppose," he said, "for the sake of argument, that I have
+tamed my pride, and subdued my body, suppose that at present there were
+nothing to do, but to go forward, I am still brought up, for the final
+obstacle terrifies me.
+
+"Up to now I have been able to walk alone, without earthly assistance,
+without advice; I have been converted without the help of anyone, but
+now I cannot make a step without a guide, I cannot approach the altar
+without the aid of an interpreter, and the bulwark of a priest."
+
+And once more, he drew back, for in former times he had been intimate
+with a certain number of ecclesiastics, and had found them so mediocre,
+so lukewarm, above all so hostile to Mysticism, that he was revolted at
+the very notion of laying before them the schedule of his requirements
+and his regrets.
+
+"They will not understand me," he thought; "they will answer that
+Mysticism was interesting in the Middle Ages, but has now become disused
+and is in any case quite out of touch with the modern spirit. They will
+think me mad, will assure me, moreover, that God does not want so much,
+will advise me with a smile, not to make myself singular, to do as
+others, and to think like them.
+
+"I have indeed no intention of entering on the way of Mysticism, but
+they may at least allow me to envy it and not inflict on me their
+middle-class ideal of a God.
+
+"For, not to deceive oneself, Catholicism is not only that moderate
+religion that they offer us; it is not composed only of petty cases and
+formulas; it is not wholly confined to rigid observances, and the toys
+of old maids, to all that goody-goody business, which spreads itself
+abroad in the Rue Saint Sulpice; it is far more exalted, far purer, but
+then we must penetrate its burning zone, and seek in Mysticism, the art,
+the essence, and the very soul of the Church.
+
+"Using the powerful means at her disposal, we then have to empty
+ourselves, and strip the soul, so that Christ if He will may enter it;
+we have to purify the house, to cleanse it with the disinfectant of
+prayer and the sublimate of Sacraments; in a word, to be ready when the
+Guest shall come and bid us to empty ourselves wholly into Him, as He
+will pour Himself into us.
+
+"I know thoroughly well, that this divine alchemy, this transmutation of
+the human creature into God, is generally impossible, for the Saviour,
+as a rule, keeps His singular favours for His elect; but after all,
+every one, however unworthy, is presumably able to attain that majestic
+end, since God only decides, and not man, whose humble acquiescence
+alone is requisite.
+
+"I see myself saying that to the priests! They will tell me I have no
+business with mystical ideas, and will give me in exchange the petty
+religion of rich women; they will wish to mix themselves up with my
+life, to inquire about the state of my soul, to insinuate their own
+tastes; they will try to convince me that art is dangerous, will
+sermonize me with imbecile talk, and pour over me their flowing bowls of
+pious veal broth.
+
+"I know what I am; at the end of a couple of interviews I shall rebel,
+and become wicked."
+
+Durtal shook his head, remained in thought, and began again,--
+
+"Yet one must be just; perhaps the secular clergy are only the leavings,
+for the contemplative orders and the missionary army carry away every
+year the pick of the spiritual basket; the mystics, priests athirst for
+sorrows, drunk with sacrifice, bury themselves in cloisters or exile
+themselves among savages whom they teach. So when the cream is off, the
+rest of the clergy are plainly but skim milk, the scourings of the
+seminaries.
+
+"Yes, but after all," he continued, "the question is not whether they
+are intelligent or narrow, it is not my business to take the priest to
+pieces to discover under the consecrated rind the nothingness of the
+man; not my business to abuse his inadequacy since it is thoroughly
+suited to the understanding of the crowd. Would it not be, after all,
+more courageous and more humble to kneel before a being of whose brains
+you know the weakness?
+
+"And then ... then ... I am not reduced to that, for indeed I know one
+in Paris, a true mystic. Suppose I go and see him!"
+
+And he thought of a certain Abbe Gevresin, with whom he had formerly
+some acquaintance; he had often met him at a bookseller's in the Rue
+Servandoni, old Tocane, who had rare books on liturgy and the lives of
+the saints.
+
+Learning that Durtal was looking for works on Blessed Lidwine, the
+priest was at once interested in him, and on leaving the shop they had a
+long conversation. The abbe was very old and walked with difficulty,
+therefore he willingly took Durtal's arm, who saw him home.
+
+"The life of that victim of the sins of her time is a magnificent
+subject," he said; "you remember it, do you not?" and as they walked he
+sketched its lines, broadly.
+
+"Lidwine was born towards the end of the fourteenth century, at
+Schiedam, in Holland. Her beauty was extraordinary, but she lost it
+through illness at the age of fifteen. She recovered, but while skating
+one day with her companions on the frozen canals, she fell and broke a
+rib. From the time of that accident to her death she was bed-ridden. She
+was afflicted with most frightful ailments, her wounds festered, and
+worms bred in her putrefying flesh. Erysipelas, that terrible malady of
+the Middle Ages, consumed her. Her right arm was eaten away, a single
+muscle held it to the body, her brow was cleft in two, one of her eyes
+became blind, and the other so weak that it could not bear the light.
+
+"While she was in this condition, the plague ravaged Holland, and
+decimated the town in which she lived; she was the first attacked. Two
+boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the heart. 'Two boils,
+it is well,' she said to the Lord, 'but three would be better in honour
+of the Holy Trinity,' and immediately a third pustule broke out on her
+face.
+
+"For thirty-five years she lived in a cellar, taking no solid food,
+praying and weeping, so chilly in winter, that each morning her tears
+formed two frozen streams down her cheeks.
+
+"She thought herself still too fortunate, and entreated the Lord not to
+spare her, and obtained from Him the grace that by her sufferings she
+might expiate the sins of others. Christ heard her prayers, visited her
+with His angels, communicated her with His own hand, gave her the
+delight of heavenly ecstasies, and caused her festering wounds to exhale
+delicious perfumes.
+
+"At the moment of her death He stood by her, and restored her poor body
+to its former soundness. Her beauty, so long vanished, shone out again,
+the town was moved, the sick came in crowds, and all who drew near were
+healed.
+
+"She is the true patroness of the sick," concluded the abbe, and, after
+a silence, he added,--
+
+"From the point of view of the higher mysticism, Lidwine is wonderful,
+for in her we can verify that plan of substitution which was, and is,
+the glorious reason for the existence of convents."
+
+And as, without answering, Durtal questioned him with a look, he went
+on,--
+
+"You are aware, sir, that in all ages, nuns have offered themselves to
+heaven as expiatory victims. The lives of saints, both men and women,
+who desired these sacrifices abound, of those who atoned for the sins of
+others by sufferings eagerly demanded and patiently borne. But there is
+a task still more arduous and more painful than was desired by these
+admirable souls. It is not now that of purging the faults of others, but
+of preventing them, hindering their commission, by taking the place of
+those who are too weak to bear the shock.
+
+"Read Saint Teresa on this subject; you will see that she gained
+permission to take on herself, and without flinching, the temptations of
+a priest who could not endure them. This substitution of a strong soul
+freeing one who is not strong from perils and fears is one of the great
+rules of mysticism.
+
+"Sometimes this exchange is purely spiritual, sometimes on the contrary
+it has to do only with the ills of the body. Saint Teresa was the
+surrogate of souls in torment, Sister Catherine Emmerich took the place
+of the sick, relieved, at least, those who were most suffering; thus,
+for instance, she was able to undergo the agony of a woman suffering
+from consumption and dropsy, in order to permit her to prepare for death
+in peace.
+
+"Well, Lidwine took on herself all bodily ills, she lusted for physical
+suffering, and was greedy for wounds; she was, as it were, the reaper of
+punishments, and she was also the piteous vessel in which everyone
+discharged the overflowings of his malady. If you would speak of her in
+other fashion than the poor hagiographies of our day, study first that
+law of substitution, that miracle of perfect charity, that superhuman
+triumph of Mysticism; that will be the stem of your book, and naturally,
+without effort, all Lidwine's acts graft themselves on it."
+
+"But," asked Durtal, "does this law still take effect?"
+
+"Yes: I know convents which apply it. Moreover, Orders like the
+Carmelites and the Poor Clares willingly accept the transfer to them of
+temptations we suffer; then these convents take on their backs, so to
+speak, the diabolical expiations of those insolvent souls whose debts
+they pay to the full."
+
+"All the same," said Durtal, shaking his head, "if you consent to take
+on yourself the assaults intended for your neighbour, you must make
+pretty sure not to sink."
+
+"The nuns chosen by our Lord," replied the abbe, "as victims of
+expiation, as whole burnt-offerings, are in fact few, and they are
+generally, especially in this age, obliged to unite and coalesce in
+order to bear without failing the weight of misdeeds which try them, for
+in order that a soul may bear alone the assaults of Satan, which are
+often terrible, it must be indeed assisted by the angels and elect of
+God." And after a silence the old priest added,--
+
+"I believe I may speak with some experience in these matters, for I am
+one of the directors of those nuns who make reparation in their
+convents."
+
+"And yet," cried Durtal, "the world asks what is the good of the
+contemplative Orders."
+
+"They are the lightning conductors of society," said the abbe, with
+great energy. "They draw on themselves the demoniacal fluid, they absorb
+temptations to vice, preserve by their prayers those who live, like
+ourselves, in sin; they appease, in fact, the wrath of the Most High
+that He may not place the earth under an interdict. Ah! while the
+sisters who devote themselves to nursing the sick and infirm are indeed
+admirable, their task is easy in comparison with that undertaken by the
+cloistered Orders, the Orders where penance never ceases, and the very
+nights spent in bed are broken by sobs."
+
+"This priest is far more interesting than his brethren," said Durtal to
+himself as they parted; and, as the abbe invited his visits, he had
+often called on him.
+
+He had always been cordially welcomed. On several occasions he had
+warily sounded the old man on several questions. He had answered
+evasively in regard to other priests. But he did not seem to think much
+of them, if Durtal might judge by what he said one day in regard to
+Lidwine, that magnet of sorrows.
+
+"Notice," he said, "that a weak and honest soul has every advantage in
+choosing a confessor, not from the clergy who have lost the sense of
+Mysticism, but from the monks. They alone know the effects of the law of
+substitution, and if they see that in spite of their efforts the
+penitent succumbs, they end by freeing him by taking his trials on
+themselves, or by sending them off to some convent in the country where
+resolute people can use them."
+
+Another time the question of nationalities was discussed in a newspaper
+which Durtal showed him. The abbe shrugged his shoulders, putting aside
+the patriotic twaddle. "For me," he said calmly, "for me my country is
+that where I can best pray."
+
+Durtal could not make out what this priest was. He understood from the
+bookseller, that the Abbe Gevresin on account of his great age and
+infirmity was incapacitated for the regular duties of the priesthood. "I
+know that, when he can, he still says his mass each morning in a
+convent; I believe also he receives a few of his brethren for confession
+in his own house;" and Tocane added with disdain, "He has barely enough
+to live on, and they do not look on him with favour at the archbishop's
+because of his mystical notions."
+
+There ended all he knew about him. "He is evidently a very good priest,"
+repeated Durtal; "his physiognomy declares it, and his mouth and eyes
+contradict each other; his eyes certainly declare his entire goodness,
+his lips, somewhat thick, purple and always moist, have on them an
+affectionate but somewhat sad smile, and to this his blue eyes give the
+lie--blue, childlike eyes which laugh out astonished under white
+eyebrows in a rather red face, touched on the cheeks like a ripe
+apricot, with little points of blood.
+
+"In any case," said Durtal, waking from his meditations, "I am very
+wrong not to continue the relations into which I have entered with him.
+
+"Yes, but then nothing is so difficult as to become really intimate with
+a priest; first by the very education he receives at the seminary the
+ecclesiastic thinks himself obliged to disperse his affections and not
+concentrate himself on particular friendships; then, like a doctor, he
+is a man harassed with business, who is never to be found. You can catch
+them now and then between two confessions or two sick calls. Nor even
+then are you quite certain that the eager welcome of the priest rings
+true, for he is just the same to all who come to him, and indeed, since
+I do not call on the Abbe Gevresin for his help or advice, I am afraid
+of being in his way, and of taking up his time, hence I am acting with
+discretion in not going to see him.
+
+"Yet I am sorry; suppose I write, or go to him one morning, but what
+have I to say to him? I ought to know what I want before I allow myself
+to trouble him. If I go only to complain, he will answer I am wrong not
+to be a communicant, and I have nothing to answer. No: the better plan
+is to meet him as by chance, on the quays, where no doubt he sometimes
+looks over the book-stalls, or at Tocane's, for then I can talk to him
+more intimately, at least less officially, about my vacillations and
+regrets."
+
+So Durtal searched the quays, and never once met the abbe. He went to
+the bookseller's, and pretended to look over his stock, but as soon as
+he pronounced the name Gevresin, Tocane exclaimed, "I have heard nothing
+of him, he has not been here for the last two months."
+
+"I will not turn back, but just disturb him in his own house," said
+Durtal, "but he will wonder why I came back after so long an absence.
+Besides the awkwardness I feel in calling on people whom I have
+neglected, I am also troubled by thinking the abbe may suspect some
+interested object in my visit. That is not convenient; if I had but a
+good pretext; there is certainly that life of Lidwine which interests
+him, I might consult him on various points. Yes, but which? I have not
+concerned myself with that saint for a long time, and must read over
+again the meagre old books on her biography. After all, it will be
+simpler and better to be frank, and say, 'This is why I have come; I
+want to ask advice, which I have not determined to follow, but I have so
+much need of speaking, of giving the reins to my soul, that I beg you to
+be so kind as to lose an hour for my sake.'
+
+"He will do it certainly and willingly.
+
+"Then that is agreed on; suppose I go to-morrow?" But he checked himself
+at once. "There was nothing pressing; there was plenty of time; better
+take time and think; ah, yes, here is Christmas close upon us, I cannot
+decently trouble a priest who has his penitents to confess, for there
+are many communicants on that day. Let him get his hard work over, and
+then we will see."
+
+He was at first pleased at having invented that excuse, then he had to
+admit in his heart that, after all, there was not much in it, for there
+was nothing to show that this priest, who was not attached to a parish,
+was busy in hearing confessions.
+
+It was hardly probable, but he tried to convince himself that it might
+be so after all, and his hesitation began again. Angry at last with the
+discussion, he adopted a middle course. For greater certainty, he would
+not call on the abbe till after Christmas, but he would not be later
+than a given time; he took an almanack, and swore to keep his
+promise--three days after that feast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Oh! that midnight mass! He had had the unfortunate idea of going to it
+at Christmas. He went to St. Severin, and found a young ladies' day
+school installed there, instead of the choir, who, with sharp voices
+like needles, knitted the worn-out skeins of the canticles. He had fled
+to St. Sulpice, and plunged into a crowd which walked and talked as if
+in the open air; had heard there choral-society marches, tea-garden
+waltzes, firework tunes, and had come away in a rage.
+
+It had seemed to him superfluous to try St. Germain-des-Pres, for he
+held that church in horror. Besides the weariness inspired by its heavy,
+ill-restored shell, and the miserable paintings with which Flandrin
+loaded it, the clergy there were specially, almost alarmingly, ugly, and
+the choir was truly infamous. They were like a set of bad cooks, boys
+who spat vinegar, and elderly choir-men, who cooked in the furnace of
+their throats a sort of vocal broth, a thin gruel of sound.
+
+Nor did he think of taking refuge in St. Thomas Aquinas, where he
+dreaded the barking and the choruses; there was indeed St. Clotilde,
+where the psalmody, at least, is upright, and has not, like that of St.
+Thomas, lost all shame. He went there, but again encountered dance music
+and profane tunes, a worldly orgie.
+
+At last he went to bed in a rage, saying to himself, "In Paris, at any
+rate, a singular baptism of music is reserved for the New-Born."
+
+Next day, when he woke, he felt he had no courage to face the churches;
+the sacrileges of last night would, he thought, continue; and as the
+weather was almost fine, he went out, wandered in the Luxembourg, gained
+the square of the Observatoire, and the Boulevard de Port Royal, and
+mechanically made his way along the interminable Rue de la Sante.
+
+He knew that street of old, and had taken melancholy walks in it,
+attracted by its poor houses, like those of a provincial town; then it
+was fit for a dreamer, for it was bounded on the right by the Prison de
+la Sante and Sainte Anne's madhouse, and on the left by convents. Light
+and air circulated in the street, but, behind it, all was black; it was
+a kind of prison corridor, with cells on either side, where some were
+condemned to temporary sentences, and others, of their own free will,
+suffered lasting sorrows.
+
+"I can imagine," thought Durtal, "how it would have been painted by an
+Early Flemish master; the long street paved by patient pencils, the
+stories open from top to bottom, and the cupboards the same; and on one
+side massive cells with iron bedsteads, a stoneware jug; little
+peepholes in the doors secured by strong bolts, inside, scoundrels and
+thieves, gnashing their teeth, turning round and round, their hair on
+end, howling like caged animals; on the other side little rooms,
+furnished with a pallet-bed, a stoneware jug, a crucifix, these also
+closed by doors iron-banded, and within nuns or monks, kneeling on the
+flags, their faces clean cut against the light of a halo, their eyes
+lifted to heaven, their hands joined, raised from the ground in ecstasy,
+a pot of lilies at their side."
+
+Then at the back of the canvas, between these two rows of houses, rises
+a great avenue, at the end of which in a dappled sky sits God the Father
+with Christ on His right, choirs of Seraphim playing on guitar and viol;
+God the Father immovable under his lofty tiara, His breast covered by
+His long beard, holds scales which balance exactly, the holy captives
+expiating precisely by their penances and prayers the blasphemies of the
+rascals and the insane.
+
+"It must be admitted," thought Durtal, "that this street is very
+peculiar, that there is probably none like it in Paris, for it unites in
+its course virtues and vices, which in other quarters, in spite of the
+efforts of the Church, trend apart as far as possible from each other."
+
+Thus thinking he had come as far as St. Anne's, where the street grows
+lighter and the houses are lower, with only one or two stories, then,
+gradually, there is greater space between them, and they are only
+joined to each other by blank ends of walls.
+
+"At any rate," thought Durtal, "if this street has no distinction, it is
+very private; here at least one need not admire the impertinent
+decoration of those modern shops which expose in their windows as
+precious commodities, chosen piles of firewood, and in glass sweetmeat
+jars, coal drops and coke lollipops."
+
+And here is an odd lane, and he looked at an alley which led down a
+sharp decline into a main street, where was to be seen the tricolor flag
+in zinc on a washhouse; he read the name: Rue de l'Ebre.
+
+He entered it, it was but a few yards long; the whole of one side was
+occupied by a wall, behind which were half seen some stunted buildings,
+surmounted by a bell. An entrance-gate with a square wicket was placed
+in the wall, which was raised higher as it sloped downwards, and at the
+end was pierced by round windows, and rose into a little building,
+surmounted by a clock-tower so low that its point did not even reach the
+height of the two-storied house opposite.
+
+On the other side three hovels sloped down, closely packed together;
+zinc pipes ran everywhere, growing like vines, ramifying like the stalks
+of a hollow vine along the walls, windows gaped on rusty leaden hinges.
+Dim courts of wretched hovels could be seen; in one was a shed where
+some cows were reposing; in two others were coach-houses for
+wheel-chairs, and a rack behind the bars of which appeared the capsuled
+necks of bottles.
+
+"But this must be a church," thought Durtal, looking at the little clock
+tower, and the three or four round bays, which seemed cut out in emery
+paper to look like the black rough mortar of the wall; "where is the
+entrance?"
+
+He found it on turning out of the alley into the Rue de la Glaciere. A
+tiny porch gave access to the building.
+
+He opened the door, and entered a large room, a sort of closed shed,
+painted yellow, with a flat ceiling, with small iron beams coloured
+grey, picked out with blue, and ornamented with gas-jets like a wine
+shop. At the end was a marble altar, six lighted tapers, and gilt
+ornaments, candelabra full of tapers, and under the tabernacle, a very
+small monstrance, which sparkled in the light of the tapers.
+
+It was almost dark, the panes of the windows having been crudely daubed
+with bands of indigo and yellowish green; it was freezing, the stove was
+not alight, and the church, paved like a kitchen floor, had no matting
+or carpet.
+
+Durtal wrapped himself up as best he could and sat down. His eyes
+gradually grew accustomed to the obscurity of the room, and what he saw
+was strange; in front of the choir on rows of chairs were seated human
+forms, drowned in floods of white muslin. No one stirred.
+
+Suddenly there entered by a side door a nun equally wrapped from head to
+foot in a large veil. She passed along the altar, stopped in the middle,
+threw herself on the ground, kissed the floor, and by a sudden effort,
+without helping herself by her arms, stood upright, advanced silently
+into the church, and brushed by Durtal, who saw under the muslin a
+magnificent robe of creamy white, an ivory cross at her neck, at her
+girdle a white cord and beads.
+
+She went to the entrance-door, and there ascended a little staircase
+into a gallery which commanded the church.
+
+He asked himself what could be this Order so sumptuously arrayed, in
+this miserable chapel, in such a district?
+
+Little by little the room filled, choir-boys in red with capes trimmed
+with rabbit's skin lighted the candelabra, went out, and ushered in a
+priest, vested in a grand cope, with large flowers, a priest tall and
+young, who sat down, and in a sonorous tone chanted the first antiphon
+of vespers.
+
+Suddenly Durtal turned round. In the gallery an harmonium accompanied
+the responses of voices never to be forgotten. It was not a woman's
+voice, but one having in it something of a child's voice, sweetened,
+purified, sharpened, and something of a man's, but less harsh, finer and
+more sustained, an unsexed voice, filtered through litanies, bolted by
+prayers, passed through the sieves of adoration and tears.
+
+The priest, still sitting, chanted the first verse of the unchanging
+psalm, "Dixit Dominus Domino meo."
+
+And Durtal saw in the air, in the gallery, tall white statues, holding
+black books in their hands, chanting slowly with eyes raised to heaven.
+A lamp cast its light on one of these figures, which for a second leant
+forward a little, and he saw under the lifted veil a face attentive and
+sorrowful, and very pale.
+
+The verses of the vesper psalms were now sung alternately, by the nuns
+above and by the congregation below. The chapel was almost full; a
+school of girls in white veils filled one side; little girls of the
+middle-class, poorly dressed brats who played with their dolls occupied
+the other. There were a few poor women in _sabots_, and no men.
+
+The atmosphere became extraordinary. The warmth of the souls thawed the
+ice of the room; here were not the vespers of the rich, such as were
+celebrated on Sundays at St. Sulpice, but the vespers of the poor,
+domestic vespers, in the plain chant of the country side, followed by
+the faithful with mighty fervour in silent and singular devotion.
+
+Durtal could fancy himself transported beyond the city, to the depths of
+some village cloister; he felt himself softened, his soul rocked by the
+monotonous amplitude of these chants, only recognizing the end of the
+psalms by the return of the doxology, the "Gloria Patri et Filio," which
+separated them from each other.
+
+He had a real impulse, a dim need of praying to the Unknowable,
+penetrated to the very marrow by this environment of aspiration, it
+seemed to him that he thawed a little, and took a far-off part in the
+united tenderness of these bright spirits. He sought for a prayer, and
+recalled what St. Paphnutius taught Thais, when he cried, "Thou art not
+worthy to name the name of God, thou wilt pray only thus: 'Qui plasmasti
+me miserere mei;' Thou who hast formed me have mercy on me." He
+stammered out the humble phrase, prayed not out of love or of
+contrition, but out of disgust with himself, unable to let himself go,
+regretting that he could not love. Then he thought of saying the Lord's
+Prayer, but stopped at the notion that this is the hardest of all
+prayers to pronounce, when the phrases are weighed in the balance. For
+in it we declare to God that we forgive our neighbours' trespasses. Now
+how many who use these words forgive others? How many Catholics do not
+lie when they tell the All-knowing that they hate no one?
+
+He was roused from these reflections by sudden silence; vespers were
+over. Then the organ played again, and all the voices of the nuns
+joined, those in the choir below and in the gallery above, singing the
+old carol "Unto us a child is born."
+
+He listened, moved by the simplicity of the strain, and suddenly, in a
+minute, brutally, without understanding why, infamous thoughts filled
+his mind.
+
+He resisted in disgust, wished to repulse the assault of these shameful
+feelings, and they were persistent. He seemed to see before him a woman
+whose perverse ways had long maddened him.
+
+All at once this hallucination ceased; his eye was mechanically
+attracted towards the priest, who was looking at him, while speaking in
+a low voice to a beadle.
+
+He lost his head, imagining that the priest guessed his thoughts and was
+turning him out, but this notion was so foolish, that he shrugged his
+shoulders, and more sensibly thought that men were not admitted to this
+convent of women, and that the abbe who had seen him was sending the
+beadle to beg him to leave.
+
+The beadle came straight to him; Durtal was ready to take his hat, when
+in persuasive and gentle tones that functionary said that the procession
+was about to begin, that it was the custom for the gentlemen to follow
+the Blessed Sacrament, and that although he was the only man there, the
+abbe thought he would not refuse to follow the procession about to
+start.
+
+Overwhelmed by this request, Durtal made a vague gesture, in which the
+beadle seemed to see assent.
+
+"No," he thought as soon as he was left alone; "I will not meddle with
+the ceremony; first I know nothing about it, and I should spoil it all,
+and again I will not make a fool of myself." He prepared to slip away
+quietly, but he had no time to carry out his intention; the usher
+brought him a lighted candle and asked him to accompany him. He put the
+best face he could on the matter, and while thinking that he was
+blushing all over, he followed the beadle to the altar.
+
+There the beadle stopped him and bid him not to move. The whole
+congregation was now standing, the girls' school divided into two files,
+preceded by a woman carrying a banner. Durtal came in front of the first
+rank of nuns.
+
+Their veils lowered before the profane, even in church, were raised
+before the Blessed Sacrament, before God. Durtal was able to look at
+these sisters for a moment; at first his disillusion was complete. He
+had supposed them pale and grave like the nun he had seen in the
+gallery, and almost all of them were red, freckled, crossing their poor
+hands swelled and wounded by chilblains. Their faces were puffy and all
+seemed at the beginning or end of a cold; they were evidently country
+girls, and the novices, known by their grey robes under the white veil,
+were still more common looking; they had certainly been accustomed to
+farm labour, and yet on seeing them all turned to the altar, the poverty
+of their faces, the ugliness of their hands blue with cold, their broken
+nails, injured in the wash, disappeared; their eyes, modest and humble
+under their long lashes, changed their coarse features into pious
+simplicity. Lost in prayer, they did not even see his curious looks, and
+did not even suspect a man was there examining them.
+
+Durtal envied the admirable wisdom of these poor girls who alone
+understood it was mad to wish to live. He thought: "Ignorance leads to
+the same result as knowledge. Among the Carmelites are rich and pretty
+women who have lived in the world and left it, wholly convinced of the
+vainness of its joys; and these nuns, who evidently know nothing, have
+had an intuition of that vacuity which it has needed years of experience
+for the others to gain. By different ways they have arrived at the same
+meeting-place. Then what clearness of thought is revealed by their
+entrance into an Order! for if indeed they had not been gathered by
+Christ, what would have become of these unhappy girls? Married to
+drunkards and hammered by beatings; or perhaps maids in taverns,
+ill-treated by their masters, brutalized by the other servants, destined
+to the scorn of the streets and the dangers of ill-usage. And without
+knowing anything they have avoided it all, have remained innocent, far
+from these perils, and far from this defilement, under an obedience
+which is not ignoble, disposed by their very way of life to experience,
+should they be worthy, the most powerful joys which the soul of a human
+creature can feel. They remain, perhaps, beasts of burthen, but at any
+rate God's beasts of burthen."
+
+He had got so far in his reflections when the beadle beckoned to him.
+The priest, who had descended from the altar, held the little
+monstrance; the girls' procession was moving before him. Durtal passed
+in front of the line of nuns who did not take part in the ceremony, and
+torch in hand he followed the beadle, who carried behind the priest an
+open white silk parasol.
+
+Then the harmonium in the gallery filled the church with its drawling
+tones, like an enlarged accordion, and the nuns standing beside it
+intoned the old chant, rhythmical as a march, the "Adeste Fideles,"
+while below the novices and the faithful repeated after each stanza the
+sweet chorus of invitation, "Venite adoremus."
+
+The procession went several times round the chapel, above the heads
+bowed in the smoke from the censers, which the choir boys swung, turning
+at each pause to face the priest.
+
+"Well, after all, I have not come so badly out of it," said Durtal to
+himself, when they had returned to the altar. He thought his part was
+finished, but, this time without asking his permission, the beadle asked
+him to kneel at the communion rail in front of the altar.
+
+He was ill at ease and annoyed, at knowing that the whole school and the
+whole convent was behind him, nor was he accustomed to kneel; it seemed
+as if wedges were thrust into his limbs, as if he were subjected to the
+tortures of the Middle Ages. Embarrassed by his taper, which was
+guttering, and threatened to cover him with spots, he shifted his
+position quietly, trying to make himself more comfortable by slipping
+the skirts of his great coat between his knees and the steps; but in
+moving he only increased the evil, his flesh was folded back between the
+bones, and his skin was chafed and burning. He sweated at last with the
+pain, and feared to distract the fervour of the community by falling;
+while the ceremony went on for ever, the nuns sang in the gallery, but
+he listened no more and deplored the length of the service.
+
+At last the moment of Benediction approached.
+
+Then in spite of himself, seeing himself there, so near to God, Durtal
+forgot his sufferings, and bowed his head, ashamed to be so placed, like
+a captain at the head of his company, in the first rank of this maiden
+troop; and when in a great silence, the bell tinkled, and the priest
+turning, lightly cut the air in the form of a cross, and, with the
+Blessed Sacrament, blessed the congregation kneeling at his feet, Durtal
+remained, his body bent, his eyes closed, seeking to hide himself, to
+make himself small, and not be seen there in front amid that pious
+crowd.
+
+The psalm "Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes," rang out when the beadle came
+to take his taper. Durtal could hardly resist a cry, when he had to
+stand up; his benumbed knees cracked, and their joints would hardly
+work.
+
+Yet he regained his place somehow; let the crowd pass, and approaching
+the beadle, asked him the name of the convent, and the order to which
+the nuns belonged.
+
+"They are the Franciscan missionaries of Mary," answered the man, "but
+the chapel is not theirs as you seem to think; it is a chapel of ease
+for the parish of St. Marcel de la Maison Blanche: it is only joined by
+a corridor to the house those sisters occupy behind us there in the Rue
+de l'Ebre. They join in the offices, in fact, just as you and I may do,
+and they keep a school for the children of the district."
+
+"It is a touching little chapel," thought Durtal, when he was alone. "It
+is well matched with the neighbourhood it shelters, with the gloomy
+brook of the tanners, which runs through the yards below the Rue de la
+Glaciere. It gives me the effect of being to Notre Dame de Paris what
+its neighbour the Bievre is to the Seine. It is the streamlet of the
+church, the pious pavement, the miserable suburb of worship.
+
+"How poor and yet how exquisite are those nuns' voices, which seem
+non-sexual and mellow! God knows how I hate the voice of a woman in the
+holy place, for it still remains unclean. I think woman always brings
+with her the lasting miasma of her indispositions and she turns the
+psalms sour. Then, all the same, vanity and concupiscence rise from the
+worldly voice, and its cries of adoration accompanied by the organ are
+only cries of carnal desire, its very pleadings in the most sombre
+liturgical hymns are only addressed to God from the lips outward, for at
+bottom a woman only mourns the mediocre ideal of earthly pleasure to
+which she cannot attain. Thus I thoroughly understand that the Church
+has rejected woman from her offices, and that the musical robe of her
+sequences may not be contaminated she employs the voices of the boy and
+the man.
+
+"Yet in convents of women, that is changed; it is certain that prayer,
+communion, abstinence and vows purify the body and the soul, as well as
+the vocal odour which proceeds from them. The emanations from them give
+to the voices of the nuns, however crude, however ill-trained they may
+be, their chaste inflexions, their simple caresses of pure love, they
+recall to it the ingenuous sounds of childhood.
+
+"In certain orders, they seem even to prune it of the greater part of
+its branches, and concentrate the threads of sap which remain in a few
+twigs;" and he thought of a Carmelite convent to which he had gone from
+time to time, remembered their failing, almost expiring voices, where
+the little health that remained to them was concentrated in three notes,
+voices which had lost the musical colours of life, the tints of open
+air, keeping only in the cloister those of the costumes they seemed to
+reflect, white and brown, chaste and sombre tones.
+
+Ah! those Carmelites, he thought of them now, as he descended the Rue de
+la Glaciere, and he called up the memory of a profession, the thought of
+which took entire possession of him every time he meditated on convents.
+He saw again in memory a morning in the little chapel in the Avenue de
+Saxe, a chapel, Spanish Gothic in style, with narrow windows glazed with
+panes so dark that the light which remained in their colours did not
+pass through them.
+
+At the end rose the high altar in shade, raised on six steps; on the
+left a large iron grating in an arch was covered with a black curtain,
+and on the same side, but almost at the base of the altar, a little arch
+traced on the plain wall, like a lancet window, with an aperture in the
+middle, a sort of square, a frame, without a panel, empty.
+
+That morning the chapel, cold and dark, sparkled, lighted by groves of
+candles; and the odour of incense, not adulterated as in other churches
+by spices and gums, filled it with a dull smoke; it was crammed with
+people. Crouched in a corner, Durtal had turned round, and like his
+neighbours looked at the backs of the thurifers and priests, who were
+going towards the entrance. The door opened suddenly, and he saw, in a
+burst of daylight, a red vision of the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris,
+passing up the nave, turning from side to side a horse-like head, in
+front of it a big spectacled nose, bending his tall form all on one
+side, blessing the congregation with a long twisted hand, like a crab's
+claw.
+
+He and his suite ascended the altar steps, and knelt at a prie-Dieu,
+then they took off his tippet, and vested him in a silk chasuble with a
+white cross embroidered in silver, and the mass began. Shortly before
+the communion, the black veil was gently withdrawn; behind the high
+grating, and in a blueish light like that of the moon, Durtal faintly
+saw white phantoms gliding and stars twinking in the air, and close to
+the grating a woman's form, kneeling motionless on the ground, she too
+holding a star at the end of a taper. The woman did not move but the
+star shook; then when the moment of communion was at hand, the woman
+rose, then disappeared, and her head, as if decapitated, filled the
+square of the wicket opened in the arch.
+
+Then as he leant forward he saw, for a second, a dead face, with closed
+lids, white, eyeless, like ancient marble statues. And all passed away,
+as the Cardinal bent above the grating, with the ciborium in his hand.
+
+All was so rapid that he asked himself if he were not dreaming; the mass
+was over. Behind the iron grating resounded mournful psalms, slow chants
+drawn out, weeping, always on the same notes, wandering lights and white
+forms passed in the azure fluid of the incense. Monseigneur Richard was
+sitting, mitre on head, interrogating the postulant who had returned to
+her place, and was kneeling before him behind the grating.
+
+He spoke in a low voice, and could not be heard. The whole congregation
+bent to listen to the novice as she pronounced her vows, but only a long
+murmur was heard. Durtal remembered that he had elbowed his way, and got
+near the choir, where, through the crossed bars of the grating, he saw
+the woman clad in white, prostrate on her face, in a square of flowers,
+while the whole convent filed past, bending over her, intoning the
+psalms for the dead, and sprinkling her with holy water, like a corpse.
+
+"It is admirable," he cried, moved in the street by the memory of the
+scene, and he thought of what a life was that of these women! To lie on
+an hair mattress without pillow or sheets, to fast seven months out of
+the twelve, except on Sundays and feasts; always to eat, standing,
+vegetables and abstinence fare; to have no fire in winter, to chant for
+hours on ice-cold tiles, to scourge the body, to become so humble as,
+however tenderly nurtured, to wash up dishes with joy, and attend to the
+meanest tasks, to pray from morning to midnight even to fainting, to
+pray there till death. They must indeed pity us, and set themselves to
+expiate the imbecility of a world which treats them as hysterical fools,
+for it cannot even understand the joy in suffering of souls like these.
+
+"We cannot be proud of ourselves, in thinking of the Carmelites, or even
+of those humble Franciscan Tertiaries, who are after all more vulgar. It
+is true they do not belong to a contemplative order, but all the same
+their rules are very strict, their existence is so hard that they too
+can atone by their prayers and good works for the crimes of the city
+they protect."
+
+He grew enthusiastic in thinking of the convents. Ah! to be earthed up
+among them, sheltered from the herd, not to know what books appear, what
+newspapers are printed, never to know what goes on outside one's cell,
+among men--to complete the beneficent silence of this cloistered life,
+nourishing ourselves with good actions, refreshing ourselves with plain
+song, saturating ourselves with the inexhaustible joys of the liturgies.
+
+Then, who knows? By force of good will, and by ardent prayer, to succeed
+in coming to Him, in entertaining Him, feeling Him near us, perhaps
+almost satisfied with His creature. And he called up before him the joys
+of those abbeys in which Jesus abode. He remembered that astonishing
+convent of Unterlinden, near Colmar, where in the thirteenth century not
+only one or two nuns, but the whole convent, rose distractedly before
+Christ with cries of joy, nuns were lifted above the ground, others
+heard the songs of seraphim, and their emaciated bodies secreted balm;
+others became transparent or were crowned with stars; all these
+phenomena of the contemplative life were visible in that cloister, a
+high school of Mysticism.
+
+Thus wrapped in thought, he found himself at his own door, without
+remembering the road he had taken, and as soon as he was in his room,
+his whole soul dilated and burst forth. He desired to thank, to call
+for mercy, to appeal to someone, he knew not whom, to complain of he
+knew not what. All at once the need of pouring himself forth, of going
+out of himself, took shape, and he fell on his knees saying to Our Lady,
+
+"Have pity on me, and hear me; I would rather anything than continue
+this shaken existence, these idle stages without an aim. Pardon me, Holy
+Virgin, unclean as I am, for I have no courage for the battle. Ah,
+wouldest thou grant my prayer! I know well that I am over bold in daring
+to ask, since I am not even resolved to turn out my soul, to empty it
+like a bucket of filth, to strike it on the bottom, that the lees may
+trickle out and the scales fall off, but ... but ... thou knowest I am
+so weak, so little sure of myself, that in truth I shrink.
+
+"Oh, all the same I would desire to flee away, a thousand miles from
+Paris, I know not where, into a cloister. My God! yet this is very
+madness that I speak, for I could not stay two days in a convent; nor
+indeed would they take me in."
+
+Then he thought,--
+
+"Though this once I am less dry, less unclean than is my wont, I can
+find nothing to say to Our Lady but insanities and follies, when it
+would be so simple to ask her pardon, to beg her to have pity on my
+desolate life, to aid me to resist the demands of my vices, not to pay
+as I do the royalties on my nerves, the tax on my senses.
+
+"All the same," he said, rising, "enough of this, I will at least do
+what little I can; without more delay I will go to the abbe to-morrow. I
+will explain the struggle of my soul, and we will see what happens
+afterwards."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+He was really comforted when the servant said that Monsieur l'Abbe was
+at home. He entered a little drawing-room, and waited till the priest,
+whom he heard speaking to someone in the next chamber, was alone.
+
+He looked at the little room, and marked that nothing was changed since
+his last visit. It was still furnished with a velvet sofa, of which the
+red, once crimson, had become the faded rose colour of raspberry jam on
+bread. There were also two tall arm-chairs on either side of the
+chimney, which was ornamented by an Empire clock, and some china vases
+filled with sand, in which were stuck some dry stalks of reed. In a
+corner against the wall, under an old wooden crucifix, was a prie-dieu,
+marked by the knees, an oval table in the centre, some sacred engravings
+on the walls; and that was all.
+
+"It is like an hotel, or an old maid's lodging," thought Durtal. The
+commonness of the furniture, the curtains in faded damask, the panels
+hung with a paper covered with bouquets of poppies and field-flowers in
+false colours, were like lodgings by the month, but certain details,
+above all the scrupulous cleanliness of the room, the worked cushions on
+the sofa, the grass mats under the chairs, an hortensia like a painted
+cauliflower placed in a flower-pot covered with lace, looked on the
+other hand like the futile and icy room of a devout woman.
+
+"Nothing was wanting but a cage of canaries, photographs in plush
+frames, shell-work and crochet mats."
+
+Durtal had got so far in his reflections when the abbe came in with
+extended hand, gently finding fault with his long absence.
+
+Durtal made what excuses he could, unusual occupations, long weariness.
+
+"And our Blessed Lidwine, how do you get on with her?"
+
+"Ah, I have not even begun her life; I am not in a state of mind which
+allows me to engage in it."
+
+Durtal's accent of discouragement surprised the priest.
+
+"Come, what is the matter? Can I be of any use to you?"
+
+"I do not know, Monsieur l'Abbe. I am almost ashamed to talk to you
+about such troubles," and suddenly he burst out, telling his sorrows in
+any chance words, declaring the unreality of his conversion, his
+struggles with the flesh, his human respect, his neglect of religious
+practices, his aversion from the rites demanded of him, in fact from all
+yokes.
+
+The abbe listened without moving, his chin on his hand.
+
+"You are more than forty," he said, when Durtal was silent; "you have
+passed the age when without any impulse from thought, the awakening of
+the flesh excites temptations, you are now in that period when indecent
+thoughts first present themselves to the imagination, before the senses
+are agitated. We have then to fight less against your sleeping body than
+your mind, which stimulates and vexes it. On the other hand, you have
+arrears and prizes of affection to put out, you have no wife or children
+to receive them, so that your affections being driven back by celibacy,
+you will end by taking them there where at first they should have been
+placed; you try to appease your soul's hunger in chapels, and as you
+hesitate, as you have not the courage to come to a decision, to break
+once for all with your vices, you have arrived at this strange
+compromise; to reserve your tender feeling for the church and the
+manifestations of that feeling for women. That, if I do not mistake, is
+your correct balance-sheet. But, good heavens, you have not too much to
+complain of, for do you not see that the important thing is to care for
+woman only with your bodily senses? When Heaven has given you grace to
+be no longer taken captive by thought, all may be arranged with a little
+effort of will."
+
+"This is an indulgent priest," thought Durtal.
+
+"But," continued the abbe, "you cannot always sit between two stools,
+the moment will come when you must stick to the one, and push the other
+away."
+
+And looking at Durtal, who looked down without answering,--
+
+"Do you pray? I do not ask if you say your morning prayers, for not all
+those, who end by entering on the divine way, after wandering for years
+where chance might take them, call on the Lord so soon as they awake.
+At break of day the soul thinks itself well, thinks itself firmer, and
+at once takes occasion of this fleeting energy to forget God. It is with
+the soul as with the body when it is sick. When night comes our
+sensations are stronger, pain which was quieted awakes, the fever which
+slept blazes up again, filth revives and wounds bleed anew, and then it
+thinks of the divine Miracle-worker, it thinks of Christ. Do you pray in
+the evening?"
+
+"Sometimes--and yet it is very difficult; the afternoon is tolerable,
+but you say truly when the daylight goes, evils spring up. A whole
+cavalcade of obscene ideas then pass through my brain; how can any one
+be recollected at such moments?"
+
+"If you do not feel able to resist in the street or at home, why do you
+not take refuge in the churches?"
+
+"But they are closed when one has most need of them; the clergy put
+Jesus to bed at nightfall."
+
+"I know it, but if most churches are closed, there are a few which
+remain partly open very late. Ah, St. Sulpice is among the number, and
+there is one which remains open every evening, and where those who visit
+it are always sure of prayers and Benediction: Notre Dame des Victoires,
+I think you know it."
+
+"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbe. It is ugly enough to cause tears, it is
+pretentious, it is in bad taste, and the singers churn up a margarine of
+rancid tones. I do not go there then as I go to St. Severin and St.
+Sulpice, to admire there the art of the old 'Praisers of God,' to
+listen, even if they are incorrectly given, to the broad, familiar
+melodies of plain chant. Notre Dame des Victoires is worthless from the
+aesthetic point of view, and yet I go there from time to time, because
+alone in Paris it has the irresistible attraction of true piety, it
+alone preserves intact the lost soul of the Time. At whatever hour one
+goes there people are praying there, prostrate in absolute silence; it
+is full as soon as it is open, and full at its closing, there is a
+constant coming and going of pilgrims from all parts of Paris, arriving
+from the depths of the provinces, and it seems that each one, by the
+prayers that he brings, adds fuel to the immense brazier of Faith whose
+flames break out again under the smoky arches like the thousands of
+tapers which constantly burn, and are renewed from morning till evening,
+before Our Lady.
+
+"Well, I who seek the most deserted corners and the darkest places in
+the chapels, I who hate mobs, mix almost willingly with those I find
+there; because there everyone is isolated, no one is concerned with his
+neighbour, you do not see the human bodies which throng you, but you
+feel the breath of souls around. However refractory, however damp you
+may be, you end by taking fire at this contact, and are astonished to
+find yourself all at once less vile; it seems to me that the prayers
+which elsewhere when they leave my lips fall back to the ground
+exhausted and chilled, spring upwards in that place, are borne on by
+others, grow warm and soar and live.
+
+"At St. Severin I have indeed experienced the sensation of a help
+spreading from the pillars and running through the arches, but, as I
+think, the aid is less strong. Perhaps since the Middle Ages that church
+makes use of, but cannot renew the celestial effluvia with which it is
+charged; while at Notre Dame the help which springs up from the very
+pavement is for ever vivified by the uninterrupted presence of an ardent
+crowd. In the one it is the impregnate stone, the church itself which
+brings consolation, in the other it is above all things the fervour of
+the crowds which fill it.
+
+"And then I have the strange impression that the Virgin, attracted and
+retained by so great faith, only spends a little while in other
+churches, goes there as a visitor, but has made her home, and really
+resides in Notre Dame."
+
+The abbe smiled.
+
+"Come, I see that you know and love it; and yet the church is not on our
+left bank, beyond which, you said to me one day, there is no sanctuary
+worth having."
+
+"Yes, and I am surprised at it, especially as it is placed in a
+thoroughly commercial quarter, two paces from the Exchange, whose
+ignoble shouts can be heard in it."
+
+"It was itself an Exchange," said the abbe.
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"After having been baptized by the monks, and having served as a chapel
+for the discalced Augustinians, it was horribly desecrated in the
+Revolution, and the Exchange was set up within its walls."
+
+"I was not aware of that detail," said Durtal.
+
+"But," continued the abbe, "it was with it, as with those holy women,
+who, if we believe their biographers, recovered by a life of prayer the
+virginity they had formerly lost. Our Lady washed it from its violation,
+and though it is comparatively modern, it is at the present day
+saturated with emanations, infused by effluences of angels, penetrated
+with divine drugs, it is for sick souls what certain thermal springs are
+for the body. People keep their season there, make their novenas, and
+obtain their cure.
+
+"Now to come back to our point; I tell you you will do wisely, if on
+your bad evenings you will attend Benediction in that church. I shall be
+surprised if you do not come out cleansed and at peace."
+
+"If he have only that to offer me, it is little enough," thought Durtal.
+And after a disappointed silence he rejoined,
+
+"But, Monsieur l'Abbe, even were I to visit that sanctuary, and follow
+the offices in other churches, when temptations assail me, even were I
+to confess and draw near the Sacraments, how would that advantage me? I
+should meet as I came out the woman whose very sight inflames my senses,
+and it would be with me as after my leaving St. Severin all unnerved;
+the very feeling of tenderness which I had in the chapel would destroy
+me, and I should fall back into sin."
+
+"What do you know about it?" and the priest suddenly rose, and took long
+strides through the room.
+
+"You have no right to speak thus, for the virtue of the Sacrament is
+formal, the man who has communicated is no longer alone. He is armed
+against others and defended against himself," and crossing his arms
+before Durtal he exclaimed,--
+
+"To lose one's soul for the pleasure of momentary gratification! what
+madness. And since the time of your conversion, does not that disgust
+you?"
+
+"Yes, I am disgusted with myself, but only after my swinish desires are
+satisfied. If only I could gain true repentance."
+
+"Rest assured," said the abbe, who sat down again, "you will find it."
+
+And, seeing that Durtal shook his head,
+
+"Remember what Saint Teresa said: 'One trouble of those who are
+beginning is, that they cannot recognize whether they have true
+repentance for their faults; but they have it, and the proof is their
+sincere resolution to serve God.' Think of that sentence, for it applies
+to you; that repugnance to your sins which wearies you is witness to
+your regret, and you have a desire to serve the Lord, since you are in
+fact struggling to go to Him."
+
+There was a moment of silence.
+
+"Well, then, Monsieur l'Abbe, what is your advice?"
+
+"I advise you to pray in your own house, in church, everywhere, as much
+as you can. I do not prescribe any religious remedy, I simply invite you
+to profit by some precepts of pious hygiene, afterwards we will see."
+
+Durtal remained undecided, discontented, like those sick persons who
+find fault with doctors, who, to satisfy them, prescribe only colourless
+drugs.
+
+The priest laughed.
+
+"Confess," he said, looking him in the face, "confess that you are
+saying to yourself, 'It was not worth while to put myself out, for I am
+no further advanced, this good fellow, the priest, practises expectant
+medicine; instead of cutting short my crises with energetic remedies, he
+palters, advises me to go to bed early, not to catch cold--'"
+
+"Oh, Monsieur l'Abbe," protested Durtal.
+
+"Yet I do not wish to treat you like a child, or talk to you like a
+woman; now attend to me!
+
+"The way in which your conversion has worked leaves me in no doubt
+whatever. There has been what Mysticism calls the divine touch,
+only--note this--God has dispensed with human intervention, even with
+the interference of a priest, to bring you back into the road you have
+left for more than twenty years.
+
+"Now we cannot reasonably suppose that the Lord has acted lightly, and
+that He will now leave His work unaccomplished. He will carry it through
+if you put no obstacle in His way.
+
+"In fact you are at this moment like a block in His hands; what will He
+do with it? I do not know, but since He has kept to Himself the conduct
+of your soul, let Him act; be patient, He will explain His action; trust
+in Him, He will help you; be content to protest with the Psalmist: 'Doce
+me facere voluntatem tuam, quia Deus meus es tu.'
+
+"I tell you again I believe in the preventive virtue, the formal power
+of the Sacraments. I quite understand the system of Pere Milleriot, who
+obliged those persons to communicate whom he thought would afterwards
+fall again into sin. For their only penance he obliged them to
+communicate again and again, and he ended by purifying them with the
+Sacred Species, taken in large doses. It is a doctrine at once realistic
+and exalted.
+
+"But reassure yourself," continued the abbe, looking at Durtal, who
+seemed wearied, "I do not intend to experiment on you in this way; on
+the contrary, my advice is that in the state of ignorance in which we
+are of God's will, you abstain from the Sacraments.
+
+"For you should desire them, and it should come from you rather than
+from Him; be sure that sooner or later you will thirst for Penance,
+hunger for the Eucharist. Well, when unable to restrain yourself longer,
+you ask for pardon and entreat to be allowed to approach the Holy Table,
+we shall see, we will ask Him what way He will choose to take, in order
+to save you."
+
+"But there are not, I presume, several ways of confessing and
+communicating?"
+
+"Certainly not, that is just what I meant to say ... but ..."
+
+And the priest hesitated, at a loss for words.
+
+"It is quite certain," he began again, "that art has been the principal
+means which the Saviour has used to make you absorb the Faith. He has
+taken you on your weak side--or strong side, if you like that better. He
+has infused into your nature the chief mystical works; he has persuaded
+and converted you, less by the way of reason than the way of the senses;
+and indeed those are the special conditions you have to take into
+account.
+
+"On the other hand your soul is not humble and simple, you are a sort of
+'sensitive,' whom the least imprudence, the least stupidity of a
+confessor would at once repel.
+
+"Therefore that you may not be at the mercy of a troublesome impression,
+certain precautions must be taken. In the state of weakness and
+feebleness in which you are, a disagreeable face, an unlucky word,
+antipathetic surroundings, a mere nothing would be enough to rout
+you--is it not so?"
+
+"Alas!" sighed Durtal, "I am obliged to answer that you are right; but,
+Monsieur l'Abbe, I do not think I shall have to fear such disillusions
+if when the moment you predict has come you will allow me to make my
+confession to you."
+
+The priest was silent for a while; then said,
+
+"No doubt, since I have met you, I may probably be useful to you, but I
+have an idea that my part will be confined to pointing out the road to
+you; I shall be a connecting link, and nothing more, you will end as you
+have begun, without help, alone." The abbe remained in thought, then
+shook his head, and went on: "Let us leave the subject, however, for we
+cannot anticipate the designs of God; to sum up, try to stifle in prayer
+your attacks of the flesh, it is a less matter not to be overcome at the
+moment, than to direct all your efforts not to be so."
+
+Then the priest added gently to rouse the spirits of Durtal, whom he saw
+to be depressed,
+
+"If you fall do not despair, and throw the handle after the hatchet. Say
+to yourself, that, after all Lust is not the most unpardonable of
+faults, that it is one of two sins for which the human being pays cash,
+and which are consequently expiated in part at least before death. Say
+to yourself that wantonness and avarice refuse all credit and will not
+wait; and in fact, whoever unlawfully commits a fleshly act is almost
+always punished in his lifetime. For some there are bastards to provide
+for, sickly wives, low connections, broken careers, abominable
+deceptions on the part of those they have loved. On whichever side we
+turn when women are concerned we have to suffer, for she is the most
+powerful instrument of sorrow which God has given to man.
+
+"It is the same with the passion for gain. Every being who allows
+himself to be overcome by that hateful sin, pays for it as a rule before
+his death. Look at the Panama business. Cooks, housekeepers, small
+proprietors who till then had lived in peace, seeking no inordinate
+gains, no illicit profit, threw themselves like madmen into that
+business. They had one only thought, to gain money; the chastisement of
+their cupidity was, as you know, sudden."
+
+"Yes," said Durtal, laughing, "the de Lesseps were the agents of
+providence, when they stole the savings of fools, who had moreover got
+them probably by thieving."
+
+"In a word," said the abbe, "I repeat my last advice: do not be at all
+discouraged if you sink. Do not despise yourself too much; have the
+courage to enter a church afterwards; for the devil catches you by
+cowardice, the false shame, the false humility he suggests, nourish,
+maintain, solidify your wantonness in some measure.
+
+"Well! no good-bye; come and see me soon again."
+
+Durtal found himself in the street a little confused. "It is evident,"
+he murmured, as he stalked along, "that the Abbe Gevresin is a clever
+spiritual watchmaker. He has dexterously taken to pieces the movement of
+my passions, and made the hours of idleness and weariness strike, but,
+after all, his advice comes only to this: stew in your own juice and
+wait.
+
+"Indeed he is right; if I had come to the point I should not have gone
+to him to chatter, but really to confess. What is strange is that he
+does not at all seem to think he will have to put me through the
+wash-tub; and to whom does he mean me to go--to the first comer who will
+wind about me his spool of commonplaces, and stroke me with his big
+hands without seeing clearly?
+
+"Well, well ... what is the time?" He looked at his watch. "Six o'clock,
+and I do not care to go home. What shall I do till dinner?"
+
+He was near St. Sulpice. He went in and sat down, to clear his thoughts
+a little, taking a place in the Chapel of Our Lady, which at that hour
+was almost empty.
+
+He felt no wish to pray, and rested there, looking at the great arch of
+marble and gold, like a scene in a theatre, where the Virgin, the only
+figure in the light, advances towards the faithful, as from a decorated
+grotto, on plaster clouds.
+
+Meanwhile two Little Sisters of the Poor came and knelt not far from
+him, and meditated, their heads between their hands.
+
+He thought as he looked at them,--
+
+"Those souls are to be envied who can thus be abstracted in prayer. How
+do they manage it? For, in fact, it is not easy, if one thinks of the
+sorrows of the world, to praise the vaunted mercy of God. It is all very
+fine to believe that He exists, to be certain that He is good; in fact,
+we do not know Him--we are ignorant of Him. He is, and, in fact, He can
+only be, immanent, permanent, and inaccessible. He is we know not what,
+and at most we know what He is not. Try to imagine Him, and the senses
+fail, for He is above, about, and in each one of us. He is three and He
+is one; He is each and He is all; He is without beginning, and He will
+be without end; He is above all and for ever incomprehensible. If we try
+to picture Him to ourselves and give Him a human wrappage, we come back
+to the simple conception of the early times, we represent Him under the
+features of an ancestor. Some old Italian model, some old Father
+Tourgeneff, with a long beard, and we cannot but smile, so childish is
+the likeness of God the Father.
+
+"He is, in fact, so absolutely above the imagination and the senses,
+that He comes only nominally into prayer, and the impulses of humanity
+ascend especially to the Son, Who only can be addressed, because He
+became man, and is to us somewhat of an elder brother, because, having
+wept in human form, we think He will hear us more readily, and be more
+compassionate to our sorrows.
+
+"As to the third Person, He is even more disconcerting than the first.
+He is especially the unknowable. How can we imagine this God formless
+and bodiless, this Substance equal to the two others, who, as it were,
+breathe Him forth? We think of Him as a brightness, a fluid, a breath;
+we cannot even lend to Him as to the Father the face of a man, since on
+the two occasions that He took to Himself a body, He showed Himself
+under the likenesses of a dove and of tongues of fire, and these two
+different aspects do not help to a suggestion of the new appearance He
+might assume.
+
+"Certainly the Trinity is terrible, and makes the brain reel. Ruysbroeck
+has moreover said admirably, 'Let those who would know and study what
+God is, know that it is forbidden; they will go mad.'
+
+"So," he continued, looking at the two Little Sisters, who were now
+telling their beads, "these good women are right not to try to
+understand, and to confine themselves to praying with all their heart to
+the Mother and the Son.
+
+"Moreover, in all the lives of the saints which they have read, they
+have made certain that Jesus and Mary always appeared to the elect to
+console and strengthen them.
+
+"In fact, how stupid I am. To pray to the Son is to pray to the two
+others, for in praying to one among them I pray at the same time to the
+three, since the three make but one. And the Substances are, however,
+special, because if the divine Essence is one and simple, it is so in
+the threefold distinction of the Persons; but, again, what is the use of
+fathoming the Impenetrable?
+
+"Yet," he continued, remembering the interview he had just had with the
+priest, "how will all this end? If the abbe be right, I no longer
+belong to myself; I am about to enter the unknown, which frightens me.
+If only the sound of my vices consents to be silent, but I feel that
+they rise furiously within me. Ah, that Florence"--and he thought of a
+woman to whose vagaries he was riveted--"continues to walk about in my
+brain. I see her behind the lowered curtain of my eyes, and when I think
+of her I am a terrible coward."
+
+He endeavoured once more to put her away, but his will was overcome at
+the sight of her.
+
+He hated, despised, and even cursed her, but the madness of his
+illusions excited him; he left her disgusted with her and with himself;
+he swore he would never see her again, but did not keep his resolve.
+
+He saw her now in vision extend her hand to him.
+
+He recoiled, struggling to free himself; but his dream continued
+mingling her with the form of one of the sisters whose gentle profile he
+saw.
+
+Suddenly he started, returned to the real world, and saw that he was at
+St. Sulpice, in the chapel. "It is disgusting that I should come here to
+soil the church with my horrible dreams; I had better go."
+
+He went out in confusion, thinking, "Perhaps if I visit Florence once
+again, I may perhaps put an end to this haunting sense of her presence,
+seeing and knowing the reality."
+
+And he was obliged to answer himself that he was becoming idiotic, for
+he knew by experience that past desire grows in proportion as it is
+nourished. "No, the abbe was right; I have to become and to remain
+penitent. But how? Pray? How can I pray, when evil imaginations pursue
+me even in church? Evil dreams followed me to La Glaciere; here they
+appear again, and smite me to the ground. How can I defend myself? for
+indeed it is frightful to be thus alone, to know nothing and have no
+proof, to feel the prayers which one tears out of oneself fall into the
+silence and the void without a gesture to answer, without a word of
+encouragement, without a sign. I do not even know if He be there, and if
+He listens. The abbe tells me to wait an indication, an order from on
+high; but, alas! they come to me from below."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Many months passed. Durtal continued his alternation of wanton and pious
+ideas. Without power to resist, he saw himself slipping. "All this is
+far from clear," he cried, one day, in a rage, when, less apathetic than
+usual, he forced himself to take stock. "Now, Monsieur l'Abbe, what does
+this mean? Whenever my sensual obsessions are weaker, so also are my
+religious impressions."
+
+"That means," said the priest, "that your adversary is holding out to
+you the most treacherous of his baits. He seeks to persuade you that you
+will never attain to anything unless you will give yourself up to the
+most repugnant excesses. He tries to convince you that satiety and
+disgust of these acts alone will bring you back to God; he incites you
+to commit them that they may, so to speak, bring about your deliverance;
+he leads you into sin under pretext of delivering you from it. Have a
+little energy, despise these sophistries and resist him."
+
+He went to see the Abbe Gevresin every week. He liked the patient
+discretion of the old priest, who let him talk when he was in a
+confidential humour, listened to him carefully, manifested no surprise
+at his frequent temptations and his falls. Only the abbe always returned
+to his first advice, insisted on regular prayer, and that Durtal should
+each day, if possible, visit a church. He also now said, "The hour is
+important for the success of these practices. If you wish that the
+chapels should be favourable to you, get up in time to be present at
+daybreak at the first mass, the servants' mass, and also be very often
+in the sanctuaries at nightfall."
+
+The priest had evidently formed a plan; Durtal did not yet wholly
+understand it, but he was bound to admit that this discipline of
+temporizing, this constant call to thought always directed to God, by
+his daily visits to the churches, acted upon him at last, and little by
+little softened his soul. One fact proved it: that he who for so long a
+time had been unable to meditate in the morning, now prayed as soon as
+he awoke. Even in the afternoon he found himself on some days seized
+with the need of speaking humbly with God, with an irresistible desire
+to ask His pardon and implore His help.
+
+It seemed then that the Lord knocked at his door with gentle touches,
+wishing so to recall his attention, and draw him to Him; but when,
+softened and troubled, Durtal would enter into himself to seek God, he
+wandered vaguely, not knowing what he said, and thinking of other things
+while speaking to Him.
+
+He complained of these wanderings and distractions to the priest, who
+answered,--
+
+"You are on the threshold of the probationary life; you cannot yet
+experience the sweet and familiar friendship of prayer. Do not sadden
+yourself because you cannot close behind you the gate of your senses.
+Watch and wait; pray badly if you can do nothing else, but pray all the
+same.
+
+"Be very sure too that every one has experienced the troubles which
+distress you; above all, believe that we do not walk blindfold, that
+Mysticism is an absolutely exact science. It can foretell the greater
+part of the phenomena which occur in that soul which the Lord intends
+for a perfect life; it follows also spiritual operations with the same
+clearness as physiology observes the different states of the body. For
+ages and ages it has disclosed the progress of grace and its effects,
+now impetuous and now slow; it has even pointed out the modifications of
+material organs which are transformed when the soul entirely loses
+itself in God.
+
+"Saint Denys the Areopagite, Saint Bonaventure, Hugh and Richard of
+Saint Victor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bernard, Ruysbroeck, Angela of
+Foligno, the two Eckharts, Tauler, Suso, Denys the Carthusian, Saint
+Hildegarde, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint
+Magdalen of Pazzi, Saint Gertrude, and others have set forth in a
+masterly way the principles and theories of Mysticism, and it has found
+at last an admirable psychologist to sum up its rules and their
+exceptions; a Saint who has verified in her own person the supernatural
+phases she has described--a woman whose lucidity was more than
+human--Saint Teresa. You have read her life, and her 'Castles of the
+Soul'!"
+
+Durtal nodded assent.
+
+"Then you have your information; you ought to know that before reaching
+the shores of Blessedness, before arriving at the fifth dwelling of the
+interior castle, at that prayer of union wherein the soul is awakened in
+regard to God, and completely asleep to all things of earth and to
+herself, she must pass through lamentable states of dryness, and the
+most painful strainings. Take heart therefore; say to yourself that this
+dryness should be a source of humility, and not a cause of disquietude;
+do, in fact, as Saint Teresa would have you: carry your cross, and not
+drag it after you."
+
+"That magnificent and terrible Saint frightens me," sighed Durtal. "I
+have read her works, and, do you know, she gives me the idea of a
+stainless lily, but a metallic lily, forged of wrought iron; you will
+admit that those who suffer have scant consolations to expect from her."
+
+"Yes; in the sense that she does not think of the creature except in the
+way of Mysticism. She supposes the fields already ploughed, the soul
+already freed from its more vehement temptations, and sheltered from
+crises; her starting-point is as yet too high and too distant for you,
+for, in fact, she is addressing nuns, women of the cloister, beings who
+live apart from the world, and who are consequently already advanced on
+those ascetic ways wherein God is leading them.
+
+"But make an effort in the spirit to free yourself from this mud, cast
+away for a few moments the memory of your imperfections and your
+troubles, and follow her. See then how experienced she is in the domain
+of the supernatural, how, in spite of her repetitions and tediousness,
+she explains wisely and clearly the mechanism of the soul unfolding when
+God touches it. In subjects where words fail and phrases crumble away,
+she succeeds in making herself understood, in showing, making felt,
+almost making visible, the inconceivable sight of God buried in the
+soul, and taking His pleasure there.
+
+"And she goes still further into the mystery, even to the end; bounds
+with a final spring to the very gates of heaven, but then she faints on
+adoration, and being unable to express herself further, she soars,
+describing circles like a frightened bird, wandering beyond herself, in
+cries of love."
+
+"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, I recognize that Saint Teresa has explored deeper
+than any other the unknown regions of the soul; she is in some measure
+its geographer, has drawn the map of its poles, marked the latitudes of
+contemplation, the interior lands of the human sky. Other Saints have
+explored them before her, but they have not left us so methodical nor so
+exact a topography.
+
+"But in spite of this I prefer those mystical writers who have less
+self-analysis, and discuss less, who always do throughout their works
+what Saint Teresa did at the end of hers--that is, who are all on fire
+from the first page to the last, and are consumed and lost at the feet
+of Christ. Ruysbroeck is among these. The little volume which Hello has
+translated is a very furnace; and, again, to quote a woman, take Saint
+Angela of Foligno, not so much in the book of her visions which may not
+be always effectual, as in the wonderful life which she dictated to
+Brother Armand, her confessor. She too explains, and much earlier than
+Saint Teresa, the principles and effects of Mysticism; but if she is
+less profound, less clever in defining shades, on the other hand she is
+wonderfully effusive and tender. She caresses the soul; she is a
+Bacchante of divine love, a Maenad of purity. Christ loves her, holds
+long conversations with her; the words she has retained surpass all
+literature, and are manifestly the most beautiful ever written. This is
+no longer the rough Christ, the Spanish Christ who begins by trampling
+on His creature to make him more supple; He is the merciful Christ of
+the Gospels, the gentle Christ of Saint Francis, and I like the Christ
+of the Franciscans better than the Christ of the Carmelites."
+
+"What will you say, then," said the abbe, with a smile, "of St. John of
+the Cross? You compared Saint Teresa just now to a flower in wrought
+iron; he too is such, but he is the lily of tortures, the royal flower
+which the executioners were wont of old time to stamp on the heraldic
+flesh of convicts. Like red-hot iron, he is at the same time burning and
+sombre. As you turn over the pages, Saint Teresa now and then bends over
+and sorrows and compassionates us; he remains impenetrable, buried in
+his internal abyss, occupied, above all things, in describing the
+sufferings of the soul which, after having crucified its desires, passes
+through the 'Night obscure,' that is to say, through the renunciation of
+all which comes from the sensible and the created.
+
+"He wills that we should extinguish our imagination--so lethargize it
+that it can no longer form images--imprison our senses, annihilate our
+faculties. He wills that he who desires to unite himself to God should
+place himself under an exhausted receiver, and make a vacuum within, so
+that, if he choose, the Pilgrim should descend therein, and purify
+himself, tearing out the remains of sins, extirpating the last relics of
+vice.
+
+"Then the sufferings which the soul endures overpass the bounds of the
+possible, it lies lost in utter darkness, falls under discouragement and
+fatigue, believes itself for ever abandoned by Him to whom it cries, who
+now hides Himself and answers not again, happy still when in that agony,
+the pangs of the flesh are not added, and that abominable spirit which
+Isaias calls the spirit of confusion, and which is none other than the
+disease of scrupulousness pushed to its extreme.
+
+"Saint John makes you shudder when he cries out that this night of the
+soul is bitter and terrible, and that the being who suffers it is
+plunged alive into hell. But when the old man is purged out, when he is
+scraped at every seam, raked over every face, light springs out, and God
+appears. Then the soul casts itself like a child into His arms, and the
+incomprehensible fusion takes place.
+
+"You see Saint John penetrates more deeply than others into the depths
+of mystical initiation. He also, like Saint Teresa and Ruysbroeck, treats
+of the spiritual marriage, of the influx of grace, and its gifts; but he
+first dared to describe minutely the dolorous phases which till then had
+been but hinted at with trembling.
+
+"Then if he is an admirable theologian, he is also a rigorous and
+clear-sighted saint. He has not those weaknesses which are natural to a
+woman; he does not lose himself in digressions, nor return continually
+on his own steps; he walks straight forward, but you often see him at
+the end of the road, blood-stained and terrible, with dry eyes."
+
+"But, but," said Durtal, "surely not all souls whom Christ will lead in
+the ways of mysticism are tried thus?"
+
+"Yes, almost always, more or less."
+
+"I will confess that I thought the spiritual life was less arid and less
+complex. I imagined that by leading a pure life, praying one's best, and
+communicating, one would attain without much trouble, not indeed to
+taste the infinite joys reserved for the saints, but at last to possess
+the Lord, and live, at least, near Him, at rest.
+
+"And I should be quite content with this middle class joy. The price
+paid in advance for the exaltation described by Saint John disconcerts
+me."
+
+The abbe smiled, but made no answer.
+
+"But do you know that if it be so," replied Durtal, "we are very far
+from the Catholicism that is taught us? It is so practical, so benign,
+so gentle, in comparison with Mysticism."
+
+"It is made for lukewarm souls--that is to say, for almost all the pious
+souls which are about us; it lives in a moderate atmosphere, without too
+great suffering or too much joy; it only can be assimilated by the
+masses, and the priests are right to present it thus, since otherwise
+the faithful would cease to understand it, or would take flight in
+alarm."
+
+"But if God judge that a moderate religion is amply sufficient--for the
+masses believe that he demands the most painful efforts on the part of
+those whom he deigns to initiate into the supremely adorable mysteries
+of His Person--it is necessary and just that he should mortify them
+before allowing them to taste the essential intoxication of union with
+Him."
+
+"In fact, the end of Mysticism is to render visible, sensible, almost
+palpable, the God who remains silent and hidden from all."
+
+"And to throw us into His deep, into the silent abyss of joy! But in
+order to speak correctly, we must forget the ordinary use of expressions
+which have been degraded. In order to describe this mysterious love, we
+are obliged to draw our comparisons from human acts, and to inflict on
+the Lord the shame of our words. We have to employ such terms as
+'union,' 'marriage,' 'wedding feast'; but it is impossible to speak of
+the inexpressible, and with the baseness of our language declare the
+ineffable immersion of the soul in God."
+
+"The fact is," murmured Durtal ... "but to return to Saint Teresa...."
+
+"She too," interrupted the abbe, "has treated of this 'Night obscure'
+which terrifies you; but she only speaks of it in a few lines. She calls
+it the soul's agony--a sadness so bitter that she strove in vain to
+depict it."
+
+"No doubt, but I prefer her to Saint John of the Cross, for she is not
+so discouraging as that inflexible saint. Admit that he belongs too much
+to the land of those large Christs who bleed in caverns."
+
+"Of what nationality then was Saint Teresa?"
+
+"Yes, I know she was a Spaniard, but so complex, so strange, that race
+seems obliterated in her, less clearly defined.
+
+"It is clear she was an admirable psychologist, but also how strange is
+in her the mixture of an ardent mystic and a cool woman of business.
+For, in fact, she has a double nature; she is a contemplative outside
+the world, and at the same time a statesman, a female Colbert of the
+cloister. In fact, never was woman so consummate a skilled artisan and
+so powerful an organizer. When we consider that, in spite of incredible
+difficulties, she founded thirty-two nunneries, that she put them all
+under obedience to a rule which is a model of wisdom, a rule which
+foresees and rectifies the most ignored mistakes of the heart, it is
+astonishing to hear her treated by strong-minded people as an hysterical
+madwoman."
+
+"One of the distinctive marks of the mystics," answered the abbe, with a
+smile, "is just their absolute balance, their entire common sense."
+
+These conversations cheered Durtal; they planted on him seeds of
+reflection which sprang up when he was alone; they encouraged him to
+trust to the advice of this priest, and follow his counsels. He found
+himself all the better for this conduct, in that his visits to the
+churches, his prayers and readings occupied his objectless life, and he
+was no longer wearied.
+
+"I have at least gained peaceable evenings and quiet nights," he said to
+himself.
+
+He knew the soothing help of a pious evening.
+
+He visited St. Sulpice at those times when, under the dull gleam of the
+lamps, the pillars opened out and threw long panels of darkness on the
+ground. The chapels which remained open were in shade, and in the nave
+before the high altar a single cluster of lamps, above in the darkness,
+shone out like a luminous bunch of red roses.
+
+In the stillness no sounds were heard but the dull thud of a door, the
+creaking of a chair, the short paces of a woman, the hurried stride of a
+man.
+
+Durtal was almost isolated in the obscure chapel which he had chosen; he
+kept himself there so far from all, so far from the city whose full
+pulse was beating only two paces from him. He knelt down and remained
+still, he prepared to speak, and had nothing to say, felt himself
+carried away by an impulse, but no words came. He ended by falling into
+a vague languor, experiencing that indolent ease, that dim sense of
+comfort, which the body feels in a medicated bath.
+
+He fell a-dreaming of the lot of the women who were round about him here
+and there, in chairs. Ah! those poor little black shawls, those
+miserable pleated caps, those wretched tippets, those doleful seed
+rosaries they fingered in the shade.
+
+Some in mourning, sobbed still inconsolable; others, overwhelmed, bent
+their backs and hung their heads on one side; others prayed, their
+shoulders shaking, their head in their hands.
+
+The task of the day was over; those wearied of their life came to ask
+for mercy. Everywhere misfortune was kneeling, for the rich, the
+healthy, the happy hardly pray; all around in the church were women,
+widowed or old, without love, women deserted, women whose home was a
+torture, praying that existence might become more merciful, that the
+dissoluteness of their husbands might cease, the vices of their sons
+amend, the health of those they loved grow stronger.
+
+A lamentable perfume went up like incense to Our Lady from a very sheaf
+of woes.
+
+Few men came to this hidden meeting-place of trouble; still fewer young
+people, for these have not yet suffered enough; there were only a few
+old men, and a few sick who dragged themselves along by the backs of the
+chairs, and a little hunchback, whom Durtal saw coming there every
+evening, an outcast who could only be loved by Her who does not even see
+the body.
+
+A burning pity seized on Durtal at the sight of those unhappy ones who
+came to beg from Heaven a little of the love refused them by men; and
+he who could not pray on his own account ended by joining himself to
+their pleadings, and praying for them.
+
+So indifferent in the afternoon, the churches were truly persuasive,
+truly sweet, in the evening; they seemed to bestir themselves at
+nightfall, and to compassionate in their solitude the sufferings of
+those sick creatures whose complaints they heard.
+
+And their first mass in the morning, the mass of working women and
+servant maids was no less touching; there were there no bigots nor
+curious persons, but poor women who came to seek in communion strength
+to live their hours of onerous tasks and servile needs. They knew as
+they left the church that they were the living custodians of a God, of
+Him who was ever while on earth the Poor Man, who took pleasure only in
+souls who had scarce where to lay their head; they knew themselves His
+chosen, and did not doubt that when He entrusted to them under the form
+of bread the memorial of His suffering, He demanded of them in exchange
+that they should live in sorrow and humility. And what harm then could
+do to them the cares of a day spent in the salutary shame of base
+occupations?
+
+"I now understand," thought Durtal, "why the abbe made such a point of
+my seeing the churches early or late; those are, in fact, the only times
+in which the soul expands."
+
+But he was too idle to be often present at early mass; he was content to
+take his relaxation after dinner in the chapels. He came out with a
+feeling of peace, even if he had prayed badly or not prayed at all. On
+other evenings, on the contrary, he felt tired of solitude, tired of
+silence, tired of darkness, and then he abandoned St. Sulpice and went
+to Notre Dame des Victoires.
+
+In this well-lighted sanctuary there was no longer that depression, that
+despair of poor wretches who dragged themselves to the nearest church
+and sat down in the shade. The pilgrims to Notre Dame des Victoires
+brought a surer confidence, and that faith softened their sorrows, whose
+bitterness was dissipated in the explosions of hope, the stammering
+adoration, which spouted up all around. There were two currents in that
+refuge, that of people who asked for favours, and that of those who,
+having gained them, were profuse in thankfulness and in acts of
+gratitude. Therefore, that church had its especial physiognomy, more
+joyous than sad, less melancholy, more ardent under all circumstances
+than that of other churches.
+
+It had, moreover, the peculiarity of being much frequented by men, but
+less by hypocrites, who will not look you in the face, or with upturned
+eyes, than by men of all classes whose features were not degraded by
+false piety. There alone were to be seen clear expressions and clean
+faces; there, above all, was not that horrible grimace of the working
+man of the Catholic clubs--that hideous creature in a blouse, whose
+breath belies the ill-defined unction of his features.
+
+In that church, covered with _ex votos_, plastered even above the arches
+with inscriptions on marble celebrating the joy for prayers granted and
+benefits received, before that altar of Our Lady where hundreds of
+tapers pierced the air blue with incense with the gilded blades of their
+lances, there were public prayers every evening at eight. A priest in
+the pulpit said the rosary, sometimes the Litany of Our Lady was sung to
+a singular air, a sort of musical cento, but it was impossible to say
+whence it was constructed, very rhythmical, and continually changing its
+tone, now fast, now slow, bringing with it, for a moment, a vague
+recollection of seventeenth-century airs, then turning sharply at a
+tangent, to a barrel-organ tune, a modern, almost vulgar, melody.
+
+Yet, after all, there was something taking in this singular confusion of
+sounds after the "Kyrie eleison" and the opening invocations. The Virgin
+came upon the scene to a dance measure like a ballet girl; but when
+certain of her attributes were paraded, and certain of her symbolical
+names declared, the music became singularly respectful; it became lower,
+halting and solemn, thrice repeating, on the same motive, some of her
+attributes, the "Refugium Peccatorum" among others; then it went on
+again, and began her graces again with a skip.
+
+When by chance there was no sermon, the Benediction took place
+immediately afterwards.
+
+Then with raspings of the choir, a bass with a cold, and two boys who
+snivelled began their liturgical chants: "Inviolata," that languishing
+and plaintive Sequence, with its clear and drawling tune so weak, so
+frail, that it would seem as if it should only be sung by voices in a
+hospital; then the "Parce Domine," that antiphon so suppliant and so
+sad; lastly, that scrap, detached from the "Panga Lingua," the "Tantum
+ergo," humble and thoughtful, attentive and slow.
+
+When the organ sounded out the first chords, and that plain chant melody
+began, the choir had only to cross their arms and hold their tongues. As
+tapers which are lighted by threads of fulminate attached one to the
+other, the faithful caught fire, and, accompanied by the organs, struck
+up for themselves the humble and glorious strains. They were then
+kneeling on the chairs, prostrate on the pavement, and when, after the
+exchange of antiphons and responses, after the "oremus," the priest
+ascended to the altar, his shoulders and hands enfolded in the white
+silk scarf, to take the monstrance, then, at the shrill and hurried
+sounds of the bells, a wind passed which at once bent every head like
+the mowing of grass.
+
+In these groups of souls on fire there was a fulness of devotion, a
+complete and absolute silence, till the bells again rang out, and
+invited human life which had been interrupted to wrap itself in a great
+sign of the Cross and resume its course.
+
+The "Laudate" was not ended when Durtal left the church, before the
+crowd began to move.
+
+"Verily," he said, as he entered his lodgings, "the fervour of that
+congregation, who do not come as in other churches from the districts,
+but are pilgrims from everywhere and one knows not where, is out of tune
+with the blackguardism of this foolish age."
+
+Then at Notre Dame at least one hears curious singing, and he bethought
+him of those strange litanies which he had heard nowhere else, and yet
+he had experienced all kinds, in churches. At St. Sulpice, for example,
+it was recited to two tunes. When the choir sang it was set to a plain
+chant melody, bellowed by the gong of a bass to which the sharp fife of
+the boys made answer; but during Rosary month, on every day except
+Thursday the task of singing it was entrusted to young ladies; then in
+the evening round a wheezy old harmonium, a troup of young and old
+geese, made Our Lady run round on her litanies as on hobby horses to the
+music of a fair.
+
+In other churches, at St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, where they were
+also dropped out by women, the litanies were sprinkled with powder and
+perfumed by bergamot and ambergris. They were, in fact, adapted to a
+minuet tune, and therefore did not disagree with the operatic
+architecture of the church, where they presented a Virgin walking with
+mincing steps, pinching her petticoat with two fingers, bending in
+beautiful curtseys, and recovering herself with a fine bow. This has
+evidently nothing to do with church music, but it was none the less
+disagreeable to hear. It would have made the whole performance complete
+if the harpsichord had been substituted for the organ.
+
+Far more interesting than this lay quavering was the plain chant, given
+more or less badly, as it was moreover given, but yet given, when there
+was no special ceremony at Notre Dame.
+
+It was not arranged there as at St. Sulpice and the other churches where
+the "Tantum ergo" is almost always dressed up in foolish flourishes,
+tunes for military ceremonials or public dinners.
+
+The Church has not allowed the actual text of Saint Thomas Aquinas to be
+altered, but she has let any and every choirmaster suppress the plain
+chant in which it has been wrapped from its birth, which has penetrated
+to its marrow, has clung to each of its phrases, and become with it one
+body and one soul.
+
+It was monstrous, and it must really be that these cures have lost, not
+the sense of art, for that they never had, but the most elementary sense
+of the liturgy, to accept such heresies, and tolerate such outrages in
+their churches.
+
+These thoughts enraged Durtal, but he returned little by little to Notre
+Dame des Victoires and grew calmer. It was well he should examine it
+under all aspects, but it remained none the less mysterious nor the less
+unique in Paris.
+
+At La Salette, at Lourdes, there have been apparitions. "Whether these
+have been authentic or controverted matters little," he thought. "For
+even supposing Our Lady were not there at the moment her coming was
+announced, she was attracted there, and dwells there now, retained there
+by the tide of prayer and the emanations cast up by the faith of
+crowds. Miracles have happened there; it is therefore not astonishing
+that pious crowds flock thither. But here at Notre Dame des Victoires
+has been no apparition; no Melanie, no Bernadette, have seen and
+described the luminous appearance of a 'beautiful Lady.' There are no
+piscinas, no medical staff, no public cures, no mountain top, no grotto,
+nothing. One fine day in 1836 the cure of the parish, the Abbe Dufriche
+Des Genettes, declared that while he was celebrating mass Our Lady
+manifested to him her desire that the sanctuary should be specially
+consecrated to her, and that alone was enough. The church, then a
+desert, has never since been empty, and thousands of _ex votos_ declare
+the graces which since that day the Madonna has accorded to the
+visitors."
+
+"Yes, but in fact," concluded Durtal, "all these suppliants are not
+specially extraordinary souls, for indeed the most part of them are like
+me, they come in their own interests, for themselves and not for Her."
+
+And he remembered the answer of the Abbe Gevresin, to whom he had
+already made the observation.
+
+"You must be singularly far advanced on the road to perfection if you go
+there for Her only."
+
+Suddenly, after so many hours spent in the chapels, there was a
+reaction; the flesh extinguished under the cinders of prayers took fire,
+and the conflagration, springing up from below, became terrible.
+
+Florence seemed present, to Durtal's imagination, at his lodgings, in
+the churches, in the street, everywhere, and he was constantly on the
+watch against her recurrent attractions.
+
+The weather was mixed up with it all; the heaven broke up, a stormy
+summer raged, shattering the nerves, enfeebling the will, letting the
+awakened troop of vices loose in their gloomy moisture. Durtal blenched
+before the dread of long evenings and the abominable melancholy of days
+that never ended. At eight o'clock in the evening the sun had not set,
+and at three in the morning it seemed to wake again; the week was only
+one uninterrupted day, and life was never arrested.
+
+Oppressed by the ignominy of this angry sunshine and these blue skies,
+disgusted at bathing in Niles of sweat, and feeling Niagaras run from
+his hat, he did not stir from home, and then, in his solitude, foul
+thoughts assailed him.
+
+It was an obsession by thought, by vision, in all ways, and the haunting
+was all the more terrible that it was so special, that it never turned
+aside, but concentrated itself always on the same point, the face and
+figure of Florence.
+
+Durtal resisted, then in distraction, took to flight, tried to tire
+himself out by long walks, and to divert his mind by excursions, but the
+ignoble desire followed him in his course, sat before him in the Cafe,
+came between his eyes and the newspaper he strove to read, becoming ever
+more definite. He ended, after hours of struggle, by giving way and
+going to see this woman; he left her overwhelmed, half dead with disgust
+and shame, almost in tears.
+
+Nor did he thus find any solace in his struggle, but the contrary; far
+from escaping it, the hateful charm took more violent and tenacious
+possession of him. Then Durtal thought of and accepted a strange
+compromise, to visit another woman he knew, and in her society to break
+this nervous state, to put an end to this possession, this weariness and
+remorse; and in doing so he strove to persuade himself that in thus
+acting he would be more pardonable, less sinful.
+
+The clearest result of this attempt was to bring back the memory of
+Florence, and her vicious charm.
+
+He continued therefore his intimacy with her, and then he had, during a
+few days, such a revolt from his slavery, that he extricated himself
+from the sewer, and stood on firm ground.
+
+He succeeded in recovering and pulling himself together, and he loathed
+himself. During this crisis he had somewhat neglected the Abbe Gevresin,
+to whom he dared not avow his foulness, but since certain indications
+warned him of new attacks, he took fright, and went to see him.
+
+He explained his crises in veiled words, and he felt so unnerved, so
+sad, that tears stood in his eyes.
+
+"Well, are you now certain that you have that repentance which you
+assure me you have not experienced up to this time?"
+
+"Yes, but what is the good of it, if one is so weak, that in spite of
+all efforts one is certain to be overthrown at the first assault?"
+
+"That is another question. Come, I see that at present you are in fact
+in a state of fatigue requiring help."
+
+"Comfort yourself therefore; go in peace and sin less, the greater part
+of your temptations will be remitted you; you can, if you choose, bear
+the remainder, only take care, if you fall henceforward, you will be
+without excuse, and I do not answer for it, that instead of mending,
+your condition will not be aggravated."
+
+And as Durtal, stupefied, stammered out: "You believe--"
+
+"I believe," said the priest, "in the mystical substitution of which I
+spoke to you; you will moreover experience it in yourself; the saints
+will enter into the lists to help you; they will take the overplus of
+the assaults which you cannot conquer; without even knowing your name,
+from their secluded province, nunneries of Carmelites and Poor Clares
+will pray for you, on receiving a letter from me."
+
+And in fact, from that very day the most acute attacks ceased. Did he
+owe that cessation, that truce, to the intercession of the cloistered
+Orders, or to a change in the weather, which then took place, to the
+less heat of the sun, which gave way to floods of rain? He could not
+tell, but one thing was certain, his temptations were less frequent, and
+he could bear them with impunity.
+
+This idea of convents in their compassion dragging him out of the mud in
+which he had stuck, and by their charity bringing him to the bank,
+excited him. He chose to go to the Avenue de Saxe, to pray in the home
+of the sisters of those who suffered for him.
+
+This time there were no lights, no crowds, as on the morning when he had
+been present at a Procession, no odour of wax or incense, no sweeping by
+of robes of scarlet and cope of gold, all was deserted and dark.
+
+He was there alone, in the sombre and dank chapel, smelling like
+stagnant water, and without saying rosaries mechanically, or repeating
+prayers by rote, he fell into a reverie, endeavouring to look somewhat
+clearly into his life, and take stock of himself. And while he thus
+pulled himself together, far-off voices came behind the grating, drew
+nearer and nearer, passed by the black sieve of the veil, and dropped
+round the altar, whose form rose dimly in the shadow.
+
+These voices of the Carmelites aided Durtal to probe his despair deeply.
+
+Seated in a chair, he said to himself: "When any one is as incapable as
+I am when I speak to Him, it is almost shameful to dare to pray, for
+indeed, if I think of Him, it is that I may ask for a little happiness;
+and that is foolish. In the immediate shipwreck of human reason, wishing
+to explain the terrible enigma of the meaning of life, one only idea
+comes to the surface, in the midst of the wreckage of thoughts which
+sink, the idea of an expiation felt rather than understood, the idea
+that the sole end assigned to life is sorrow.
+
+"Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever
+does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only
+lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in
+advance on a future succession of sorrows.
+
+"Who knows in that case whether anaesthetics which suppress corporal pain
+do not bring into debt those who use them? Who knows whether chloroform
+is not a means of revolt, and if the shrinking of the creature from
+suffering is not seditious, a rebellion against the will of Heaven? If
+this be so, the arrears of torture, the balance of distress, the
+warrants of pain avoided must accumulate terrible interest above, and
+justify the war cry of Saint Teresa, 'Lord, let me always suffer, or
+die;' this explains why, in their trials, the saints rejoice, and pray
+the Lord not to spare them, for they know that the purifying amount of
+ills must be paid in order to be free from debt after death.
+
+"To be just, human nature would be too ignoble without pain, for it
+alone can raise the soul while purifying it, but all that is nothing
+less than consoling," he added. "What an accompaniment to these sad
+thoughts are the wailing voices of these nuns; it is truly frightful."
+
+He ended by fleeing, and taking refuge, to shake off his depression, in
+the neighbouring convent at the bottom of the alley de Saxe, in a
+suburban lane, full of little cottages with gardens in front, where
+serpentine paths of pebbles wound round tufts of pot-herbs.
+
+This was the convent of the Poor Clares of the Ave Maria, an Order
+still more strict than that of the Carmelites, poorer, less fashionable,
+more humble.
+
+This cloister was entered by a little door, partly ajar; you ascended to
+the second storey without meeting anyone, and found a little chapel,
+through whose windows trees were visible, rocking to the chirping of
+riotous sparrows.
+
+This too was a place of burial, but no longer, as though opposite a tomb
+at the bottom of a dark cavern, but rather a cemetery where birds sang
+in the sun among the branches, you might have thought yourself in the
+country, twenty miles from Paris.
+
+The decoration of this bright chapel tried, however, to be gloomy; it
+was like those wine shops whose walls are made to look like those of
+caves, with false stones painted in the imitation plaster. Only the
+height of the nave manifested the childishness of the imposture, and
+declared the vulgarity of the deception.
+
+At the end was an altar above a smooth waxed floor, and on either side
+of it a grating with a black veil. According to the rule of Saint
+Francis, all the ornaments, the crucifix, the candlesticks, the
+tabernacle, were of wood, no object was to be seen in metal, no flower,
+the only luxury in the chapel consisted of two modern stained windows,
+one of which represented Saint Francis, the other Saint Clare.
+
+Durtal thought the sanctuary airy and delightful, but he only stayed
+there a few minutes, for there was not here, as at the Carmelites, an
+absolute solitude, a sombre peace; here there were always two or three
+Poor Clares trotting about the chapel, who looked at him while they were
+arranging the chairs, and seemed surprised at his presence.
+
+They were annoying to him, and he feared he was the same to them, so
+much so that he went away; but this short stay was enough to efface, or
+at least to lessen the funereal impression of the neighbouring convent.
+
+Durtal returned home, at once much appeased and much disquieted--much
+appeased in regard to his temptations, much disquieted about what he
+should do next.
+
+He felt rising in him, and increasing ever more and more, the desire to
+have done with these strifes and fears, but he grew pale when he thought
+of reversing his life, once for all.
+
+But if he still had hesitation and fear, he had no longer the firm
+intention of resisting; he now accepted in principle the idea of a
+change of existence, only he tried to retard the day, and put off the
+hour; he tried to gain time.
+
+Then like people who grow angry at having to wait, on other days he
+wished to put off the inevitable moment no longer, and cried within
+himself that this must end; anything rather than remain as he was.
+
+Then as this desire did not seem heard, he grew discouraged, would no
+longer think of anything, regretted the time past, and deplored that he
+felt himself carried along by such a current.
+
+And when he was rather more cheerful, he tried again to examine himself.
+"In fact I do not at all know how I stand," he thought; "this flux and
+reflux of different wishes alarms me, but how have I come to this point,
+and what is the matter with me?" What he felt, since he became more
+lucid, was so intangible, so indefinite, and yet so continuous that he
+was obliged to give up understanding it. Indeed every time he tried to
+examine his soul, a curtain of mist arose, and hid from him the unseen
+and silent approach of he knew not what. The only impression which he
+carried with him as he rose, was that it was less that he advanced
+towards the unknown, but that this unknown invaded him, penetrated him,
+and little by little took possession of him.
+
+When he spoke to the abbe of this state, at once cowardly and resigned,
+imploring and fearful, the priest only smiled.
+
+"Busy yourself in prayer, and bow down your back," he said one day.
+
+"But I am tired of bending my back, and of trampling always on the same
+spot," cried Durtal. "I have had enough of feeling myself taken by the
+shoulders and led I know not where, it is really time that in one way or
+another this situation came to an end."
+
+"Plainly." And standing up, and looking him in the face, the abbe said,
+impressively,
+
+"This advance towards God which you find so obscure and so slow is, on
+the contrary, so luminous and so rapid that it astonishes me, only as
+you yourself do not move, you do not take account of the swiftness with
+which you are borne along.
+
+"Before long you will be ripe, and then without need to shake the tree
+you will fall off of yourself. The question we have now to answer is
+into what receptacle we must put you, when at last you fall away from
+your life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+"But ... but ..." thought Durtal, "we must at any rate come to an
+understanding; the abbe wearies me with his quiet assumptions, his
+receptacle in which he must place me. He does not, I suppose, think of
+making me a seminarist or a monk; the seminary, at my age, is devoid of
+interest, and as to the convent, it is attractive from the mystical
+point of view, and even enticing from the artistic standpoint, but I
+have not the physical aptitudes, still less the spiritual
+predispositions to shut myself up for ever in a cloister; but putting
+that aside, what does he mean?
+
+"On the other hand he has insisted on lending me the works of Saint John
+of the Cross, and has made me read them; he has then an aim, for he is
+not a man to feel his way as he walks, he knows what he wishes and where
+he is going; does he imagine that I am intended for the perfect life,
+and does he intend to put me on my guard by this course of reading
+against the disillusions which, according to him, beginners experience?
+His scent seems to fail him there. I have a very horror of bigotry, and
+pious polish, but though I admire, I do not feel at all drawn towards
+the phenomena of Mysticism. No, I am interested in seeing them in
+others, I like to see it all from my window, but will not go downstairs,
+I have no pretension to become a saint, all that I desire is to attain
+the intermediate state, between goody-goodiness and sanctity. This is a
+frightfully low ideal, perhaps, but in practice it is the only one I am
+capable of attaining, and yet!
+
+"Then these questions have to be faced! If I am mistaken and am obeying
+false impulses, I am, as I advance, on the verge of madness. How, except
+by a special grace, am I to know whether I am in the right way, or
+walking in the dark towards the abyss? Here, for instance, are those
+conversations between God and the soul so common in the mystical life;
+how can one be sure that this interior voice, these distinct words not
+heard with bodily ears, but perceived by the soul in a clearer fashion
+than if they came by the channels of sense, are true, how be sure that
+they emanate from God, not from our imagination or from the devil
+himself?
+
+"I know, indeed, that Saint Teresa treats this matter at length in her
+'Castles of the Soul,' and that she points out the signs by which we can
+recognize the origin of the words, but her proofs do not seem to me
+always as easy to discern as she thinks.
+
+"'If these expressions come from God,' she says, 'they are always
+accompanied by an effect, and bring with them an authority which nothing
+can resist; thus a soul is in affliction, and the Lord simply suggests
+the words "trouble not thyself," and at once the whirlwind passes, and
+joy revives. In the second place, these words leave an indissoluble
+peace of mind, they engrave themselves on the memory, and often cannot
+be effaced.'
+
+"'In the other case,' she continues, 'if these words proceed from
+imagination or from the demon, none of these effects are produced, a
+kind of uneasiness, anguish and doubt torments you, moreover the
+expressions evaporate in part, and fatigue the soul which endeavours in
+vain to recall them in their entirety.'
+
+"In spite of these tokens, we are, in fact, standing on shifting ground
+in which we may sink at every step, but in his turn Saint John of the
+Cross intervenes, and tells you not to move. What then is to be done?
+
+"'No one,' he says, 'ought to aspire to these supernatural
+communications and rest there, for two motives; first, humility, the
+perfect abnegation of refusing to believe in them; the second, that in
+acting thus, we deliver ourselves from the labour necessary to assure
+ourselves whether these vocal visions are true or false, and so we are
+dispensed from an examination which has no other profit for the soul
+than loss of time and anxiety.'
+
+"Good--but if these words are really pronounced by God, we rebel against
+His will if we remain deaf to them. And then, as Saint Teresa declares,
+it is not in our power not to listen to them, and the soul can only
+think of what it hears when Jesus speaks to it. Moreover, all the
+discussions on this subject are uncertain, for one does not enter of
+one's own will into the strait way, as the Church calls it, we are led,
+and even thrown into it often against the will, and resistance is
+impossible, phenomena occur, and nothing in the world has power to check
+them; witness Saint Teresa, who, resist as she would by humility, fell
+into ecstasy under the divine breath, and was raised from the ground.
+
+"No, these superhuman conditions alarm me, and I do not hold to knowing
+them by experience. As to Saint John of the Cross, the abbe is not wrong
+in calling him unique, but though he sounds the lowest strata of the
+soul, and reaches where human auger has never penetrated, he wearies me
+all the same in my admiration, for his work is full of nightmares which
+repel me; I am not certain that his hell is correct, and some of his
+assertions do not convince me. What he calls the 'night obscure' is
+incomprehensible; 'The sufferings of that darkness surpass what is
+possible,' he cries on each page. Here I lose foothold. I can imagine,
+though I have not experienced them, the moral and terrible pangs, of the
+deaths of friends and relations, love betrayed, hopes which failed,
+spiritual sorrows of all kinds, but such a martyrdom as he proclaims as
+superior to all others, is beyond me, for it is outside our human
+interests, beyond our affections; he moves in an inaccessible sphere, in
+an unknown world very far off.
+
+"I am certainly afraid that this terrible saint, a true man of the
+south, abuses metaphor, and is full of Spanish affectation.
+
+"Moreover I am astonished at the abbe on another point. He, who is so
+gentle, shows a certain leaning to the dry bread of Mysticism; the
+effusions of Ruysbroeck, of Saint Angela, of Saint Catherine of Genoa,
+touch him less than the arguments of saints who are hard reasoners; yet
+by the side of these he has advised me to read Marie d'Agreda, whom he
+ought not to fancy, for she has none of those qualities which are
+admired in the works of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross.
+
+"Ah! he may flatter himself that he has inflicted on me a complete
+disillusion, by lending me her 'Cite Mystique.'
+
+"From the renown of this Spanish woman, I expected the breath of
+prophecy, wide outlooks, extraordinary visions. Not at all; her book is
+simply strange and pompous, wearisome and cold. Then the phraseology of
+her book is intolerable. All the expressions which swarm in those
+ponderous volumes, 'my divine princess,' 'my great queen,' when she
+addresses Our Lady, who in her turn speaks to her as 'my dearest,' just
+as Christ calls her 'my spouse,' 'my well-beloved,' and speaks of her
+continually as 'the object of my pleasure and delight,' the way in which
+she speaks of the angels as 'the courtiers of the great King,' set my
+nerves on edge and weary me.
+
+"They smell of perriwigs and ruffles, bows and dances like Versailles, a
+sort of court mysticism in which Christ pontificates, attired in the
+costume of Louis XIV.
+
+"Moreover Marie d'Agreda enters into most extravagant details. She tells
+us of the milk of Our Lady which cannot grow sour, of female complaints
+from which she was exempt, she explains the mystery of the conception by
+three drops of blood which fell from the heart into the womb of Mary,
+and which the Holy Ghost used to form the child; lastly, she declares
+that Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel played the part of midwives, and
+stood living, under human forms, at the lying-in of the Virgin.
+
+"This is too strong. I know well that the abbe would say that we need
+not concern ourselves with these singularities and these errors, but
+that the 'Cite Mystique' is to be read in relation to the inner life of
+the Blessed Virgin. Yes, but then the book of M. Ollier, which treats of
+the same subject, seems to me curious and trustworthy in quite a
+different way."
+
+Was the priest forcing the note, playing a part? Durtal asked himself
+this, when he saw how determined he was not to avoid the same questions
+during a certain time. He tried now and then, in order to see how the
+matter was, to turn the conversation, but the abbe smiled, and brought
+it back to the point he wished.
+
+When he thought that he had saturated Durtal with mystical works, he
+spoke of them less, and seemed to attach himself mainly to the religious
+Orders, and especially to that of Saint Benedict. He very cleverly
+induced Durtal to become interested in this institution, and to ask him
+about it, and when once he had entered on this ground, he did not depart
+from it.
+
+It began one day when Durtal was talking with him about plain chant.
+
+"You have reason to like it," said the abbe, "for even independently of
+the liturgy and of art, this chant, if I may believe Saint Justin,
+appeases the desires and concupiscences of the flesh, 'affectiones et
+concupiscentias carnis sedat,' but let me assure you, you only know it
+by hearsay, there is no longer any true plain chant in the churches,
+these are like the products of therapeutics, only more or less audacious
+adulterations presented to you.
+
+"None of the chants which are to some extent respected by choirs, the
+'Tantum ergo,' for example, are now exact. It is given almost faithfully
+till the verse 'Praestet fides,' and then it runs off the rails, taking
+no account of the shades, which are, however, quite perceptible, that
+the Gregorian melody introduces when the text declares the impotence of
+reason and the powerful aid of Faith; these adulterations are still more
+apparent, if you listen to the 'Salve Regina' after Compline. This is
+abridged more than half, is enervated, blanched, half its pauses are
+taken away, it is reduced to a mere stump of ignoble music, if you had
+even heard this magnificent chant among the Trappists, you would weep
+with disgust at hearing it bawled in the churches at Paris.
+
+"But besides the textual alteration of the melody as we now have it, the
+way in which the plain chant is bellowed is everywhere absurd. One of
+the first conditions for rendering it well, is that the voices should go
+together, that they should all chant in the same time syllable for
+syllable and note for note, in one word it must be in unison.
+
+"Now, you can verify it yourself, the Gregorian melody is not thus
+treated; every voice takes its own part, and is isolated. Next, plain
+music allows no accompaniment, it must be chanted alone, without organ,
+it bears at most that the instrument should give the intonation and
+accompany it very softly, just enough if need be to sustain the pitch
+taken by the voices; it is not so that you will hear it given in the
+churches."
+
+"Yes, I know it well," said Durtal. "When I hear it at St. Sulpice, St.
+Severin, or Notre Dame des Victoires, I am aware that it is
+sophisticated, but you must admit that it is even then superb. I do not
+defend the tricks, the addition of fiorituri, the falseness of the
+musical pauses, the felonious accompaniment, the concert-room tone
+inflicted on you at Saint Sulpice, but what can I do? in default of the
+original I must be content with a more or less worthless copy, and I
+repeat, even executed in that fashion the music is so admirable that I
+am enchanted by it."
+
+"But," said the abbe quietly, "nothing obliges you to listen to the
+false plain chant, when you can hear the true, for saving your presence,
+there exists, even in Paris, a chapel where it is intact, and given
+according to the rules of which I have spoken."
+
+"Indeed, and where is that?"
+
+"At the Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament in the Rue Monsieur."
+
+"And can anyone enter the convent and be present at the offices?"
+
+"Anyone. Every day in the week, Vespers are sung at three o'clock, and
+on Sundays High Mass is said at nine."
+
+"Ah, had I but known this chapel earlier," said Durtal, the first time
+he came out.
+
+In fact it combined all the conditions he could wish. Situated in a
+solitary street, it had the completest privacy. The architect who built
+it had introduced no innovations or pretentiousness, had built a Gothic
+church, and introduced no fancies of his own.
+
+It was cruciform, but one of the arms was scarcely the full length, for
+want of room, while the other was prolonged into a hall, separated from
+the choir by an iron grating above which the Blessed Sacrament was
+adored by two kneeling angels, whose lilac wings were folded over thin
+rose-coloured backs. Except these two figures, of which the execution
+was truly sinful, the rest was at least veiled by shadow, and was not
+too afflicting to the eyes. The chapel was dim, and always at the time
+of the offices, a young sacristan-sister, tall and pale, and rather
+bent, entered like a shadow, and each time that she passed before the
+altar she fell on one knee and bowed her head profoundly.
+
+She seemed strange and scarcely human, gliding noiselessly over the
+pavement, her head bowed, with a band as low as her eyebrows, and she
+seemed to fly like a large bat when standing before the tabernacle she
+turned her back, moving her large black sleeves as she lighted the
+tapers. Durtal one day saw her features, sickly but charming, her
+eyelids dark, her eyes of a tired blue, and he guessed that her body was
+wasted by prayers, under her black robe drawn together by a leathern
+girdle ornamented by a little medal of the Blessed Sacrament of gilt
+metal, under the trimming, near her heart.
+
+The grating of the enclosure, on the left of the altar, was large, and
+well lighted from behind, so that even when the curtains were drawn it
+was possible to see the whole chapter drawn up in file in their oaken
+stalls surmounted at the end by a higher stall in which the abbess sat.
+A lighted taper stood in the middle of the hall, and before it a nun
+prayed day and night, a cord round her neck, to expiate the insults
+offered to Jesus under His Eucharistic form.
+
+The first time Durtal had visited the chapel, he had gone there on
+Sunday a little before the time of Mass, and he had been thus able to be
+present at the entry of the Benedictine nuns, behind the iron screen.
+They advanced two and two, stopped in the middle of the grating, turned
+to the altar and genuflected, then each bowed to her neighbour, and so
+to the end of this procession of women in black, only brightened by the
+whiteness of the head-band and the collar, and the gilt spot of the
+little monstrance on the breast. The novices came last, to be recognized
+by the white veils which covered their heads.
+
+And when an old priest, assisted by a sacristan, began the mass softly
+at the end of the chapter, a small organ gave the tone to the voices.
+
+Then Durtal might well wonder, for he had never before heard a sole and
+only voice made up of perhaps some thirty, of a tone so strange, a
+superterrestrial voice, which burnt upon itself, in the air, and
+intertwined its soft cooings.
+
+This bore no resemblance to the icy and obstinate lament of the
+Carmelites, nor was it like the unsexed tone, the child's voice,
+squeaking, rounded off at the end of the Franciscan nuns, but quite
+another thing.
+
+At La Glaciere in fact those raw voices, though softened and watered by
+prayers, kept somewhat of the drawling, almost vulgar, inflexion of the
+people from whom they came; they were greatly purified, but remained
+none the less human. Here the tenderness of tones was rendered angelic,
+that voice with no defined origin long bolted through the divine sieve,
+patiently modelled for the liturgical chant, caught fire as it unfolded,
+blazed in virginal clusters of white sound, died down, flowered out
+again in pale pleadings, distant, seraphic at the end of certain chants.
+
+Thus interpreted the Mass gave a special accent to the sense of the
+sequences.
+
+Standing, behind the grating, the convent answered the priest.
+
+Durtal had then heard, after a mournful and solemn "Kyrie Eleison,"
+sharp and almost tragic, the decided cry, so loving and so grave, of the
+"Gloria in Excelsis," to the true plain chant; he had listened to the
+Credo, slow and bare, solemn and pensive, and he was able to affirm that
+these chants were totally different from those which were sung
+everywhere in the churches. St. Severin and St. Sulpice now seemed to
+him profane; in the place of their gentle warmth, their curls and their
+fringes, the angles of their polished melodies, their modern endings,
+their incoherent accompaniments arranged for the organ, he found himself
+in the presence of a chant, thin, sharp and nervous, like the work of an
+early master, and saw the ascetic severity of its lines, its sonorous
+colouring, the brightness of its metal hammered out with the rude yet
+charming art of Gothic jewels, he heard under the woven robe of sound,
+the beating of a simple heart, the ingenuous love of ages, and he
+noticed that curious shade in Benedictine music; it ended all cries of
+adoration, all tender cooings in a timid murmur, cut short, as though
+shrinking in humility, effacing itself modestly as though asking pardon
+of God for daring to love Him.
+
+"Ah, you were very right to send me there," said Durtal to the abbe when
+next he saw him.
+
+"I had no choice," answered the priest, smiling, "for the plain chant is
+respected only in convents under the Benedictine rule. That grand Order
+has restored it. Dom Pothier has done for it what Dom Gueranger has done
+for the liturgy.
+
+"Moreover, beyond the authenticity of the vocal text, and the manner of
+rendering it, there are still two essential conditions for restoring the
+special life of these melodies, and they are hardly found except in
+cloisters, first Faith, and next the understanding the meaning of the
+words sung."
+
+"But," interrupted Durtal, "I do not suppose that the Benedictine nuns
+know Latin."
+
+"I beg your pardon, among the nuns of Saint Benedict, and even among the
+cloistered sisters of other Orders there are a certain number who study
+the language enough to understand the Breviary and the Psalms. That is a
+serious advantage which they have over the choirs, composed for the most
+part of artisans without instruction and without piety, only simple
+workers with their voices.
+
+"Now without wishing to abate your enthusiasm for the musical honesty of
+these nuns, I am bound to say, that in order to understand this
+magnificent chant in its height and breadth, you must hear it, not
+winnowed by the mouths of virgins, even if unsexed, but as it issues,
+unsmoothed, untrimmed from the lips of men. Unfortunately, though there
+are at Paris, in the Rue Monsieur and the Rue Tournefort, two
+communities of Benedictine nuns, there is not on the other hand a single
+monastery of Benedictine monks."
+
+"At the Rue Monsieur do they absolutely follow the rule of Saint
+Benedict?"
+
+"Yes; but over and above the usual vows of poverty, chastity, remaining
+in the cloister, obedience, they make a further vow of separation and
+adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, as formulated by Saint Mechtilde.
+
+"And so they lead the most austere existence of any nuns. They scarcely
+taste flesh; they rise at two in the morning to sing Matins and Lauds,
+night and day, summer and winter, they take turns before the taper of
+reparation, and before the altar. It need not be said," continued the
+abbe after a pause, "that woman is stronger and braver than man; no male
+ascetic could live and lead such a life, especially in the enervating
+atmosphere of Paris."
+
+"What perhaps astounds me still more," said Durtal, "is the kind of
+obedience exacted of them. How can a creature endowed with free will
+annihilate herself to such an extent?"
+
+"Oh," said the abbe, "the obedience is the same in all the great
+Orders, absolute, without reserve; its formula is well summed up by
+Saint Augustine. Listen to this sentence which I remember to have read
+in a commentary on his rule:
+
+"'We must enter into the feelings of a beast of burthen, and allow
+ourselves to be led like a horse or a mule, which have no understanding;
+or rather, that obedience may be still more perfect, since these animals
+kick against the spur, we must be in the hands of a superior like a
+block, or the stock of a tree, which has neither life, nor movement, nor
+action, nor will, nor judgment.' Is that clear?"
+
+"It is most frightful! I quite admit," said Durtal, "that in exchange
+for such abnegation, the nuns must be powerfully aided from on high, but
+are there not some moments of falling away, some cases of despair, some
+instants in which they pine for a natural life in the open air, in which
+they lament that death in life which they have made for themselves; are
+there not days in which their senses wake and cry aloud?"
+
+"No doubt; in the cloistered life the age of twenty-nine is terrible to
+pass, then a passionate crisis arises; if a woman doubles that cape, and
+she almost always does so, she is safe.
+
+"But carnal emotions are not, to speak correctly, the most troublesome
+assault they have to undergo. The real punishment they endure in those
+hours of sorrow is the ardent, wild regret for that maternity of which
+they are ignorant; the desolate womb of woman revolts, and full of God
+though she be, her heart is breaking. The child Jesus whom they have
+loved so well then appears so far off and so inaccessible, and His very
+sight would hardly satisfy them, for they have dreamed of holding Him in
+their arms, of swathing and rocking Him, of giving Him suck, in one
+word, of being mothers.
+
+"Other nuns undergo no precise attack, no assault to which a name can be
+given, but without any definite reason they languish and die suddenly,
+like a taper, blown out. The torpor of the cloister kills them."
+
+"But indeed, Monsieur l'abbe, these details are far from encouraging."
+
+The priest shrugged his shoulders. "It is the poor reverse of a splendid
+stuff," he said, "wonderful recompenses are granted, even in this
+world, to souls in convents."
+
+"Nor do I suppose that if a nun fall, stricken in the flesh, she is
+abandoned. What does the Mother abbess in such a case?"
+
+"She acts according to the bodily temperament and state of the soul of
+the sick person. Note that she has been able to follow her during the
+years of her probation, that she has necessarily gained an influence
+over her; at such times therefore she will watch her daughter very
+closely, endeavour to turn the course of her ideas, breaking her by hard
+work, and by occupying her mind; she must not leave her alone, must
+diminish her prayers, if need be, restrict her hours of office, lessen
+her fasts, give her, if the case demands it, better food. In other
+cases, on the contrary, she will have recourse to more frequent
+communions, lessen her food or cause her to be blooded, mix cooling
+meats with her diet, and above all things she and all the community must
+pray for her.
+
+"An old Benedictine abbess, whom I knew at Saint-Omer, an incomparable
+guide of souls, limited before all things the length of confessions. The
+moment she saw the least symptoms arise she gave two minutes, watch in
+hand, to the penitent, and when the time was up she sent her back from
+the confessional, to mix with her companions."
+
+"Why so?"
+
+"Because in convents, even for souls which are well, confession is a
+most dangerous relaxation, it is as it were too long and too warm a
+bath. In it nuns go to excess, open their hearts uselessly, dwell upon
+their troubles, accentuate them, and revel in them; they come out more
+weakened and more ill than before. Two minutes ought indeed to be enough
+for a nun in which to tell her little sins.
+
+"Yet ... yet ... I must admit it, the confessor is a danger for a
+convent, not that I suspect his honour, that is not at all what I mean,
+but as he is generally chosen from among the bishop's favourites, there
+are many chances that he may be a man who knows nothing, and quite
+ignorant of how to deal with such souls, ends by unsettling them while
+he consoles them. Again, if demoniac attacks, so common in nunneries,
+occur, the poor man can only gape, gives all sorts of confused counsel,
+and hinders the energy of the abbess, who in such matters knows far
+better than he."
+
+"And," said Durtal, who chose his words carefully, "tell me, I suppose
+that tales like those which Diderot gives in his foolish volume 'La
+Religieuse' are incorrect?"
+
+"Unless a community is rotted by a superior given over to Satanism,
+which, thank God, is rare, the filthy stories told by that writer are
+false, and there is moreover a good reason why it should be so, for
+there is a sin which is the very antidote of the other, the sin of
+zeal."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Yes: the sin of zeal which causes the denunciation of our neighbour,
+gives scope to jealousy, creates spying to satisfy hate, that is the
+real sin of the cloister. Well, I assure you that if two sisters became
+quite shameless they would be denounced at once."
+
+"But I thought, Monsieur l'Abbe, that tale-bearing was allowed by the
+rules of most orders?"
+
+"It is, but perhaps there is a temptation to carry it somewhat to
+excess, especially in convents of women; for you can imagine that if
+nunneries contain pure mystics, real saints, they have in them also some
+nuns less advanced in the way of perfection, and who even still retain
+some faults...."
+
+"Come, since we are in the chapter of minute details, dare I ask if
+cleanliness is not just a little neglected by these good women?"
+
+"I cannot say; all that I know is, that in the Benedictine abbeys I have
+known, each nun was free to act as seemed good to her; in certain
+Augustinian constitutions, the case was provided for in contrary
+fashion, it was forbidden to wash the body, except once a month. On the
+other hand, amongst the Carmelites cleanliness is exacted. Saint Teresa
+hated dirt, and loved white linen, her daughters have even, I think, a
+right to have a flask of Eau de Cologne in their cells. You see this
+depends on the order, and probably also, when the rule does not
+expressly mention it, on the ideas which the superior may have on the
+subject. I will add that this question must not be looked at only from
+the worldly point of view, for corporal dirt is for certain souls an
+additional suffering and mortification which they impose on themselves,
+as Benedict Labre."
+
+"He who picked up vermin which left him, and put them piously in his
+sleeve. I prefer mortifications of another kind."
+
+"There are harder ones, believe me, and I think they would suit you
+better. Would you like to imitate Suso, who, to subdue his passions,
+bore on his naked shoulders, for eighteen years, an enormous cross set
+with nails, whose points pierced his flesh? More than that, he
+imprisoned his hands in leather gloves which also bristled with nails,
+lest he should be tempted to dress his wounds. Saint Rose of Lima
+treated herself no better, she bound a chain so tightly round her body
+that it penetrated the skin, and hid itself under the bleeding pad of
+flesh, she wore also a horsehair girdle set with pins, and lay on shards
+of glass; but all these trials are nothing in comparison of those
+inflicted on herself by a Capuchin nun, the venerable Mother Pasidee of
+Siena.
+
+"She scourged herself with branches of juniper and holly, then poured
+vinegar into her wounds, and sprinkled them with salt, she slept in
+winter on the snow, in summer on bunches of nettles, or pebbles, or
+brushes, put drops of hot lead in her shoes, knelt upon thistles, thorns
+and sticks. In January she broke the ice in a cask and plunged into it,
+and she even half-stifled herself by hanging head downwards in a chimney
+in which damp straw was lighted, but that is enough; indeed," said the
+abbe laughing, "if you had to choose, you would like best the
+mortifications which Benedict Labre imposed on himself."
+
+"I would rather have none at all," answered Durtal.
+
+There was a moment's pause.
+
+Durtal's thoughts went back to the Benedictine nuns: "But," said he,
+"why do they put in the 'Semaine religieuse,' after their title
+Benedictine Nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, this further name, 'Convent
+of Saint Louis du Temple?'"
+
+"Because," said the abbe, "their first convent was founded on the actual
+ruins of the Temple prison, given them by royal warrant, when Louis
+XVIII. returned to France.
+
+"Their foundress and superior was Louise Adelaide de Bourbon Conde, an
+unfortunate princess of many wanderings, almost the whole of whose life
+was spent in exile. Expelled from France by the Revolution and the
+Empire, hunted in almost every country in Europe, she wandered by
+chance among convents seeking shelter, now among the nuns of the
+Annunciation at Turin and the Capuchins in Piedmont, now among the
+Trappistines in Switzerland and the Sisters of the Visitation at Vienna,
+now among the Benedictines of Lithuania and Poland. At last she found
+shelter among the Benedictines in Norfolk, till she could again enter
+France.
+
+"She was a woman singularly trained in monastic science and experienced
+in the direction of souls.
+
+"She desired that in her abbey every sister should offer herself to
+heaven in reparation for crimes committed; and that she should accept
+the most painful privations to make up for those which might be
+committed; she instituted there the perpetual adoration, and introduced
+the plain chant, in all its purity, to the exclusion of all others.
+
+"It is, as you have been able to hear, there preserved intact; it is
+true that since her time, her nuns have had lessons from Dom Schmitt,
+one of the most learned monks in that matter.
+
+"Then, after the death of the princess, which took place, I think, in
+1824, it was perceived that her body exhaled the odour of sanctity, and
+though she has not been canonized her intercession is invoked by her
+daughters in certain cases. Thus, for example, the Benedictine nuns of
+the Rue Monsieur ask her assistance when they lose anything, and their
+experience shows that their prayer is never in vain, since the object
+lost is found almost at once.
+
+"But," continued the abbe, "since you like the convent so well, go
+there, especially when it is lighted up."
+
+The priest rose and took up a "Semaine religieuse," which lay upon the
+table.
+
+He turned over the leaves. "See," he said, and read, "'Sunday 3 o'clock,
+Vespers chanted; ceremony of clothing, presided over by the Very
+Reverend Father Dom Etienne, abbot of the Grande Trappe, and
+Benediction.'"
+
+"That is a ceremony which interests me much."
+
+"I too shall probably be there."
+
+"Then we can meet in the chapel?"
+
+"Just so."
+
+"These ceremonies of clothing have not now the gaiety they had in the
+eighteenth century in certain Benedictine institutions, amongst others
+the Abbey de Bourbourg in Flanders," said the abbe smiling, after a
+silence.
+
+And since Durtal looked at him questioningly--
+
+"Yes, there was no sadness about it, or at least it had a special
+sadness of its own; you shall judge. On the eve of the day that the
+postulant was to take the habit, she was presented to the abbess of
+Bourbourg by the governor of the town. Bread and wine were offered to
+her, and she tasted them in the church itself. On the morrow she
+appeared, magnificently dressed, at a ball which was attended by the
+whole community of nuns, where she danced, then she asked her parents'
+blessing, and was conducted, with violins playing, to the chapel, where
+the abbess took possession of her. She had for the last time seen, at
+the ball, the joys of the world, for she was immediately shut up, for
+the rest of her days in the cloister."
+
+"The joy of the Dance of Death," said Durtal, "monastic customs and
+congregations were strange in old days."
+
+"No doubt, but they are lost in the night of time. I remember, however,
+that in the fifteenth century there existed under the rule of Saint
+Augustine an order strange indeed, called the Order of the Daughters of
+Saint Magloire, whose convent was in the Rue Saint Denys at Paris. The
+conditions of admission were the reverse of those of all other charters.
+The postulant had to swear on the holy Gospels that she had been
+unchaste, and no one believed her oath; she was examined, and if her
+oath were false, she was declared unworthy to be received. Nor might she
+have brought about this condition expressly in order to enter the
+convent, she must have well and truly given herself over to sin, before
+she came to ask the shelter of the cloister.
+
+"They were in fact a troop of penitent girls, and the rule of their
+subjection was savage. They were whipped, locked up, subjected to the
+most rigid fasts, made their confessions thrice in the week, rose at
+midnight, were under the most unremitting surveillance, were even
+attended in their most secret retirement; their mortifications were
+incessant and their closure absolute. I need hardly add that this
+nunnery is dead."
+
+"Nor likely to revive," cried Durtal. "Well then, Monsieur l'Abbe, we
+meet on Sunday in the Rue Monsieur?"
+
+And on the assent of the abbe, Durtal went his way, with the strangest
+ideas in his head about the monastic orders. The thing would be, he
+thought, to found an abbey where one could work at ease in a good
+library, there should be several monks, with decent meals, plenty of
+tobacco, and permission to take a turn on the quays now and then. And he
+laughed; but then that would not be a monastery! or only a Dominican
+monastery, with monks who dine out, and have, at least, the amusement of
+preaching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+On Sunday morning, on his way to the Rue Monsieur, Durtal chewed the cud
+of his reflections on the Monasteries. "It is certain," he thought,
+"that in the accumulated filth of ages, they alone have remained clean,
+are truly in relation with heaven, and serve as interpreters between it
+and earth. But we must thoroughly understand and specify that we are
+speaking only of the cloistered orders, which have remained, as far as
+possible, poor...."
+
+And thinking of the communities of women, he murmured as he hastened his
+steps: "Here is a surprising fact, which proves once more, the
+incomparable genius with which the Church is endowed; she has been able
+to bring into common life women who do not assassinate each other, and
+obey without recalcitrancy the orders of another woman--wonderful!
+
+"Well, here I am"--and Durtal, who knew he was late, hastened into the
+court of the Benedictine nunnery, took the steps of the little church
+four at a time, and pushed the door open. He paused in hesitation on the
+threshold, dazzled by the blaze of the lighted chapel. Lamps were lit
+everywhere, and overhead the altar flamed with a forest of tapers
+against which stood out as on a gold ground, the ruddy face of a bishop
+all in white.
+
+Durtal glided among the crowd, elbowing his way till he saw the Abbe
+Gevresin beckoning to him. He joined him, and sat down on the chair the
+priest had kept for him, and examined the abbot of Grande Trappe,
+surrounded by priests in chasubles, and choir boys some in red and
+others in blue, followed by a Trappist with shaven crown, surrounded by
+a fringe of hair, holding a wooden cross, on the reverse of which was
+carved the small figure of a monk.
+
+Clad in a white cowl, with long sleeves and a gold button on his hood,
+his abbot's cross on his breast, his head covered with an old French
+mitre of low form, Dom Etienne, with his broad shoulders, his greyish
+beard, his ruddy colour, had a look of an old Burgundian, tanned by the
+sun while working at his vines; he seemed, moreover, a good sort of man,
+uneasy under his mitre, oppressed by his honours.
+
+A sharp perfume which burnt the nose as a spice burns the tongue, the
+perfume of myrrh, floated in the air, the crowds surged; behind the
+grating from which the curtain was withdrawn, the nuns standing sang the
+hymn of Saint Ambrose, "Jesu corona virginum," while the bells of the
+abbey rang a peal; in the short aisle leading from the porch to the
+choir, a bending line of women on either side, a cross-bearer and
+torch-bearers entered, and behind them appeared the novice dressed as a
+bride.
+
+She was dark, slight, and very short, and came forward shyly with
+downcast eyes, between her mother and sister. At first sight Durtal
+thought her insignificant, scarcely pretty, a mere nobody; and he looked
+instinctively for the other party, put out in his sense of fitness, by
+the absence of a man in the marriage procession.
+
+Striving against her agitation the postulant walked up the nave into the
+choir, and knelt on the left before a large taper, her mother and sister
+on either side as bridesmaids.
+
+Dom Etienne genuflected to the altar, mounted the steps, and sat down in
+a red velvet arm-chair, placed on the highest step.
+
+Then one of the priests conducted the girl, who knelt alone, before the
+monk.
+
+Dom Etienne was motionless as a figure of Buddha; with the same gesture,
+he lifted one finger, and said gently to the novice,--
+
+"What is it you ask?"
+
+She spoke so low as scarcely to be heard.
+
+"Father, feeling in myself an ardent desire to sacrifice myself to God,
+as a victim in union with our Lord Jesus Christ, immolated on our
+altars, and to spend my life in perpetual adoration of His divine
+Sacrament, under the observance of the rule of our glorious Father Saint
+Benedict, I humbly ask of you the grace of the holy habit."
+
+"I will give it you willingly if you believe you can conform your life
+to that of a victim devoted to the Holy Sacrament."
+
+And she answered in a firmer tone,
+
+"I trust so, leaning on the infinite goodness of my Saviour Jesus
+Christ."
+
+"God give you perseverance, my daughter," said the prelate; he rose,
+turned to the altar, genuflected, and with uncovered head began the
+chant "Veni Creator," taken up by the voices of the nuns behind the
+light screen of iron.
+
+Then he replaced his mitre, and prayed, while the chanted psalms rose
+under the arches. The novice, who in the meantime had been reconducted
+to her place at the prie-Dieu, rose, genuflected to the altar, and then
+knelt between her two bridesmaids before the abbot of La Trappe, who had
+reseated himself.
+
+Her two companions lifted the veil of the bride, took off her wreath of
+orange flowers, unrolled the coils of her hair, while a priest spread a
+napkin on the knees of the prelate, and the deacon presented a pair of
+long scissors on a salver.
+
+Then before the gesture of this monk, making himself ready, like an
+executioner, to shear the condemned person, whose hour of expiation was
+at hand, the terrible beauty of innocence becoming like crime, in
+substitution for sins of which she was ignorant, which she could not
+even understand, was evident to the public who had come to the chapel
+out of curiosity, and in consternation at the superhuman denial of
+justice, it trembled when the bishop seized the entire handful of her
+hair, and drew it towards him over her brow.
+
+Then there was as it were a flash of steel in a dark shower.
+
+In the death-like silence of the church the grinding of the scissors was
+heard in the mass of hair which fell under the blades, and then all was
+silent. Dom Etienne opened his hand, and the rain fell on his knees in
+long black threads.
+
+There was a sigh of relief when the priests and bridesmaids led away the
+bride, looking strange in her train, with her head discrowned and her
+neck bare.
+
+The procession returned almost immediately. There was no longer a bride
+in a white skirt, but a nun in a black robe.
+
+She bowed before the Trappist, and again knelt between her mother and
+sister.
+
+Then, while the abbot prayed the Lord to bless his handmaid, the master
+of the ceremonies and the deacon took, from a credence near the altar, a
+basket, wherein under loose rose leaves were folded a girdle of untanned
+leather, emblem of the end of that luxury which the Fathers of the
+Church placed in the region of the reins, a scapular, symbol of a life
+crucified to the world, a veil, which signifies the solitude of the life
+hidden in God, and the prelate explained the sense of these emblems to
+the novice, then taking the lighted taper from the candlestick before
+her, he gave it to her, declaring in one phrase the meaning of his
+action: "Accipe, charissima soror, lumen Christi."
+
+Then Dom Etienne took the sprinkler which a priest handed him with an
+inclination, and as in the general absolution of the dead, he sprinkled
+the girl with holy water in the form of a cross, then he sat down and
+spoke gently and quietly without using a single gesture.
+
+He spoke to the postulant alone, praising the august and humble life of
+the cloister. "Look not back," he said, "have no regrets, for by my
+voice Jesus repeats to you the promise once made to the Magdalen, 'yours
+is the better part, which shall not be taken away from you.' Say also to
+yourself, my daughter, that, henceforward, taken away from the eternal
+trifling of labours in vain, you will accomplish a useful work upon
+earth, you will practise charity in its highest form, you will make
+expiation for others, you will pray for those who never pray, you will
+aid, so far as your strength permits, to make amends for the hate the
+world bears to the Saviour.
+
+"Suffer and you will be happy; love your spouse, and you will see how
+tender He is to His elect. Believe me, His love is such that He will not
+even wait till you are purified by death to recompense you for your
+miserable mortifications, your poor sufferings. Even before your hour is
+come, He will heap His graces upon you, and you will beg Him to let you
+die, so greatly will the excess of these joys exceed your strength."
+
+Little by little the old monk grew warm, and returned to the words of
+Christ to the Magdalen, showing how in reference to her Jesus set
+forward the excellence of the contemplative over the other Orders, and
+gave brief advice, dwelling on the necessity of humility and poverty,
+which are, as Saint Clare says, the two great walls of cloistered life.
+Then he blessed the novice, who kissed his hand, and when she had
+returned to her place, he prayed to the Lord, lifting his eyes to
+heaven, that He would accept this nun, who offered herself as a victim
+for the sins of the world. Then, standing, he intoned the "Te Deum."
+
+Every one rose, and preceded by the cross and torch bearers, the
+procession passed out of the church, and was massed in the court.
+
+Then Durtal might have believed himself carried back far from Paris,
+into the heart of the Middle Ages.
+
+The court, surrounded by buildings, was closed opposite the
+entrance-gate by a high wall, in the midst of which was a folding-door;
+on each side six thin pines rocked to and fro, and chanting was heard
+behind the wall.
+
+The postulant, in front, alone, near the closed door, held her torch,
+with her head bent. The abbot of La Trappe, leaning on his crosier,
+waited, unmoving, a few paces from her.
+
+Durtal examined their faces, the girl, so commonplace in her bridal
+costume, had become charming, her body was now full of a timid grace,
+the lines, somewhat too marked under her worldly dress, were softened,
+under her religious shroud her outline was only a simple sketch, it was
+as though the years had rolled back, and as though there was a return to
+the forms only prophesied in childhood.
+
+Durtal drew near to examine her better, he tried to look at her face,
+but under the chill bandage of her head-dress, she remained mute, and as
+if absent from life, with her eyes closed, and as though she lived only
+in the smile of her happy lips.
+
+Seen nearer, the monk who had seemed so stout and ruddy in the chapel,
+seemed also changed, his frame remained robust, and his complexion
+bright, but his eyes of a light blue, like chalk water, water without
+reflections or waves, eyes wonderfully pure, changed the common
+expression of his features, and took away from him that look of a
+vine-dresser which he had at a distance.
+
+"It is clear," thought Durtal, "that the soul is everything in these
+people, and their faces are modelled by it. There is a holy clearness in
+their eyes, and their lips, in those only apertures through which the
+soul comes to look out of the body, and almost shows itself."
+
+The chants behind the wall suddenly ceased, the girl made a step
+forward, and knocked with her closed fingers at the door, and then with
+a failing voice she sang,--
+
+"Aperite mihi portas justitiae: Ingressa in eas, confitebor Domino."
+
+The door opened. Another large court, paved with pebbles was seen,
+bounded at the end by a building, and all the community, in a sort of
+semicircle, with black books in their hands, cried,--
+
+"Haec porta Domini: Justi intrabunt in eam."
+
+The novice made another step to the sill and answered in her far-away
+voice,--
+
+"Ingrediar in locum tabernaculi admirabilis: usque ad domum Dei."
+
+And the choir of nuns, unmoving, answered,--
+
+"Haec est domus Domini firmiter aedificata: Bene fundata est supra
+firmam petram."
+
+Durtal hastily looked at those faces which could only be seen for a few
+minutes and on the occasion of such a ceremony. It was a row of dead
+bodies standing in black shrouds. All were bloodless, with white cheeks,
+lilac eyelids and grey lips, the voices of all were exhausted and fined
+down by prayer, and most of them, even the young, were bent. "Their poor
+bodies are worn with austere fatigue," thought Durtal.
+
+But his reflections were cut short, the bride, now kneeling on the
+threshold, turned to Dom Etienne and chanted in a low voice,--
+
+"Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi: Hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam."
+
+The monk laid aside his mitre and crosier and said,--
+
+"Confirma hoc Deus, quod operatus es in nobis."
+
+And the postulant murmured,--
+
+"A templo sacro tuo quod est in Jerusalem."
+
+Then before re-covering his head and resuming his crosier, the prelate
+prayed God Almighty to pour the dew of His blessing on His handmaid;
+then directing the girl towards a nun who left the group of sisters and
+advanced to the threshold, he said to her,--
+
+"Into your hands, Madame, we commit this new bride of the Lord, sustain
+her in the holy resolution she has so solemnly taken upon her, in asking
+to sacrifice herself to God as a victim, and to dedicate her life in
+honour of our Lord Jesus Christ, sacrificed on our altars. Lead her in
+the way of the divine Commandments, in the practice of the counsels of
+the Holy Gospel, and in the observance of the monastic rule. Prepare her
+for the eternal union to which the heavenly Spouse invites her, and from
+this blessed increase of the flock committed to your charge draw a new
+motive for maternal care. The peace of the Lord rest upon you."
+
+This was all: the nuns one by one turned and disappeared behind the
+wall, while the girl followed them like a poor dog, who with drooping
+head accompanies at a distance a new master.
+
+The folding doors closed.
+
+Durtal remained stupefied, looking at the outline of the white bishop,
+the backs of the priests who were mounting the steps to give Benediction
+in the church, while behind them came in tears, their faces in their
+handkerchiefs, the mother and sister of the novice.
+
+"Well?" said the abbe, passing his arm through Durtal's.
+
+"Well, this scene is to my mind the most touching alibi of death that it
+is possible to see, this living woman, who buries herself in the most
+frightful of tombs--for in it the flesh continues to suffer--is
+wonderful.
+
+"I remember that you have yourself told me of the pressure of this
+observance, and I shivered in thinking of perpetual Adoration, in those
+winter nights, when a child like this is awakened out of her first
+sleep, and cast into the darkness of a chapel where unless she faints
+from weakness or terror, she must pray alone, through the freezing hours
+on her knees on the pavement.
+
+"What passes in that conversation with the unknown, that interview with
+the Shadow? Does she succeed in escaping from self, and in leaving the
+earth, in gaining, on the threshold of Eternity, the inconceivable
+Spouse, or does the soul, powerless to spring on high, remain riveted to
+the soil?
+
+"We figure her to ourselves, her face bent forward, her hands joined,
+making appeal to herself, concentrating herself, in order to pour
+herself forth the better, and we imagine her thus sickly, with no
+strength left, trying to set her soul on fire in a shivering frame. But
+who can tell if on certain nights she attains to it?
+
+"Ah! those poor lamps of exhausted oil, of flames almost dead, which
+tremble in the obscurity of the sanctuary, what will God make of them?
+
+"Then there was the family present at the taking the habit, and if the
+daughter filled me with enthusiasm I could not restrain myself from
+pitying the mother. Think if the daughter died, the mother would embrace
+her, would perhaps speak to her, or if she did not recognize her, it
+would at least not be with her own good will; but in this case it is not
+the body, but the very soul of her child that dies before her eyes. Of
+her own accord her child knows her no longer, it is the contemptuous end
+of an affection. You will admit that for a mother this is very hard."
+
+"Yes, but this so-called ingratitude, gained at the price of God knows
+what struggles, is it not, even apart from the divine vocation, the most
+equitable repartition of human love? Think that this elect creature
+becomes the scapegoat of sins committed, and like a lamentable daughter
+of Danaus she will unceasingly pour the offering of her mortifications
+and prayers, of her vigils and fastings, into the bottomless vessel of
+offences and crimes. Ah! if you knew what it was to repair the sins of
+the world. In regard to this I remember that one day the abbess of the
+Benedictines in the Rue Tournefort said to me: 'Since our tears are not
+holy enough, nor our souls pure enough, God makes trial of us in our
+bodies.' Here are long illnesses which cannot be cured, illnesses which
+doctors fail to understand, and we make thus much expiation for others.
+
+"But if you will think over the ceremony which is just ended, you need
+not be affected beyond measure or compare it to the well-known
+ceremonies of a funeral; the postulant whom you saw has not yet
+pronounced her final vows, she can if she choose leave the convent, and
+return to her own home. At present she is in regard to her mother, a
+child in a foreign country, a child at school, but she is not a dead
+child.
+
+"You may say what you please, but there is a tragedy in that door which
+closed upon her."
+
+"Therefore in the Benedictine convent in the Rue Tournefort, the scene
+takes place in the interior of the convent, and the family is not
+present, the mother is spared, but mitigated thus, the ceremony is but a
+mere form, almost a foolish rule in the seclusion wherein the Faith is
+hidden."
+
+"Those nuns are also Benedictines of the perpetual Adoration, are they
+not?"
+
+"Yes, do you know their convent?"
+
+And as Durtal shook his head, the abbe continued,--
+
+"It is older, but less interesting than that in the Rue Monsieur, the
+chapel is mean, full of plaster statuettes, cotton flowers, bunches of
+grapes and ears of corn in gold paper, but the old building of the
+nunnery is curious. It contains, what shall I call it? a school
+dining-room, and a retreatant's drawing-room, and so gives at once the
+impression of old age and childhood."
+
+"I know that class of convents," said Durtal. "I used often to see one,
+when I used to visit an old aunt at Versailles. It always used to
+impress me as a Maison Vauquer, brought to devotional uses, it had the
+air at once of a _table d'hote_ in the Rue de la Clef and the sacristy
+of a country church."
+
+"Just so," and the abbe went on with a smile,--
+
+"I had many interviews with the abbess in the Rue Tournefort; you guess
+at rather than see her, for you are separated from her by a screen of
+black wood, behind which is stretched a black curtain which she draws
+aside."
+
+"I can see it," thought Durtal, who, remembering the Benedictine custom,
+saw in a second a little face confused in neutral tinted light, and
+lower, at the top of her habit, the gleam of a medal of the Blessed
+Sacrament in red enamelled in white.
+
+He laughed and said to the abbe,--
+
+"I laugh, because having had some business to transact with my nun aunt
+of whom I was speaking, only visible like your abbess through a trellis,
+I found out how to read her thoughts a little."
+
+"Ah! how was that?"
+
+"In this way. Since I could not see her face, which was hidden behind
+the lattice of her cage, and disappeared behind her veil, and if she
+should answer me, having nothing to guide me but the inflexions of her
+voice, always circumspect and always calm, I ended by trusting only to
+her great glasses, round, with buff frames, which almost all nuns wear.
+Well, all the repressed vivacity of this woman burst out there; suddenly
+in a corner of her glasses, there was a glimmer, and I then understood
+that her eye had lighted up, and gave the lie to the indifference of her
+voice, the determined quietness of her tone."
+
+The abbe in his turn began to laugh.
+
+"Do you know the Superior of the Benedictines, in the Rue Monsieur?"
+said Durtal.
+
+"I have spoken with her once or twice; there the parlour is monastic,
+there is not the provincial and middle-class side of the Rue Tournefort,
+it is composed of a sombre room, of which all the breadth at the end is
+taken up by an iron grating, and behind the grating are again wooden
+bars, and a shutter painted black. You are quite in the dark, and the
+abbess, scarcely in the light, appears to you like a phantom."
+
+"The abbess is, I suppose, the nun, elderly, fragile and very short, to
+whom Dom Etienne committed the novice?"
+
+"Yes. She is a remarkable shepherdess of souls, and what is more, a very
+well educated woman of most distinguished manners."
+
+"Oh," thought Durtal: "I can imagine that these abbesses are charming,
+but also terrible women. Saint Teresa was goodness itself, but when she
+speaks in her 'Way of Perfection' of nuns who band themselves together
+to discuss the will of their mother, she shows herself inexorable, for
+she declares that perpetual imprisonment should be inflicted on them as
+soon as possible and without flinching, and in fact she is right, for
+every disorderly sister infects the flock, and gives the rot to souls."
+
+Thus talking they had reached the end of the Rue de Sevres, and the abbe
+stopped to rest.
+
+"Ah," he said, as if speaking to himself, "had I not had all my life
+heavy expenses, first a brother, then nephews to maintain, I should many
+years ago have become a member of Saint Benedict's family. I have
+always had an attraction towards that grand Order, which is, in fact,
+the intellectual Order of the Church. Therefore, when I was stronger and
+younger, I always went for my retreats to one of their monasteries,
+sometimes to the black monks of Solesmes, or of Liguge, who have
+preserved the wise traditions of Saint Maurus, sometimes to the
+Cistercians, or the white monks of La Trappe."
+
+"True," said Durtal, "La Trappe is one of the great branches of the tree
+of Saint Benedict, but how is it that its ordinances do not differ from
+those which the Patriarch left?"
+
+"That is to say that the Trappists interpret the rule of Saint Benedict,
+which is very broad and supple, less in its spirit than in its letter,
+while the Benedictines do the contrary.
+
+"In fact, La Trappe is an offshoot of Citeaux, and is much more the
+daughter of Saint Bernard, who was during forty years the very sap of
+that branch, than the descendant of Saint Benedict."
+
+"But, so far as I remember, the Trappists are themselves divided, and do
+not live under a uniform discipline."
+
+"They do so now, since a pontifical brief dated March 17th, 1893,
+sanctioned the decisions of the general Chapter of the Trappists
+assembled in Rome, and ordered the fusion into one sole order, and under
+the direction of a sole superior, of the three observances of the
+Trappists, who were in fact ruled by discordant constitutions."
+
+And seeing that Durtal was listening attentively, the abbe continued,--
+
+"Among these three observances, one only, that of the Cistercian
+Trappists, to which belonged the abbey of which I was a guest, followed
+in their integrity the rules of the twelfth century, and led the
+monastic life of Saint Bernard's day. This alone recognized the rule of
+Saint Benedict, taken in its strictest application, and completed by the
+Charte de Charite, and the use and customs of Citeaux; the two others
+had adopted the same rule, but revised and modified in the seventeenth
+century by the Abbe de Rance, and again one of them, the Belgian
+congregation, had changed the statutes imposed by that abbot.
+
+"At the present day, as I have just said, all the Trappists form only
+one and the same institute under the name, Order of Reformed Cistercians
+of the Blessed Virgin Mary of La Trappe, and all resume the rules of
+Citeaux, and live again the life of the cenobites of the Middle Ages."
+
+"But if you have visited these ascetics," said Durtal, "you must know
+Dom Etienne?"
+
+"No, I have never stayed at La Grande Trappe, I prefer the poor and
+small monasteries where one is mixed up with the monks, to those
+imposing convents where they isolate you in a guest-house, and in a word
+keep you separate.
+
+"There is one in which I make my retreats, Notre Dame de l'Atre, a small
+Trappist monastery a few leagues from Paris, which is quite the most
+seductive of shelters. Besides that the Lord really abides there, for it
+has true saints among its children, it is delightful also with its
+ponds, its immemorial trees, its distant solitude, far in the woods."
+
+"Yes, but," observed Durtal, "the life there must be unbending, for La
+Trappe is the most rigid order which has been imposed on men."
+
+For his only answer the abbe let go Durtal's arm, and took both his
+hands.
+
+"Do you know," he said, looking him in the face, "it is there you must
+go for your conversion?"
+
+"Are you serious, Monsieur l'Abbe?"
+
+And as the priest pressed his hands more strongly Durtal cried,--
+
+"Ah, no indeed, first I have not the stoutness of soul, and if that be
+possible I have still less the bodily health needed for such a course, I
+should fall ill on my arrival, and then ... and then...."
+
+"And then, what? I am not proposing to you to shut you up for ever in a
+cloister."
+
+"So I suppose," said Durtal, in a somewhat piqued tone.
+
+"But just to remain a week, just the necessary time for a cure. Now a
+week is soon over, then do you think that if you make such a resolution
+God will not sustain you?"
+
+"That is all very fine, but ..."
+
+"Let us speak on the health question, then;" and the abbe smiled a smile
+of pity that was a little contemptuous.
+
+"I can promise you at once that as a retreatant, you will not be bound
+to lead the life of a Trappist in its austerest sense. You need not get
+up at two in the morning for Matins, but at three, or even at four
+o'clock, according to the day."
+
+And smiling at the face Durtal made, the abbe went on,--
+
+"As to your food it will be better than that of the monks; naturally you
+will have no fish nor meat, but you may certainly have an egg for
+dinner, if vegetables are not enough for you."
+
+"And the vegetables, I suppose, are cooked with salt and water, and no
+seasoning?"
+
+"No, they are dressed with salt and water only on fasting days; at other
+times you will have them cooked in milk and water, or in oil."
+
+"Many thanks," said Durtal.
+
+"But all that is excellent for your health," continued the priest, "you
+complain of pains in the stomach, sick headaches, diarrhoea, well, this
+diet, in the country, in the air, will cure you better than all the
+drugs you take.
+
+"Now let us leave, if you like, your body out of the question, for in
+such a case, it is God's part to act against your weakness. I tell you,
+you will not be ill at La Trappe, that were absurd; it would be to send
+the penitent sinner away, and Jesus would not then be the Christ; but
+let us talk of your soul. Have the courage to take its measure, to look
+it well in the face. Do you see that?" said the abbe after a silence.
+
+Durtal did not answer.
+
+"Admit," said the priest, "that you are horrified at it."
+
+They took a few steps in the street, and the abbe continued,--
+
+"You declare that you are sustained by the crowds of Notre Dame des
+Victoires and the emanations of St. Severin. What will it be then, in
+the humble chapel, when you will be on the ground huddled together with
+the saints? I guarantee you in the name of the Lord an assistance such
+as you have never had;" and he went on with a laugh, "I may add that the
+Church will take pleasure in receiving you, she will bring out her
+ornaments which she has now left off: the authentic liturgies of the
+Middle Ages, true plain chant, without solos or organs."
+
+"Listen, your propositions astound me," said Durtal with an effort. "No:
+I assure you I am not at all disposed to imprison myself in such a
+place. I know well that at Paris I shall never come to any good. I swear
+to you that I am not proud of my life, nor satisfied with my soul, but
+from thence ... to ... where I cannot tell; I want at least a mitigated
+asylum, a quiet convent. There must be, on those conditions, somewhere,
+hospitals for souls."
+
+"I could only send you to the Jesuits, who make a specialty of retreats
+for men: but knowing you as I think I know you, I feel sure you would
+not stay there two days. You would find yourself among amiable and very
+clever priests, but they would overwhelm you with sermons, would wish to
+interfere with your life, mix themselves up with your art, they would
+examine your thoughts with a magnifying glass, and then you would be
+under treatment with good young people, whose unintelligent piety would
+horrify you, and you would flee in exasperation.
+
+"At La Trappe it is the contrary. You would certainly be the sole
+retreatant there, and no one will have the least idea of troubling
+himself about you; you will be free, you can if you choose leave the
+monastery just as you entered it, without having confessed or approached
+the Sacraments, your will will be respected there, and no monk will
+attempt to sound it without your authority. To you only it will
+appertain to decide whether you will be converted or no.
+
+"And you will like me to be frank to the last, will you not? You are, as
+indeed I have already said to you, a sensitive and distrustful man;
+well, the priest as you see him in Paris, even the religious not
+cloistered, seem to you, how shall I express it? second rate souls, not
+to go further...."
+
+Durtal protested vaguely, with a gesture.
+
+"Let me go on. An afterthought will come to you in regard to the
+ecclesiastic to whom will fall the task of cleansing you, you will be
+quite certain that he is not a saint; this is not very theological, for
+were he even the worst of priests his absolution would have just the
+same value, if you merit it, but indeed here is a question of sentiment
+which I respect, you will think of him in a word: he lives as I do, he
+is not more self-denying than I am, nothing shows that his conscience is
+very superior to mine, and thence to losing all confidence, and
+throwing up the whole thing there is but a step. At La Trappe, I will
+defy you to reason in this way, and not to become humble. When you see
+men, who after having abandoned everything to serve God, lead a life of
+privations and penance such as no government would dare to inflict on
+its convicts, you will indeed be obliged to admit that you are no great
+thing by their side."
+
+Durtal was silent. After the astonishment he had felt at the suggestion
+of such an issue, he became dully irritated against this friend, who
+hitherto so discreet, had suddenly rushed upon his soul and opened it by
+force. There came out the disgusting vision of an existence stripped,
+used up, reduced to a state of dust, a condition of rags. And Durtal
+shrank from himself, convinced that the abbe was right, that he must at
+any rate stanch the discharge of his senses, and expiate their
+inappeasable desires, their abominable covetousness, their rotten
+tastes, and he was seized with a terror irrational and intense. He had
+the giddy fear of the cloister, a terror which attracted him to the
+abyss over which Gevresin made him lean.
+
+Enervated by the ceremony of taking the habit, stunned by the blow with
+which the priest had assailed him as they left the church, he now felt
+an anguish almost physical, in which everything ended in confusion. He
+did not know to what reflections he should give himself, and only saw,
+swimming on this whirlpool of troubled ideas, one clear thought, that
+the moment had come so dreaded by him in which he must make a
+resolution.
+
+The abbe looked at him, saw that he was really suffering, and was full
+of pity for a soul so unable to support a struggle.
+
+He took Durtal's arm, and said gently,--
+
+"My son, believe me that the day you go yourself to the house of God,
+the day you knock at its door, it will open wide, and the angels will
+draw aside to let you pass. The Gospel cannot lie, and it declares that
+there is more joy over one sinner that repents than over ninety and nine
+just persons who need no repentance. You will be much better welcomed
+than you expect, and be sufficiently my friend to think that the old
+priest you leave here will not remain inactive, and that he and the
+convents he can influence will pray their best for you."
+
+"I will see," said Durtal, really moved by the affectionate tone of the
+priest, "I will see. I cannot decide thus, unexpectedly; I will think.
+Ah! it is not simple."
+
+"Above all things pray," said the priest, who had reached his door. "I
+have on my side sought the Lord much that He would enlighten me, and I
+declare to you that the solution of La Trappe is the only one He has
+given me. Ask Him humbly, in your turn, and you will be guided. I shall
+soon see you again, shall I not?"
+
+He pressed Durtal's hand, who, left alone, recovered himself at last.
+Then he recalled the strategic smiles, the ambiguous phrases, the dreamy
+silences of the Abbe Gevresin, he understood the kindness of his
+counsels, the patience of his plans; and a little put out at having
+been, without knowing it, led so wisely, he exclaimed in spite of
+himself, "This, then, was the design the priest was ripening, with his
+air of not concerning himself with it at all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+He experienced that painful awakening of a sick man whom a doctor
+deceives for months, who learns some fine morning that he is to be taken
+at once to an hospital to undergo an urgent surgical operation. "But
+that is not the way things should be done," cried Durtal, "people should
+be prepared, little by little, accustomed by words of warning, to the
+idea that they are to be cut up on a table, they are not struck down
+thus unexpectedly!
+
+"Yes, but what does that matter? since I know very well, in the depths
+of my soul, that this priest is right; I must leave Paris if I wish to
+amend; but all the same, the treatment he inflicts is hard indeed to
+follow; I know not what to do."
+
+And from this moment his days were haunted by Trappists. He turned over
+the thought of his departure, and examined it on all sides, chewed the
+cud of for and against, and ended by saying to himself, "That he would
+take stock of his reflections and open an account, and this with a debit
+and credit side, that he might know himself the better.
+
+"The debit is terrible. To gather up his life, and cast it into the
+stove of a cloister; and again, he ought to know if his body were in a
+state to bear such a remedy; mine is frail and soft, accustomed to rise
+late; it becomes weak if not nourished by flesh meat, and is subject to
+neuralgia at any change of the hour of meals. I should never be able to
+hold out down there with vegetables cooked in warm oil or in milk; first
+I detest oily cookery, and I hate milk still more, which I cannot
+digest.
+
+"Then I think I see myself on my knees, on the floor for hours, I who
+suffered so much at La Glaciere in remaining in that posture, on a step,
+for scarce a quarter of an hour.
+
+"Again, I am so accustomed to cigarettes that it is absolutely
+impossible to give them up, and it is pretty certain they will not let
+me smoke in a monastery.
+
+"No, indeed, from the bodily point of view, this plan is madness; in my
+state of health there is no doctor who would not dissuade me from
+undertaking such a risk.
+
+"If I place myself in a spiritual point of view I must then again
+recognize that it is terrible to enter La Trappe.
+
+"I am afraid indeed that my dryness of soul, my want of love will
+remain, and then what would become of me in such surroundings? then it
+is equally probable, that in that solitude and absolute silence, I
+should be wearied to death, and if it be so, what a miserable existence
+is it to stalk about a cell and count the hours. No, for that one needs
+to be firmly fixed on God, to be dwelt in wholly by Him.
+
+"Moreover, there are two formidable questions which I have never
+properly weighed, because it has been painful to think of them, but now
+that they come before me, and stop the road, I must face them, the
+questions of Confession and Holy Communion.
+
+"Confession? Yes, I will consent to it, I am so tired of myself, so
+disgusted with my wretched existence that this expiation appears to me
+as deserved, even necessary. I desire to humble myself, I would ask
+pardon with all my heart, but again this penance must be assigned me
+under possible conditions. At La Trappe, if I believe the abbe, no one
+will trouble himself about me, in other words no one will encourage me,
+and aid me to submit to this sorrowful extraction of my shames. I shall
+be somewhat like a sick man operated on in hospital, far from his
+friends and relatives.
+
+"Confession," he went on, "is an admirable discovery, for it is the most
+sensitive touchstone of souls, the most intolerable act which the Church
+has ever imposed on the vanity of men.
+
+"Is this strange? We speak easily of our lapses, of our grosser actions,
+even, indeed, to a priest in conversation, that does not seem to lead to
+any consequences, and perhaps a little bragging enters into our
+admission of easy sins, but to tell the same thing on one's knees,
+accusing oneself, after prayer, is different, that which was only rather
+amusing becomes a very painful humiliation, for the soul is not the dupe
+of this false seeming, it knows so well in its inner tribunal that all
+is changed, it feels so well the terrible power of the Sacrament, that
+he who but now smiled, now trembles at the very thought.
+
+"Now, were I to find myself face to face with an old monk who emerges
+from an eternity of silence to listen to me, a monk who will not aid me,
+perhaps cannot even understand me, this will be terrible. I shall never
+get to the end of my troubles if he does not hold out a staff to me, if
+he lets me stifle and gives no air to my soul, nor brings me help.
+
+"The Eucharist also seems terrible. To dare to come forward, to offer
+Him as a tabernacle the sewer of self scarce purified by repentance, a
+sewer drained by absolution, but still hardly dry, is monstrous. I am
+quite without such courage as to offer Christ this last insult, and so
+there is no good in fleeing to a monastery.
+
+"No; the more I think of it, the more I am obliged to conclude that I
+should be mad if I ventured into a Trappist house.
+
+"Now for the Credit side. The only proper work of my life would be to
+make a parcel of my life, and take it to a cloister to disinfect it, and
+if that cost me nothing, where is the merit?
+
+"Nothing shows me, on the other hand, that my body, however weakened,
+cannot support the regimen of La Trappe. Without believing or pretending
+to believe with the Abbe Gevresin that that kind of food will be even
+helpful to me, I ought to count on Divine consolations, to admit the
+principle that, if I am sent there, it is not that I may take at once to
+my bed, or be obliged to leave again as soon as I arrive--at least,
+unless that is the chastisement prepared me, the expiation demanded, and
+again no, for that would be to ascribe to God pitiless tricks, and would
+be absurd!
+
+"As to the cookery, it matters little that it is uncivilized, if my
+stomach can digest it; to have bad food, and get up in the middle of the
+night is nothing, provided the body can stand it, and no doubt I shall
+find some means of smoking cigarettes by stealth in the woods.
+
+"After all, a week is soon over, and I am not even obliged, if I feel
+poorly, to remain a week.
+
+"From the spiritual point of view, I must again count on the mercy of
+God, believe that it will not abandon me, will dress my wounds, and
+change the very foundation of my soul. I know well that these arguments
+do not rest on any earthly certainty, but yet if I have proofs that
+Providence has already taken part in my affairs, I have no reason to
+suppose that these arguments are weaker than the purely physical motives
+which served to support my other thesis. Now I must recall that
+conversion, so outside my will; I must take account of a fact which
+should encourage me, the weakness of the temptations which I now
+experience.
+
+"It is difficult to have been more rapidly and more completely heard.
+Whether I owe this grace to my own prayers or to those of the convents
+which have shielded me without knowing me, it is the case that for some
+time past my brain has been silent and my flesh calm. That monster
+Florence appears to me still at certain times, but she does not approach
+me, she remains in the shade, and the end of the Lord's Prayer, the 'ne
+nos inducas in tentationem,' puts her to flight.
+
+"That is an unaccustomed fact, and yet a precise one. Why should I
+doubt, then, that I shall be better upheld at La Trappe than I am in
+Paris itself?
+
+"There remain confession and communion.
+
+"Confession? It will be what the Lord chooses it should be. He will
+choose the monk for me; I shall only be able to make use of him; and
+then the more disagreeable it is, the better worth it will be; and if I
+suffer much, I shall think myself less unworthy to communicate.
+
+"That is," he went on, "the most painful point! Communicate! But let us
+consider, it is certain that I shall be base in proposing to Christ that
+He should descend like a scavenger into my ditch; but if I wait till it
+is empty, I shall never be in a state to receive Him, for my bulkheads
+are not closed, and sins would filter through the fissures.
+
+"All this well considered, the abbe spoke truth when he answered me one
+day: 'But I too am not worthy to approach Him; thank God, I have not
+those sewers of which you speak, but in the morning, when I go to say my
+mass, and think of all the dust of the evening, do you not think that I
+am ashamed? It is always necessary, you see, to go back to the Gospels,
+and say to yourself that He came for the weak and the sick, the
+publicans and lepers; and, in fact, you must convince yourself that the
+Eucharist is a lookout post, a help, that it is given, as it is written
+in the ordinary of the Mass "ad tutamentum mentis et corporis et ad
+medelam percipiendam." It is, if I may say so, a spiritual medicine; you
+go to the Saviour just as you go to a doctor, you take your soul to Him
+to care for it, and He does so!'
+
+"I stand before the unknown," pursued Durtal, "I complain that I am
+arid, and have wandered from the right way, but who will declare to me
+that, if I determine to communicate, I shall remain in the same mind;
+for indeed, if I have Faith, I ought to believe in the occult work of
+Christ in the Sacrament. Lastly, I am afraid of being wearied by
+solitude; I am not much amused here as it is, but at La Trappe I shall
+no longer have those vacillations at every minute, those constant fears;
+I shall at least have the advantage of having my time to myself; and
+then ... and then ... how well I know solitude. Have I not lived apart
+since the deaths of des Hermies and Carhaix? Indeed, whom do I see? A
+few publishers, a few literary men, and my relations with these people
+are not interesting. As to silence, it is a blessing. I shall not hear
+any foolish sayings at La Trappe; I shall not listen to pitiable
+homilies and poor sermons; but I ought to rejoice on being at last
+isolated, far from Paris, far from men."
+
+He was silent, and made, as it were, a return in upon himself; and said
+to himself, in a melancholy manner: "These strifes are useless, these
+reflections vain. I need not try to take account of my soul, to make out
+the debit and credit; I know, without knowing how, that I must go; I am
+thrust out of myself by an impulse which rises from the very depths of
+my being, to which I am quite certain I have to yield."
+
+At that moment Durtal had decided, but ten minutes afterwards the
+attempt at resolution vanished. He felt his cowardice gain on him once
+more, he chewed once more the cud of arguments against his moving; came
+to the conclusion that his reasons for remaining in Paris were palpable,
+human, certain, while the others were intangible, extra-natural, and
+consequently subject to illusions, perhaps false.
+
+And he invented for himself the fear of not obtaining the thing he
+feared, said to himself that La Trappe would not receive him, or
+certainly that it would refuse him communion; and then he suggested to
+himself a middle term: to confess at Paris and communicate at La
+Trappe.
+
+But then there passed in him an incomprehensible fact: his whole soul
+revolted at this idea, and the formal order not to deceive himself was
+truly breathed into him, and he said to himself: "No, the bitter draught
+must be drained to the last drop, it is all or nothing; if I confess to
+the abbe it will be in disobedience to absolute and secret directions; I
+should be capable of not going afterwards to Notre Dame de l'Atre.
+
+"What shall I do?" And he accused himself of distrust, called to his aid
+once more the memory of benefits received, how scales had fallen from
+his eyes, his insensible progress towards Faith, his encounter with that
+singular priest, perhaps the only one who could understand him, and
+treat him in a way so benign and so elastic; but he tried in vain to
+reassure himself, then he called up the dream of the monastic life, the
+sovereign beauty of the cloister; he imagined the joy of renunciation,
+the peace of exalted prayers, the interior intoxication of the spirit,
+the delight of not being at home any longer in his own body. Some words
+of the abbe about La Trappe served as a spring-board for his dreams, and
+he perceived an old abbey, grey and warm, immense avenues of trees,
+clouds flying confusedly amid the song of waters, silent strolls in the
+woods at nightfall; he called up the solemn liturgies of Saint
+Benedict's time; he saw the white pith of monastic chants rise under the
+scarcely pruned bark of sound. He succeeded in his decision, and cried:
+"You have dreamed for years of the cloisters, now rejoice that you will
+know them at last," and he wished to go at once and live there; then
+suddenly he fell down into reality, and said to himself: "It is easy to
+wish to live in a monastery, to tell God that you would desire to take
+shelter therein, when life in Paris weighs you down, but when it comes
+to the real point of emigration, it is quite another matter."
+
+He turned over these thoughts everywhere, in the street, at home, in the
+chapels. He hurried like a shuttle from one church to another, hoping to
+solace his fears by changing his place, but they persisted, and rendered
+every place intolerable.
+
+Then in the sacred places came always that dryness of soul, the broken
+spring of impulse, a sudden silence within, when he desired consolation
+in speaking to Him. His best moments, his pauses in the hurly-burly,
+were a few minutes of absolute torpor, which rested like snow on the
+soul and he heard nothing.
+
+But this drowsiness of thought lasted but a while, the whirlwind blew
+once more, and the prayers which were wont to appease it refused to
+leave his lips, he tried religious music, the despairing sequences of
+the psalms, pictures of the Crucifixion by the Early Masters, to excite
+him, but his prayers ran on and became confused on his lips, were
+divested of all sense, mere words, empty shells.
+
+At Notre Dame des Victoires, where he dragged himself that he might thaw
+a little under the warmth of his neighbours' prayers, he did in fact
+feel less chilly, and seemed to break up a little, fell drop by drop
+into sorrows which he could not formulate, and were all summed up in the
+cry of a sick child, in which he said to Our Lady, in low tones: "My
+soul is sorrowful."
+
+Thence he returned to St. Severin, sat down under those arches browned
+by the rust of prayers, and, haunted by his fixed idea, he pleaded for
+himself extenuating circumstances, exaggerated the austerities of La
+Trappe, tried almost to exasperate his fear to excuse his weakness in a
+vague appeal to Our Lady.
+
+"But I must go and see the Abbe Gevresin," he murmured, but his courage
+still failed him to pronounce the "Yes" which the priest would surely
+require from him. He ended by discovering a reason for his visit,
+without thinking himself obliged to promise just yet.
+
+"After all," he thought, "I have no precise information about this
+monastery; I do not even know whether it may not be necessary to take a
+long and expensive journey to get there; the abbe indeed declares that
+it is not far from Paris, but it is impossible to decide on this simple
+declaration; it will be useful also to know the habits of these
+cenobites before going to stay with them."
+
+The abbe smiled when Durtal mentioned these objections.
+
+"The journey is short," he said. "You start from the Gare du Nord at
+eight o'clock in the morning for Saint Landry, where you arrive at a
+quarter to twelve; you lunch at an inn close to the station, and while
+you are drinking your coffee they get you a carriage, and after a drive
+of four hours you arrive at Notre Dame de l'Atre for dinner. There is no
+difficulty there.
+
+"Then the cost is moderate. As far as I remember the railway fare is
+about fifteen francs, add two or three francs for lunch, and six or
+seven for the carriage ..."
+
+And as Durtal was silent, the abbe went on: "Well?"
+
+"Ah yes, yes ... if you knew ... I am in a pitiable state, I will and
+will not, I know well that I ought to take refuge there, but in spite of
+myself, I wish to gain time and put off the hour of departure."
+
+And he continued: "My soul is out of gear, when I would pray, my senses
+go all astray, I cannot recollect myself, and if I succeed in pulling
+myself together, five minutes do not pass but I am all astray again; no,
+I have neither fervour nor true contrition, I do not love God enough, if
+it must be said.
+
+"And, indeed, during the last two days, a frightful certainty has grown
+up in me; I am sure that, in spite of my good intentions, if I found
+myself in the presence of a certain person, whose sight troubles me, I
+should send religion to the devil, I should return eagerly to my vomit;
+I only hold on because I am not tempted, I am no better than when I was
+sinning. You will admit that I am in a wretched state to enter a
+Trappist monastery."
+
+"Your reasons are at least weak," answered the abbe. "You say first that
+your prayers are distracted, that you are unable to concentrate your
+attention; but in fact you are just like everybody else. Even Saint
+Teresa declares that often she was unable to recite the Credo without
+distraction, it is a weakness in which we must just take our portion
+humbly: above all things it is necessary not to lay too much stress on
+these evils, for the fear of seeing them return ensures their assiduity;
+you are distracted in prayer by the very fear of distraction, and by
+regret for it; go forth more boldly, look at things more widely, pray as
+best you can, and do not trouble yourself.
+
+"Again, you declare that if you meet a certain person whose attraction
+is a trouble to you, you will succumb. How do you know that? why should
+you take care about seductions which God does not yet inflict upon you,
+and which He will perhaps spare you? Why doubt His mercy? Why not
+believe, on the contrary, that if He judge the temptation useful, He
+will aid you enough to prevent your sinking under it?
+
+"In any case you ought not, by anticipation, to fear disgust at your
+weakness; the Imitation declares 'There is nothing more foolish and
+vain, than to afflict ourselves about future things which may perhaps
+never happen.' No, it is enough to occupy ourselves with the present,
+for 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof,'--'sufficit diei
+malitia sua.'
+
+"Finally you say you do not love God; again I answer, what do you know
+about it? You have this love by the very token that you desire to have
+it, and that you regret you have it not; you love our Lord by the very
+fact that you desire to love Him."
+
+"That is special pleading," murmured Durtal. "But indeed," he went on,
+"suppose at La Trappe, the monk revolted at the long outrage of my sins,
+refused me absolution, and forbade me to communicate."
+
+The abbe burst out laughing.
+
+"You are mad! What is your notion of Christ?"
+
+"Not of Christ, but of His intermediary the human being who replaces
+Him."
+
+"You can only chance upon a man pointed out beforehand from above to
+judge you; moreover, at Notre Dame de l'Atre you have every chance of
+kneeling at the feet of a saint, therefore God will inspire him, will be
+present, you have nothing to fear.
+
+"As to the Communion, the prospect of being rejected terrifies you, but
+is not that one proof the more that, contrary to your opinion, God does
+not leave you insensible?"
+
+"Yes, but the idea of communicating alarms me none the less."
+
+"I say to you again: if Jesus were indifferent to you, it would be just
+the same to you, to consume or not to consume the sacred species."
+
+"All that does not convince me," sighed Durtal. "I do not know where I
+am; I am afraid of a confessor, of others, of myself; it is foolish, but
+it is stronger than I. I cannot gain the upper hand."
+
+"You are afraid of the water; imitate Gribouille, throw yourself in
+boldly; look, suppose I write to La Trappe this very day to say you are
+coming; when?"
+
+"Oh!" cried Durtal, "wait a while."
+
+"To get an answer, we need two days each way; will you go there five
+days hence?"
+
+And, as Durtal was astounded and silent,
+
+"Is that settled?"
+
+Then, at that moment, Durtal had a strange experience, as often at St.
+Severin, a sort of caressing touch and gentle push; he felt a will
+insinuate itself into his own, and he drew back disquieted at seeing he
+had a double self, to find he was no longer alone in the depth of his
+being; then he was inexplicably reassured, and gave himself up, and as
+soon as he had said "Yes" he felt immensely relieved; then passing from
+one extreme to the other, he was troubled at the idea that his departure
+could not take place at once, and was sorry that he had still to pass
+five days in Paris.
+
+The abbe laughed. "But the Trappists must have notice, it is a simple
+formality, for with a word from me, you will be received at once, but
+wait at least until I have sent this word; I will post it this evening,
+so have no anxiety, and sleep in peace."
+
+Durtal in his turn laughed at his own impatience. "You must think me
+very ridiculous," he said.
+
+The priest shrugged his shoulders. "Come, you asked me about my little
+monastery; I must try to satisfy you. It is very small, if compared with
+the grande Trappe at Soligny, or the establishments at Sept Fonds,
+Meilleray or Aiguebelle, for there are only about ten choir fathers, and
+about thirty lay brothers or 'conversi.' There are also a certain number
+of peasants who work with them, and help them to till their land, and
+make their chocolate."
+
+"They make chocolate!"
+
+"That surprises you. How do you think they live? Ah! I warn you, you are
+not going into a sumptuous monastery."
+
+"I like it so. But in regard to the stories of La Trappe, I suppose the
+monks do not greet each other with 'Brother, we must die,' and that they
+do not dig their graves every morning?"
+
+"All that is false. They take no trouble about their graves, and they
+salute each other silently, since they are forbidden to speak."
+
+"Then what am I to do if I need anything?"
+
+"The abbot, the confessor, and the guest-master have the right of
+conversing with the guests, you will have to do with them alone; the
+others will bow when you meet them, but if you speak to them they will
+not answer."
+
+"It is well to know that. What is their dress?"
+
+"Before the foundation of Citeaux, the Benedictines wore, or so it is
+supposed, the black habit of Saint Benedict; the Benedictines properly
+so-called wear it still, but at Citeaux the colour was changed, and the
+Trappists, who are a twig of this branch, have adopted the white robe of
+Saint Bernard."
+
+"Pray pardon all these questions, which must seem childish, but since I
+am about to visit these monks, I ought to be in some measure acquainted
+with the customs of their order."
+
+"I am wholly at your disposition," replied the abbe.
+
+Durtal asked him about the situation of the abbey itself, and he
+replied,
+
+"The present monastery dates from the eighteenth century, but you will
+see in the gardens the ruins of the old cloister, which was built in the
+time of Saint Bernard. In the Middle Ages there was a succession of
+Blessed in this convent; it is a truly sanctified land, fit for
+meditation and regret.
+
+"The abbey is situated at the bottom of a valley, according to the
+orders of Saint Bernard; for you know that if Saint Benedict loved the
+hills, Saint Bernard sought the low and moist plains wherein to found
+his convents. An old Latin line has preserved the different tastes of
+these two saints:
+
+     "'Bernardus valles, colles Benedictus amabat.'"
+
+"Was it on account of his own personal liking, or for a pious end, that
+Saint Bernard built his hermitages in unwholesome and flat places?"
+
+"In order that his monks, whose health was enfeebled by the fogs, might
+have constantly before their eyes the salutary image of death."
+
+"The deuce he did!"
+
+"I may add at once that the valley in which Notre Dame de l'Atre rises
+is now drained, and the air is very pure. You will stroll by delightful
+ponds, and I may recommend you, on the borders of the enclosure, an
+avenue of secular chestnuts, where you may take some refreshing walks
+at daybreak."
+
+And after a silence the Abbe Gevresin continued,--
+
+"Walk there a good deal, traverse the woods in all directions; the
+forests will tell you more about your soul than books: 'Aliquid amplius
+invenies in sylvis quam in libris,' wrote Saint Bernard--'pray and your
+days will seem short.'"
+
+Durtal went away from the priest's house comforted, almost joyful; he
+felt at least the solace of a fixed decision, a resolution taken at
+last. He said to himself that the only thing now to be done was to
+prepare himself as best he could for the retreat, and he prayed and went
+to bed for the first time for months with his mind at rest.
+
+But next day, when he woke, his mood changed, all his preconceived
+ideas, all his fears returned; he asked himself if his conversion were
+ripe enough to allow him to cut it separate, and carry it to La Trappe;
+the fear of a confessor, the dread of the unknown, assailed him afresh.
+"I was wrong to have answered so soon," and he asked himself, "Why did I
+say 'yes'?" The recollection of this word pronounced by his lips,
+conceived by a will which was still his own and yet other than his, came
+back to his mind. "It is not the first time that such a thing happened
+to me," he thought, "I have already experienced when alone in the
+churches unexpected counsels, silent orders, and it must be admitted
+that it is terrifying to feel this infusion into self of an invisible
+being, and to know that he can, if he choose, almost turn you out of the
+domain of your personality.
+
+"But no, it is not that, there is no substitution of an exterior will to
+one's own, for one's free will is absolutely intact; neither is it one
+of those irresistible impulses endured by certain sick persons, for
+nothing is more easy than to resist it; it is still less a suggestion,
+since, in this case, there are no magnetic passes, no somnambulism
+induced, no hypnotism; no, it is the irresistible entrance into oneself
+of a strange will, the sudden intrusion of a precise and discreet
+desire, a pressure on the soul at once firm and gentle. Ah! again I am
+incorrect, and play the fool, but nothing can describe that close
+pressure, which vanishes at the least movement of impatience--it is felt
+but cannot be expressed.
+
+"Its introduction is always attended by surprise, almost with anguish,
+since it does not make use of even an interior voice to make itself
+heard, and is formulated without the aid of words, all is blotted out,
+the breath which has thrilled you disappears. You would wish that this
+incitement should be confirmed, that the phenomenon should be repeated
+in order to be more closely observed, to try to analyze it and
+understand it, when lo! it is gone; you remain alone with yourself, are
+free not to obey, your will is unfettered and you know it, but you know
+also that if you reject these invitations you take on yourself
+unspeakable risks for the future.
+
+"In fact," pursued Durtal, "it is an angelic influx, a divine touch,
+something analogous to the interior voice so well known by the mystics,
+but it is less complete, less precise, and yet it is quite as certain."
+
+He ended his dreams concluding, "I am consumed and collared by myself,
+before being able to answer this priest, whose arguments would scarce
+persuade me, unless I had had this help, this unexpected succour.
+
+"But then, since I am thus led by the hand, what have I to fear?"
+
+He feared all the same, and could not be at peace with himself; then if
+he profited by the comfort of a decision, he was consumed for the moment
+by the expectation of his departure.
+
+He tried to kill time in reading, but he had to admit once more that he
+could not expect consolation from any book. None came even distantly
+into relation with his state of mind. High Mysticism was so little
+human, soared at such heights far from our mire, that no sovereign aid
+could be expected from it. He ended by falling back on the "Imitation,"
+in which Mysticism, placed within the reach of the crowd, was like a
+trembling and plaintive friend who stanched your wounds within the cells
+of its chapters, prayed and wept with you, and in any case
+compassionated the desolate widowhood of souls.
+
+Unfortunately, Durtal had read so much, and was so saturated with the
+Gospels, that he had temporarily exhausted their sedative and soothing
+virtues. Tired of reading, he again began his courses in the churches.
+"And suppose the Trappists will not have me," he thought, "what will
+become of me?"
+
+"But I tell you that they will receive you," said the abbe, whom he went
+to see. He was not easy till the day the priest handed him the answer
+from La Trappe.
+
+He read:--
+
+     "We will receive with pleasure, for a week, in our guest-house the
+     retreatant whom you wish to commend to us, and I do not see at the
+     moment any reason why the retreat should not begin next Tuesday.
+
+     "In the hope, Monsieur l'Abbe, that we shall also have the pleasure
+     of seeing you again in our solitude, I beg to assure you that I am
+     yours most respectfully,
+
+     "F. M. ETIENNE,
+     "_Guestmaster._"
+
+He read and re-read it, at once delighted and terrified. "There is no
+further doubt; it is irrevocable," he said, and he went at once in haste
+to St. Severin, having less need of prayer than of going near to Our
+Lady; of showing himself to her, paying her, as it were, a visit of
+thankfulness, and expressing his gratitude by his very presence.
+
+He was taken by the charms of that church, its silence, the shadow which
+fell on the apse, from the height of its palm trees of stone, and he
+ended by caring for nothing and sinking on a chair, filled with one sole
+desire, not to enter again on the life of the streets, never to leave
+his refuge, never to move.
+
+The next day, which was a Sunday, he went to the Benedictine nuns to
+hear High Mass. A black monk celebrated; he recognized a Benedictine
+when the priest chanted "Dominous vobiscoum," for the Abbe Gevresin had
+told him that the Benedictines pronounced Latin like Italian.
+
+Though he was not inclined to like that pronunciation which took away
+from Latin the sonorous tones of its words, and turned after a fashion
+the phrases of that tongue into a ring of bells with their clappers
+muffled or their vases stuffed with tow, he let himself go, taken hold
+of by the unction, by the humble piety of the monk, who almost trembled
+with reverence and joy when he kissed the altar, and he had a deep
+voice, to which, behind the grating, answered the clear high voices of
+the nuns.
+
+Durtal panted, listening to the fluid pictures of the Early Masters
+sketch and form and paint themselves on the air; he was affected to his
+very marrow, as he had formerly been during High Mass at St. Severin. He
+had lost that emotion now in that church, where the flower of melody had
+faded for him since he knew the Benedictine plain song, and he now found
+it again, or rather he took it with him from St. Severin to this chapel.
+
+And for the first time he had a wild desire, a desire so violent that it
+seemed to melt his heart.
+
+It was at the moment of the Communion. The monk, elevating the Host,
+uttered the "Domine non sum dignus." Pale, with drawn features,
+sorrowful eyes, and serious mouth, he seemed to have escaped from a
+monastery of the Middle Ages, cut out of one of those Flemish pictures
+where the monks are standing in the background, while, before them, nuns
+are praying on their knees with joined hands, near the donors, to the
+child Jesus on whom the Virgin smiles, while lowering her long lashes
+under her arching brow.
+
+And while he descended the steps and communicated two women, Durtal
+trembled, and his desires went forth towards the ciborium.
+
+It seemed to him that if he were nourished on that Bread, there would be
+an end of all his dryness and all his fears; it would seem to him that
+the wall of his sins, higher and higher from year to year, and now
+barring his view, would roll away, and at last he would see. And he was
+in haste to set off for La Trappe, that he too might receive the Sacred
+Body from the hands of a monk.
+
+That mass gave him new strength like a tonic, he came out of the chapel
+joyful and firmer, and when the impression grew somewhat feebler in the
+course of hours, he remained perhaps less affected, but still resolute,
+joking in the evening with a gentle melancholy about his condition:
+"There are many people who go to Bareges or Vichy to cure their bodies,
+and why should not I go and cure my soul in a Trappist monastery?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+"I shall make myself a prisoner in two days," sighed Durtal; "it is time
+to think about packing. What books shall I take to help me to live down
+there?"
+
+He searched his library, and turned over the mystical books, which had,
+by degrees, replaced profane works on the shelves.
+
+"I will not talk of Saint Teresa," he thought; "neither she, nor Saint
+John of the Cross, would be indulgent enough to me in solitude; I have
+need of more pardon and consolation."
+
+"Saint Denys the Areopagite, or the apocryphal book known under that
+name? He is the first of the Mystics, and perhaps has gone the furthest
+in his theological definitions. He lives in the rarefied air of the
+mountain tops, above the gulfs, on the threshold of the other world
+which he sees in part by flashes of grace, and he remains lucid,
+undazzled in the blaze of light around him.
+
+"It seems that in his 'Celestial Hierarchies,' in which he brings out in
+procession the armies of heaven, and shows the meaning of angelic
+attributes and symbols, he has already passed the limits assigned to
+man, and yet in his 'Divine Names' he ventures even a step further, and
+then he raises himself into the super-essence of metaphysics at once
+calm and stern.
+
+"He over-heats the human word to give it greater force, but when after
+all his efforts he endeavours to define the Indescribable, to
+distinguish those never to be confounded Persons of the Trinity who in
+their plurality never lose their unity, words fail on his lips, and his
+tongue is paralyzed under his pen; then tranquilly and without any
+astonishment he makes himself again a child, comes down from those
+heights among us, and in order to try and explain to us what he
+understands, he has recourse to comparisons with domestic life; and that
+he may explain the Trinity in Unity he notices how, if many torches be
+lighted in one hall, lights, though distinct, mingle in one, and are in
+fact no more than one.
+
+"Saint Denys," thought Durtal, "is one of the boldest explorers of the
+eternal regions, but he would be dry reading at La Trappe."
+
+"Ruysbroeck?" he thought--"perhaps, and yet I hardly am sure--I might put
+him in my bag as well as for a cordial the little collection distilled
+by Hello; as for the Spiritual Marriages, so well translated by
+Maeterlinck, they are disconnected and obscure, they stifle me, this
+Ruysbroeck oppresses me less. This hermit is singular, all the same, for
+he does not enter into us, but rather goes round about us; he
+endeavours, like Saint Denys, to arrive at God, rather in heaven than in
+the soul, but in wishing to take such a flight, he strains his wings,
+and stammers incomprehensibly when he comes down.
+
+"We will leave him behind, then. Now let us see. Saint Catherine of
+Genoa? Her discussions between the soul, the body, and self-love are
+unmeaning and confused, and when in her 'Dialogues,' she treats of the
+operations of the interior life, she is greatly below Saint Teresa and
+Saint Angela. On the other hand her Treatise on Purgatory is clear. It
+declares that she alone has penetrated into the spaces of unknown
+sorrows, and that she has disentangled and taken hold of the joys; she
+has in fact succeeded in reconciling two contraries which seemed
+eternally repugnant; the suffering of the soul in its purification from
+sin, and the joy of the same soul, which at the very moment it is
+enduring frightful torment experiences immense happiness, for little by
+little it draws near to God, and feels His rays attract it more and
+more, and His love inundate it with such excess, that it would seem the
+Saviour desires nought but only it.
+
+"Saint Catherine sets forth also that Jesus forbids heaven to none, that
+it is the soul herself who, deeming herself unworthy to attain it,
+flings herself by her own motion into Purgatory there to cleanse
+herself, for she has only one end, to re-establish herself in her
+primitive purity, only one desire, to attain her last end, by
+destroying herself, annihilating herself, losing herself in God.
+
+"This is a conclusive study," murmured Durtal, "but not that which would
+lead to La Trappe. We must try again."
+
+He touched other volumes in the book-cases.
+
+"Here, for instance, is one which obviously I should use," he went on,
+as he took down the "Seraphic Theology" of Saint Bonaventure, "for he
+condenses the means of self-examination, of meditation for communion, of
+thoughts on death, then in these 'Selections' is a treatise on the
+Contempt of the World, whose terse phrases are admirable; it is the true
+essence of the Holy Spirit, a jelly of unction firm set--we will put
+that on one side.
+
+"I shall hardly find a better help to remedy the probable weariness of
+solitude," murmured Durtal, turning over new ranks of volumes. He looked
+at the titles. "The Life of the Blessed Virgin," by M. Olier.
+
+He hesitated, saying to himself, "Under a style which is like water with
+scarcely the chill off, there are some interesting observations, some
+tasteful comments. M. Olier has in a way traversed the mysterious
+territory of hidden designs, and has there discovered the unimaginable
+truths which the Lord is sometimes pleased to reveal to His saints. He
+has made himself the liege-man of Our Lady, and living near her has made
+himself also the herald of her attributes, the legate of her graces. His
+Life of Mary is certainly the only one which seems really inspired and
+is possible to read. Where the abbess of Agreda wanders, he alone
+remains vigorous and clear. He shows us the Virgin existing from all
+eternity in God, conceiving without ceasing to be immaculate, like the
+crystal which receives and reflects the rays of the sun, yet loses
+nothing of its lustre, and indeed shines with greater brightness,
+bringing forth without pain, but suffering at the death of her Son the
+pangs she would have borne at His birth. Then he gives us learned
+dissertations on Her whom he calls the Treasure-house of all good, the
+Mediatrix of love and impetration. Yes, but to converse with Her nothing
+is so good as the 'Officium parvum beatae Virginis,' and that," concluded
+Durtal, "I will put in my bag with my Prayer-book; we will not disturb
+M. Olier's volume."
+
+"My stock begins to give out," he continued. "Angela of Foligno?
+Certainly she is a brasier at which one may warm one's soul. I will take
+her with me. What more--Tauler's Sermons? I am tempted to do so, for
+never has any treated better than this monk the most abstruse subjects
+with a more perfectly lucid mind. By aid of familiar images, humble
+analogies, he has rendered accessible the highest speculations of
+Mysticism. He is homely and deep, then he borrows a little from
+quietism, and, perhaps, it will be no bad thing to absorb, down there, a
+few drops of that mixture. Yet on the whole, no; I have rather need of
+nerve tonics. As to Suso, he is a remedy far inferior to Saint
+Bonaventure, or Saint Angela. I put aside also Saint Bridget of Sweden,
+for in her conversations with heaven she seems aided by a God morose and
+tired, who reveals to her nothing unexpected, nothing new.
+
+"There is also Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, that voluble Carmelite whose
+work is a series of apostrophes. An exclamatory person, clever at
+analogies, expert in coincidences, a saint infatuated with metaphors and
+hyperboles. She talks directly with God the Father, and stammers out in
+ecstasy explanations of the mysteries revealed to her by the Ancient of
+days. Her books contain one sovereign page on the Circumcision, another
+magnificent one, entirely made up of antitheses, on the Holy Spirit,
+others, very strange, on the deification of the human soul, on its union
+with heaven, and on the part assigned in this operation to the wounds of
+the Word.
+
+"These are inhabited nests; the eagle which is the symbol of Faith
+resides in the eyrie of the left foot; in the hole of the right foot
+resides the melancholy sweetness of the turtle-doves; in the wound of
+the left hand the dove ensconces herself, the symbol of surrender, and
+in the cavity of the right hand reposes the pelican, the emblem of love.
+
+"These birds leave their nests and come to seek the soul that they may
+lead it to the nuptial chamber of the wound which bleeds in the side of
+Christ.
+
+"Was it not also that Carmelite nun who, ravished by the power of grace,
+despised so greatly the certitude acquired by the way of the senses, as
+to say to the Lord: 'If I saw Thee with mine eyes, I should have Faith
+no more, because Faith ceases where evidence comes in'?
+
+"All things considered," he said; "Magdalen of Pazzi, with her dialogues
+and contemplations, opens eloquent horizons, but the soul, snared in the
+bird-lime of its sins, cannot follow her. No; this saint cannot reassure
+me in the cloister.
+
+"Ah!" he went on, shaking the dust from a volume in a grey cover; "ah!
+it is true I have The Precious Blood, of Father Faber." And he began to
+dream as he turned over its pages where he stood.
+
+He remembered the impression, till now forgotten, produced on him when
+he read it. The work of this Oratorian was at least strange. The pages
+boiled over, ran forth tumultuously, carrying with them grandiose
+visions, such as Hugo conceived, developing historical perspectives such
+as Michelet loved to paint. In this volume was seen advancing the solemn
+procession of the Precious Blood, starting from the confines of
+humanity, from the origin of the ages, and it broke the bounds of the
+worlds, overwhelmed the nations, submerged history.
+
+Father Faber was less a mystic, properly so-called, than a visionary and
+a poet; in spite of the abuse of rhetoric transferred from the pulpit to
+a book, he tore up souls by roots, carried them away on the rush of the
+stream, but when one regained footing, and sought to remember what had
+been heard and seen, one could recall nothing; on reflection one
+recognized that the theme of the work was very thin, too slender to have
+been executed by so noisy an orchestra, and there remained of that
+reading something distracting and feverish which made you uneasy, and
+made you think that this kind of book had only very distant relation to
+the heavenly fulness of the great mystics.
+
+"No, not that," thought Durtal. "Now what have we selected? I keep the
+little collection of Ruysbroeck, the Life of Angela of Foligno, and Saint
+Bonaventure, and the best of all for my state of soul," he said,
+striking his forehead. He went back to his book-case, and seized a
+little book, which lay alone in a corner.
+
+He sat down, and turned it over, saying, "Here is the tonic, the
+stimulant in weakness, the strychnine for failure of Faith, the goad
+which drives you in tears to the feet of Christ, the 'Dolorous Passion'
+of Sister Emmerich."
+
+She was no chemist of the spiritual being, like Saint Teresa; she had
+nothing to do with our interior life; in her book she forgot herself,
+and left us on one side, for she saw only Jesus crucified, and wished
+only to show the stages of His agony, and to leave marked on her pages,
+as on the veil of Veronica, the imprint of the Holy Face.
+
+Though she was of our time, for Catherine Emmerich died in 1824, this
+great work dates from the Middle Ages. It is a picture which seems to
+belong to the early schools of Franconia and Swabia. This woman was the
+sister of the Zeitbloms and the Gruenewalds, she had their clear visions,
+their vivid colouring, their wild scent; but she seemed to bring back
+also, by her care for exact detail, by her precise indication of places,
+the old Flemish Masters, Roger Van der Weyden and Bouts; she united in
+herself two currents, springing one from Germany, the other from
+Flanders, and this painting brushed in with blood, and varnished with
+tears, was transposed by her into a prose style which has no relation to
+any known literature, of which we can only find by analogy the ancestry
+in the panels of the fifteenth century.
+
+Moreover, she was quite illiterate, had never read a book, nor seen a
+painting; she told quite plainly what she saw in her ecstasies.
+
+The pictures of the Passion unfolded themselves before her while she was
+bed-ridden, crushed by suffering, bleeding from the wounds of her
+stigmata; she mourned and wept, brought to nothingness by love and pity,
+before the torments of Christ.
+
+According to her words, which a scribe took down, Calvary rose, and the
+whole rascaldom of the soldiers rushed at the Saviour and spat on Him;
+frightful episodes took place where Jesus, chained to a pillar, twisting
+like a worm, under the lashes of the scourgers, then falling, looking
+with His failing eyes, at the fallen women who held Him by the hand, and
+turned away in disgust from His lacerated body, from His face covered
+with threads of blood as with a red net.
+
+Then slowly, patiently, only stopping to sob, and cry for mercy, she
+described the soldiers tearing away the stuff which had stuck to the
+wounds, the Virgin weeping; her face livid and her lips blue, she
+related the agony of His bearing His Cross, how He fell on His knees,
+grew weaker and more worn when death came.
+
+It was a frightful spectacle, told in its every particular, forming a
+sublime and frightful whole. The Redeemer was extended on a cross laid
+on the ground, one of the executioners placed a knee against His side,
+while another spread His fingers abroad, and a third hammered in a
+flat-headed nail as broad as a crown, and so long that the point came
+out behind the wood. And when the right hand was riveted the torturers
+saw that the left would not reach to the place they intended to pierce,
+therefore they attached a rope to the arm, pulled it with all their
+force, dislocated the shoulder, and the cries of the Saviour were heard
+above the blows of the hammer, His breast was seen heaving, while His
+body was anguished and furrowed by terrible shuddering.
+
+The same scene was repeated to fix His feet. They also did not reach the
+place which the executioners had marked. The body had to be tied and the
+arms bound so as not to tear the hands from the wood, and then it was
+necessary to hang on the legs so as to lengthen them as far as the
+bracket on which they were to rest; all at once the entire body yielded,
+the ribs moved under the skin; the shock was so fearful, that the
+executioners believed that the bones would start, and burst the flesh,
+wherefore they made haste to rest the left foot on the right, but their
+difficulties began again, the feet turned over, and it was necessary to
+bore them with an auger to fasten them.
+
+This continued till Jesus died, when Sister Emmerich fainted from
+terror, her stigmata bled afresh, and her wounded head rained blood.
+
+In this book the whole pack of Jewish hounds was seen in full cry, the
+imprecations and shouts of the crowd were heard, the Virgin was shown
+trembling with fever, the Magdalen, beyond herself, was terrible by her
+cries, and towering above this lamentable group, Christ appeared, pale
+and swollen, His legs entangled in His robe, when He mounted to Golgotha
+clenching His broken nails on the cross as it slipped from His grasp.
+
+This extraordinary visionary, Catherine Emmerich, also described the
+surroundings of these scenes, the landscapes of Judaea, which she had
+never visited, but have since been recognized as exact; without knowing
+it, without willing it, this illiterate woman became an unique and
+powerful artist.
+
+"Wonderful visionary, wonderful painter," cried Durtal, "and also
+wonderful saint," he added, running over the life of this nun, placed as
+a preface to the book.
+
+She was born in 1774, in the diocese of Muenster, the child of poor
+peasants. From her infancy she had conversations with the Virgin, and
+possessed the gift which also was given to Saint Sibylline of Pavia, Ida
+of Louvain, and more recently to Louise Lateau, of discerning, when she
+looked at, or touched them, objects which had been blessed from those
+which had not. She entered, as a novice, the Augustinian convent at
+Dulmen, made her profession when she was twenty-nine; her health failed
+and incessant pain tortured her, which she increased, for, like Blessed
+Lidwine, she obtained from Heaven permission to suffer for others, and
+succour the sick by taking their maladies. In 1811, under the government
+of Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, the convent was suppressed and
+the nuns dispersed. Infirm and penniless, she was carried to a room in
+an inn where she had to bear every sort of curiosity and insult. Christ
+added to her martyrdom in giving her the stigmata for which she asked;
+she could neither rise, nor walk, nor sit, could take no food but the
+juice of a cherry, but she was transported by long ecstasies. In these
+she visited Palestine, following the Saviour step by step, dictated with
+groans this fond book, then said with her death-rattle, "Let me die in
+shame with Jesus on the Cross," and died overwhelmed with joy, thanking
+Heaven for the life of suffering she had endured.
+
+"Ah, yes; I will take the 'Dolorous Passion!'" cried Durtal to himself.
+
+"Take the Gospels also," said the abbe, who came in meanwhile; "they are
+the heavenly phials from which you will draw the oil you need to dress
+your wounds."
+
+"It will be equally useful, and truly in accordance with the atmosphere
+of La Trappe, to be able to read in the abbey itself the works of Saint
+Bernard, but they consist of unmanageable folios, and the abridgments
+and extracts in volumes of a more convenient form are so ill-chosen,
+that I have never had the courage to buy them."
+
+"They have Saint Bernard at La Trappe, and will lend you the volumes if
+you ask them; but where are you from the spiritual point of view? How
+are you getting on?"
+
+"I am melancholy, badly prepared and resigned. I cannot tell if
+weariness has come from my turning always on the same round, like a
+circus horse, but at this moment I am not suffering. I am persuaded that
+this change of place is necessary, and that it would be useless to
+hesitate. All the same," he said, after a silence, "it is very odd that
+I am going to imprison myself in a monastery, and in truth, in spite of
+myself, that astonishes me."
+
+"I will admit," said the abbe, laughing, "that when I first met you at
+Tocane's, I never thought I was pointed out to direct you to a
+monastery; ah, you see I must evidently belong to that category of
+people whom I may call mere bridges, involuntary brokers of souls who
+are imposed on you for a certain end which you do not suspect, and of
+which even themselves are ignorant."
+
+"Rather, if any one were a mere bridge in this matter," answered Durtal,
+"it was Tocane, for it was he who brought us together, and we kick him
+away as soon as he has finished his unconscious task; it was evidently
+designed that we should know each other."
+
+"That is true," said the abbe, with a smile; "now I do not suppose I
+shall see you again before you start, for I go to-morrow to Macon, where
+I shall stay five days, time to see my nephews and to sign some law
+papers: at any rate keep up your courage, and do not forget to send me
+news of yourself. Write to me without much delay, that I may find your
+letter when I return to Paris."
+
+And as Durtal thanked him for his constant kindness, he took his hand
+and held it in his own.
+
+"Say nothing about that," he said; "you have only to thank Him, whose
+fatherly impatience has broken the obstinate slumber of your Faith; you
+owe thanks to God only.
+
+"Thank Him in getting rid of your nature as soon as possible, and
+leaving the house of your conscience empty for Him. The more you die to
+yourself the better will He live in you. Prayer is the most powerful
+ascetic means by which you can renounce yourself, empty yourself and
+render yourself humble in this matter; pray therefore without ceasing at
+La Trappe. Implore our Lady especially, for like myrrh which consumes
+the proud flesh of wounds, she heals the ulcers of the soul; I on my
+side will pray for you as best I can; you can thus in your weakness
+lean, so as not to fall, on that firm and protecting pillar of prayer of
+which Saint Teresa speaks. Once again, a safe journey to you; we shall
+meet soon again, my son, good-bye."
+
+Durtal remained much disturbed. "It is most tiresome," he thought, "that
+this priest is leaving Paris before me, for indeed if I have need of
+spiritual help or counsel, to whom shall I go? It is clearly written
+that I must end as I have begun, alone, but ... but ... solitude under
+these conditions is alarming. I am no spoilt child, whatever the abbe
+may say."
+
+Next morning Durtal awoke ill; furious neuralgia bored his temples like
+a gimlet; he tried to stop it with antipyrine, but this medicine in a
+large dose put his stomach out of order without abating the strokes of
+the machine which penetrated his skull. He wandered about his rooms,
+changing from one seat to another, coiling himself up in an arm-chair,
+getting up to lie down again, jumping from his bed in fits of sickness,
+upsetting his furniture from time to time.
+
+He could assign no precise cause for this attack; he had slept his fill,
+and had not exceeded in any way the night before.
+
+He thought, with his head in his hands, "There are still two days
+counting to-day before I leave Paris, and very fit I am for it! I shall
+not be in a state to travel by train, and if I travel, the food at La
+Trappe will finish me."
+
+He had a minute's comfort from the idea that through no fault of his own
+he might perhaps avoid his painful duty, and remain at home; but the
+reaction was immediate; he understood that if he did not go, he was
+lost; the vacillation of his soul had become chronic, the crisis of
+disgust of self, the acute regret of an effort consented to with pain,
+and suddenly missed, the certainty that it would only be postponed for a
+time, that he would have to pass again through alternations of revolt
+and terror, and begin again to fight with himself for conviction.
+
+"Admitting that I am not in a state to travel, I have always the
+resource of making my confession to the abbe when he returns, and of
+communicating in Paris," he thought, but he shook his head, saying to
+himself once more that he felt and knew that was not his duty. "But
+then," he said to God: "since Thou dost implant this idea in me so
+violently that I cannot even discuss it, in spite of its entire common
+sense--for after all it is not necessary to immure myself in a Trappist
+monastery in order to reconcile myself to Thee--then let me go!"
+
+And he spoke to God quietly.
+
+"My soul is an evil place, sordid and infamous; till now it has loved
+only perverse ways; it has exacted from my wretched body the tithe of
+illicit pleasures and unholy joys, it is worth little, it is worth
+nothing, and yet down there near Thee, if Thou wilt succour me, I think
+that I shall subdue it, but if my body be sick, I cannot force it to
+obey me; this is worse than all, I am disarmed if Thou do not come to my
+aid.
+
+"Take count of this, O Lord; I know by experience that when I am
+ill-fed, I have neuralgia; humanly, logically speaking, I am certain to
+be horribly ill at Notre Dame de l'Atre; nevertheless, if I can get
+about at all, the day after to-morrow, I will go all the same.
+
+"In default of love, this is the sole proof I can give that I truly
+desire Thee, that truly I hope and believe in Thee, but then, O Lord,
+aid me."
+
+He added sadly, "Ah! indeed I am no Lidwine or Catherine Emmerich, who
+when Thou didst strike them cried out, More, more!--Thou dost scarce
+touch me, and I protest; but what wouldest Thou? Thou dost know better
+than I; physical suffering breaks me down, drives me to despair."
+
+He went to sleep at last to kill the day in bed; slumbering to wake
+again suddenly from frightful nightmares.
+
+The next day his head seemed empty and his heart feeble, but his
+neuralgia was less violent. He rose, saying to himself that he must eat,
+though he was not hungry, for fear his pain should return. He went out
+and wandered in the Luxembourg, saying to himself that he must arrange
+his time, that after breakfast he would visit St. Severin, then he would
+go home and pack, and afterwards finish the day at Notre Dame des
+Victoires.
+
+The walk did him good, his head was lighter, and his heart free. He went
+into a restaurant, where because of the early hour nothing was ready; he
+spent the time before a newspaper, on a bench. How often he had held
+papers thus without reading them, how many evenings he had waited in
+cafes with his nose in an article, thinking of other matters, at those
+times especially when he was striving with his vices; when Florence
+appeared to him, still keeping the clear smile of a little girl on her
+way to school, her eyes cast down, her hands in the pockets of her
+apron.
+
+Suddenly the child changed into a ghoul who whirled round him wildly,
+and made him silently understand the horror of his desires....
+
+All that was now far distant; almost in one day the charm was broken,
+without any real strife or true effort, without inward struggles; he had
+abstained from seeing her, and now when she roused his memory again she
+was no more in fact than a recollection odious and sweet.
+
+"After all," thought Durtal, as he cut up his beefsteak, "I wonder what
+she thinks of me; she must certainly suppose me dead or lost; happily I
+have never met her, and she does not know my address.
+
+"Well," he went on, "there is no use in stirring the mud, it will be
+time to cleanse it when I am at La Trappe," and he shuddered, for the
+idea of the confessor again took root in him, and he was obliged to tell
+himself for the twentieth time that the expected never happens, and to
+declare that he should find some good fellow of a monk who would listen
+to him; then he was afraid again, putting things at their worst, and
+fancying himself turned out, like a mangy dog.
+
+He finished his breakfast, and went to St. Severin; there the crisis
+declared itself, the overcharged soul gave way, struck down by a
+congestion of sadness.
+
+He lay on a chair in such a state of depression that he could think no
+more, he remained inert without the power of suffering, till little by
+little the soul, recovered from its torpor, came to itself in a flood of
+tears.
+
+These tears gave him solace; he wept over his lot, thought himself so
+unhappy, so worthy of pity, that he hoped still more for help, yet he
+dare not address himself to Christ, whom he thought less accessible, but
+he spoke in low tones to the Virgin, murmuring that prayer in which
+Saint Bernard reminds the Mother of Christ that never in human memory
+was it heard that she abandoned any of those who sought her aid.
+
+He left St. Severin, consoled and more resolved, and, when once at home,
+was taken up with preparations for departure. Afraid that he would find
+nothing he wanted down there, he determined to stuff his portmanteau
+full; he crammed into the corners sugar, packets of chocolate, that he
+might try to deceive if needful the anguish of a fasting stomach, took
+towels thinking there would be few at La Trappe, prepared a stock of
+tobacco and matches; then besides books, paper, pencils, ink, packets of
+antipyrine, a phial of laudanum, which he wrapped in handkerchiefs and
+wedged into his slippers.
+
+When he had strapped his portmanteau, he said to himself, looking at the
+clock: "To-morrow at this time I shall be jolting in a cab, and my
+seclusion will be near at hand; never mind, I shall do well, in
+anticipation of bodily ailment, to ask for the confessor as soon as I
+get there, and suppose that turns out badly, I shall have time to make
+arrangements and take the train back at once.
+
+"All the same this will not prevent my having a wretched moment this
+evening when I enter Notre Dame des Victoires," but his anxieties and
+emotions vanished when the hour of Benediction came. He was seized by
+the giddy infection of the church, and he wrapped, steeped, and lost
+himself in the prayer which arose from all those souls, in the chant
+which went up from every mouth, and when the monstrance was brought
+forward to make its sign in the air, he felt a vast peace descend upon
+him.
+
+At evening as he undressed he sighed: "To-morrow I shall lie down in a
+cell, amazing when I think of it! I should have considered anyone mad,
+who, a few years ago, had prophesied that I should take refuge in a
+Trappist monastery; yet now I am going there of my own accord, and yet
+no, I am going driven by an unknown power, I am going as a whipped cur.
+
+"After all, what a symptom of the time it is! Society must indeed be
+unclean, if God has no longer the right to be hard, and is reduced to
+pick up what He finds, and to content Himself with gathering to Himself
+people like me!"
+
+
+
+
+SECOND PART.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Durtal awoke, gay and brisk, astonished at not hearing himself groan,
+when the moment had come in which he should set off for La Trappe; he
+was wonderfully reassured. He tried to recollect himself, and to pray,
+but he felt his thoughts more scattered and wandering than usual; he
+remained indifferent and unmoved. Surprised at this result, he tried to
+examine himself, and touched the void; he was slack that morning, in one
+of those sudden dispositions in which a man becomes a child again,
+incapable of attention, in which the wrong side of things disappears,
+and everything distracts.
+
+He dressed hastily, got into a cab, was too early at the station; and
+there experienced a perfectly childish attack of vanity. Looking at the
+people who hurried through the waiting rooms, thronged the ticket
+offices, or resignedly followed their luggage, he was not far from
+admiring himself. "If these travellers who think only of their pleasures
+or their business, knew where I am going," he thought.
+
+Then he reproached himself for the stupidity of these reflections, and
+as soon as he was settled in his compartment, in which he chanced to be
+alone, he lighted a cigarette, saying to himself, "Let us profit at
+least by the time there is still for smoking," and he began to wander,
+to dream about the position of the monastery, and rove about the
+neighbourhood of La Trappe.
+
+He remembered that a review had recently estimated the number of nuns
+and monks in France at two hundred thousand.
+
+"Two hundred thousand persons, who, in such an epoch, have understood
+the wickedness of the struggle for life, the filth of sexual relations,
+the horror of lyings-in, those are they who save the honour of the
+country," he thought.
+
+Then, passing at a bound from cloistered souls to the treatises he had
+put in his portmanteau, he went on: "It is, all the same, curious how
+completely the temperament of French art rebels against Mysticism!
+
+"All exalted writers are foreigners. Saint Denys the Areopagite was a
+Greek; Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Sister Emmerich, were Germans; Ruysbroeck
+came from Flanders; Saint Teresa, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Marie
+d'Agreda, were Spaniards; Father Faber was English; Saint Bonaventure,
+Angela of Foligno, Magdalen of Pazzi, Catherine of Genoa, Jacopo de
+Voragine, were Italians....
+
+"Ah!" he said, struck by the last name he had cited, "I ought to have
+brought his Golden Legend in my bag; how was it I did not remember it,
+for that book is, in fact, the very crowning work of the Middle Ages,
+the stimulant for hours rendered languid by the prolonged uneasiness of
+fasting, the simple aid of pious vigils? For the most incredulous souls
+of our time, the Golden Legend at least still seems like one of those
+pure parchments, on which simple illuminators painted the faces of
+saints with gum water, or white of egg on golden backgrounds. Jacopo de
+Voragine is the Jehan Fouquet, the Andre Beaunevue, of literary
+miniature, of mystic prose!
+
+"It is quite absurd to have forgotten that book, for it would have made
+me pass precious days, like those of old, in La Trappe.
+
+"Yes, it is strange," he thought, returning on his thoughts, and coming
+back to his first idea; "France can count religious authors, more or
+less celebrated, but very few mystical writers, properly so-called, and
+it is just the same also in painting. The true Early Masters are
+Flemish, German or Italian, none are French, for our Burgundian School
+descended from the Flemish.
+
+"No, it cannot be denied, the genius of our race cannot easily follow
+and explain how God acts when He works in the central depths of the
+soul, which is the ovary of thought, the very source of conception; it
+is refractory at explaining, by the expressive power of words, the crash
+or the silence of grace; bursting forth in the domain which is wasted by
+sin, it is inapt at extracting from that secret world, works of
+psychology like those of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, works
+of art, like those of Voragine or Sister Emmerich.
+
+"Besides that our field is scarcely arable, and our soil harsh, where
+shall we now find the labourer who sows and harrows it, who prepares not
+even a mystical harvest, but even any spiritual fruit, capable of
+assuaging the hunger of the few who stray and are lost, and fall from
+inanition in the icy desert of our time?
+
+"He who should be the cultivator of that land, the farmer of souls, the
+priest, has not strength to clear the ground.
+
+"The seminary has made him arbitrary and puerile, life outside has made
+him lukewarm. Therefore it seems that God has withdrawn Himself from
+him, and the proof of this is that He has taken away all ability from
+the priesthood. There are no priests now who have talent, either in the
+pulpit or in books; the laity have inherited that grace which was so
+common in the Church of the Middle Ages. Another example proves it still
+more, priests make so few conversions. In these days the being who
+pleases Heaven does without them, the Saviour Himself strikes him down,
+handles him, works directly on him.
+
+"The ignorance of the clergy, their want of education, their
+unintelligence of their surroundings, their dislike for Mysticism, their
+incomprehension of art, have taken away all their influence on the
+aristocracy of souls. Their only action is now on the childish brains of
+bigots and pretenders; and this is no doubt providential; it is better
+so, for if the priest became the master, if he succeeded in raising and
+vivifying the wearisome tribe he manages, it would be like a waterspout
+of clerical stupidity beating down on a country, would be the end of all
+literature and all art in France.
+
+"To save the Church there remains the monk, whom the priest detests, for
+the life of the cloister is a constant reproach to his own existence,"
+continued Durtal; "always supposing that my illusions are not again
+destroyed when I see a monastery ... but no, I am lucky; I have
+discovered in Paris one of those few abbes who is neither indifferent
+nor a pedant; why should I not, in an abbey, come into contact with
+authentic monks?"
+
+He lighted a cigarette, and looked at the landscape from the carriage
+window; the train was passing through fields in front of which the
+telegraph wires danced in puffs of steam; the landscape was flat and
+uninteresting. Durtal fell back sulkily in his corner.
+
+"The arrival at the convent disturbs me," he murmured; "since there are
+no useless words to proffer, I shall confine myself to giving his letter
+to the Father Guestmaster; ah! and then all will arrange itself."
+
+He felt, in fact, a perfect calm, and was astonished at not finding in
+himself any disgust or fear, at being almost in high spirits: "Well, my
+good priest was right in declaring that I was creating monsters in
+advance;" and he thought of the Abbe Gevresin, was surprised that long
+as he had visited him, he knew nothing whatever of his antecedents, that
+he was no more intimate with him than on the very first day; "In fact,
+it only rested with me to question him discreetly, but the idea never
+entered my head: it is true that our intercourse has been strictly
+limited to matters of religion and art; this perpetual reserve does not
+create very thrilling friendships, but it institutes a sort of Jansenism
+of the affections which is not without charm.
+
+"In any case that ecclesiastic is a holy man; he has not even that
+manner at once caressing and reserved of other priests. Apart from
+certain gestures, his habit of rolling his arms in his cincture, of
+wrapping his hands in his sleeves, of liking to walk backwards when in
+conversation; apart from his innocent mania of interlarding his phrases
+with Latin, he does not recall either the attitude or the unfashionable
+speech of his brethren. He loves mysticism and plain song; he is
+exceptional, and therefore he must have been also carefully chosen for
+me in heaven.
+
+"Ah well! we must be getting near," he sighed, looking at his watch, "I
+am beginning to feel hungry; come, that is all right, we shall be at
+Saint Landry in a quarter of an hour."
+
+He strummed on the windows of the carriage, saw the fields and woods fly
+past, smoked a cigarette or two, took his bag from the rack, at last
+arrived at the station and got out.
+
+Close to the tiny station he recognized the inn of which the abbe had
+told him. He found a good woman in the kitchen who said, "All right,
+sir, sit down, they will put the horse to while you breakfast."
+
+He fed himself on uneatable things, they brought him a calf's head
+forgotten in a tub, some cutlets that were high, vegetables blackened
+with gravy from the stove.
+
+In his present mood he was amused at this infamous meal, fell back upon
+a thin wine which rasped his throat, and resignedly drank coffee which
+left a sediment of peat at the bottom of the cup.
+
+Then he climbed into a jolting car driven by a young man, and the horse
+went off at a smart pace through the village and into the country.
+
+On the way he asked the driver for some information about La Trappe, but
+the peasant knew nothing. "I often go there," he said, "but never enter,
+the carriage stays at the gate, so you see I can tell you nothing."
+
+They went for an hour rapidly through the lanes, and the peasant saluted
+a roadmaker with his whip, and said to Durtal,
+
+"They say that the eminets eat their bellies."
+
+And as Durtal asked what he meant,
+
+"They are idle dogs, they lie all the summer on their bellies in the
+shade."
+
+And he said no more.
+
+Durtal thought of nothing; he digested and smoked, dizzy with the
+rumbling of the carriage.
+
+At the end of another hour they came into the heart of the forest.
+
+"Are we near?"
+
+"Oh, not yet!"
+
+"Can we see La Trappe from a distance?"
+
+"Oh no, you must have your nose just over it to see it, it is quite in a
+bottom, at the end of a lane, like that," said the peasant, pointing to
+a grassy lane into which they turned.
+
+"There is a fellow coming from the place," he said, pointing out a
+vagabond, who was crossing the copse at a great pace.
+
+And he explained to Durtal that every beggar had a right to food and
+even to lodging at La Trappe; they gave them the ordinary fare of the
+community in a room close to the brother porter's lodge, but did not let
+them into the convent.
+
+When Durtal asked him the opinion which the villagers round about had of
+the monks, the peasant was evidently afraid of compromising himself, for
+he answered,
+
+"Some say nothing about them."
+
+Durtal began to be rather weary, when suddenly as they turned out of a
+lane, he saw an immense building below him.
+
+"There is La Trappe!" said the peasant, gathering his reins for the
+descent.
+
+From the height where he was, Durtal looked over the roofs, and saw a
+large garden, with thickets, and in front of them a formidable crucifix.
+
+Then the vision disappeared, the carriage again went through the wood,
+descending by zig-zag roads where the foliage intercepted the view.
+
+They came at last, by long circuits, to an open place, at the end of
+which rose a wall with a large gate in the middle. The carriage stopped.
+
+"You have only to ring," said the peasant, showing Durtal an iron chain
+along the wall; and he added,
+
+"Shall I come for you again to-morrow?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you remain here?" and the peasant looked at him with astonishment,
+turned about, and drove up the hill.
+
+Durtal remained as one crushed, his portmanteau at his feet, before the
+door; his heart beat violently; all his assurance, all his enthusiasm,
+had vanished, and he stammered: "What will happen to me within?"
+
+And with a swift feeling of dread, there passed before him the terrible
+life of the Trappists; the body ill-nourished, exhausted from want of
+sleep, prostrate for hours on the pavement; the soul trembling, squeezed
+like a sponge in the hand, drilled, examined, ransacked even to its
+smallest folds; and at the end of its failure of an existence, thrown
+like a wreck against this rude rock, into the silence of a prison, and
+the dreadful stillness of the tomb!
+
+"My God, my God, have pity upon me!" said he, as he wiped his brow.
+
+Mechanically he looked around, as if he expected some help; the roads
+were deserted and the woods were empty; no sound was heard in the
+country, or in the monastery.
+
+"At any rate I must make up my mind to ring;" and, his limbs sinking
+under him, he pulled the chain.
+
+The sound of the bell, hard, rusty, grumbling, sounded on the other side
+of the wall.
+
+"Get up and don't be a fool," he said to himself, as he heard the
+clatter of a pair of sabots behind the door.
+
+This opened, and a very old monk, clad in the brown cloth of the
+Capuchins, looked at him inquiringly.
+
+"I come to make a retreat, and I wish to see Father Etienne."
+
+The monk bowed, took up the portmanteau, and made a sign to Durtal to
+follow him. He went with bent head and short steps across an orchard.
+They reached a grating, passed on the right of the vast building a sort
+of dilapidated chateau, flanked by two wings advancing on a court.
+
+The brother entered the wing close to the grating. Durtal followed him
+along a corridor into which several grey doors opened; on one of these
+he read the word "Auditorium." The Trappist stopped before it, lifted
+the wooden latch, ushered Durtal into the room, and after some minutes
+he heard repeated calls on the bell.
+
+Durtal sat down and looked at this gloomy chamber, for the window was
+half closed by shutters. There was little furniture; the most important
+a dining-table with an old cover; in the corner, a "prie-Dieu" above
+which was nailed a figure of Saint Antony of Padua rocking the infant
+Jesus in his arms; a large crucifix on the other wall, and here and
+there were placed two high-backed chairs and four ordinary chairs.
+
+Durtal took from his pocket-book the letter of introduction to the
+father. "What sort of reception will he give me?" he asked himself; "he
+at any rate can speak; well, we shall soon see," he said, as he heard
+steps.
+
+A monk in white with a black scapular whose two ends fell, one on his
+shoulders, the other on his breast, appeared; he was young and smiling.
+
+He read the letter, then he took Durtal's hand, and led him in silent
+astonishment across the court to the other wing of the building, opened
+a door, dipped his finger in a holy-water stoup, and offered it to him.
+
+They were in a chapel. The monk invited Durtal by a sign to kneel on a
+step before the altar, and he prayed in a low voice; he then rose,
+returned slowly to the threshold, offered Durtal holy water again, still
+without opening his lips, and leading him by the hand they went the way
+they came to the Auditorium.
+
+There, he inquired after the health of the Abbe Gevresin, seized the
+portmanteau, and mounted an immense staircase falling into ruin. At the
+top of this staircase, which had only one story, there extended a vast
+landing bounded at each of its extremities by a door.
+
+Father Etienne entered that on the right, crossed a broad vestibule, and
+led Durtal into a room, which a ticket printed in large letters placed
+under the invocation of St. Benedict, and said, "I am sorry, sir, to be
+only able to put at your disposal this room, which is not very
+comfortable."
+
+"But it will do very well," said Durtal, "and the view is charming," he
+continued, approaching the window.
+
+"At least you will be in good air," said the monk, opening the casement.
+
+Below stretched the orchard through which Durtal had passed under the
+conduct of the brother porter. An enclosure full of apple trees stunted
+and clipped, silvered by lichens, and gilt by moss; then beyond the
+monastery, and above the walls, rose fields of clover intersected by a
+great white road, extending to the horizon, which was notched by the
+foliage of trees.
+
+"You will see, sir," Father Etienne went on, "if you need anything in
+this cell, and tell me quite simply, will you not? for otherwise we
+should heap up regret for both of us, for you who have only to ask for
+what might be useful to you, for me who should only discover it later
+and be sorry for my forgetfulness."
+
+Durtal looked at him reassured by this frank greeting; he was a young
+priest, about thirty years old. His face bright, and finely cut, was
+streaked with red fibres on the cheeks; this monk wore a beard, and
+round his shaven head was a crown of brown hair. He spoke somewhat
+rapidly, and smiled, with his hands pushed into the large leathern belt
+round his waist. "I will come back directly, for I have some important
+work to finish," he said; "try to make yourself at home as much as
+possible, and if you have time glance over the rule which you have to
+follow in this monastery--it is written on one of these cards on the
+table; we will talk about it after you have mastered it, if you like."
+
+And he left Durtal alone.
+
+He soon made an inventory of the room; it was very high and extremely
+narrow like a gun-barrel, the door was at one end, the window at the
+other.
+
+At the bottom, in a corner, near the casement, was a little iron bed,
+and a small round table in chestnut wood. At the foot of the bed which
+stood along the wall was a prie-Dieu in faded rep, upon which was a
+crucifix, and a branch of dried fir below it; on the same side was a
+table of white wood covered with a towel, on which were placed an ewer,
+a basin, and a glass. On the opposite wall was a wardrobe, and by the
+fireplace, on the mantelpiece of which a crucifix was placed, was a
+table opposite the bed near the window; three straw chairs completed the
+furniture of this room. "I shall never have water enough to wash in,"
+thought Durtal, gauging the miniature jug, which held about a pint;
+"since Father Etienne shows himself so obliging, I must ask him for a
+larger ration." He unpacked his portmanteau, undressed, put on flannel
+instead of his starched shirt, arranged his toilet things on the
+washing-stand, folded his linen in the wardrobe; then sat down, looked
+around the cell, and thought it sufficiently comfortable, and above all
+very clean. He then went towards the table on which were laid a ream of
+ruled paper, an inkstand, and some pens; he was grateful for this
+attention of the monk, who knew no doubt by the Abbe Gevresin's letter
+that his business was writing, opened two volumes bound in leather and
+shut them again. The one was "The Introduction to the Devout Life," by
+Saint Francis de Sales, the other was "Manresa," or "The Spiritual
+Exercises" of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and he arranged his own books on
+the table.
+
+Then he took up, just as it came, one of the cards spread on the table
+and read:--
+
+     "Exercises of the Community for ordinary days--from Easter to the
+     Invention of the Cross in September.
+
+          Rise. 2.
+          Prime and Mass.  5.15.
+          Work after the Chapter.
+          End of work and leisure time.  9.
+          Sext.  11.
+          Angelus and Dinner.  11.30.
+          Siesta after Dinner.
+          End of Siesta.  1.30.
+          None and work, five minutes after waking.
+          End of work and leisure.  4.30.
+          Vespers followed by prayer.  5.15.
+          Supper and leisure.  6.
+          Compline.  7.25.
+          Retire to rest.  8."
+
+He turned the card, and on the other side was a new horary, entitled:--
+
+     "Winter Exercises, from the Invention of the Cross in September to
+     Easter."
+
+The hour of rising was the same, but bed-time was an hour earlier;
+dinner was changed from 11.30 to 2; siesta and supper at 6 o'clock were
+suppressed; the canonical hours were the same, except vespers and
+compline, which were changed from 5.15 and 7.25 to 4.30 and 6.15.
+
+"It is not pleasant to drag oneself from bed in the middle of the
+night," sighed Durtal, "but I am inclined to think that the Retreatants
+are not subject to this rule of wakefulness," and he took up another
+card. "This must be the one intended for me," he said, reading the head
+of the card:--
+
+Rules of Retreat from Easter to the Invention of the Cross in September.
+
+Let us look at these rules rather more closely.
+
+He examined the two tables, brought together, one for the morning, and
+one for the evening.
+
+          MORNING.
+
+          4.     Rise at the Angelus bell.
+          4.30.  Prayer and Meditation.
+          5.15.   Prime and Mass.
+          6-7.    Examination of Conscience.
+          7.      Breakfast.
+          7.30.   Way of the Cross.
+          8.      Sext and None.
+          8.30.   Second Meditation.
+          9.      Spiritual Reading.
+          11.     Adoration and Examination. Tierce.
+          11.30.  Angelus. Dinner. Recreation.
+          12.15.  Siesta. Absolute Silence.
+
+
+          EVENING.
+
+          1.30.   End of Siesta. Rosary.
+          2.      Vespers and Compline.
+          3.      Third Meditation.
+          3.15.   Spiritual Reading.
+          4.15.   Matins and Lauds.
+          5.15.   Reflections. Choir Vespers.
+          5.30.   Examination and Prayer.
+          6.      Supper and Recreation.
+          7.      Litanies. Absolute Silence.
+          7.15.   Assist at Compline.
+          7.30.   Salve Regina. Angelus.
+          7.45.   Private Examination. Retire to rest.
+
+"This at any rate is more practical--four o'clock in the morning is an
+almost possible hour, but I do not understand it, the canonical hours on
+this tablet do not agree with those of the monks, and then why these
+double Vespers and Compline? Lastly, these little points in which you
+are invited to meditate so many minutes, to read so many more, scarcely
+suit me. My mind is scarcely malleable enough to run in those
+channels--it is true that after all I am free to do as I please, for no
+one can verify what tricks I may play, can know, for instance, if I
+meditate....
+
+"Ah, here is again a regulation at the back," he went on, as he turned
+the card, "the regulation for September, I need not trouble myself about
+it, it differs, moreover, little from the other; but here is a
+postscript which concerns both horaries."
+
+     NOTE.
+
+     1. Those who are not bound to say the Breviary will say the Little
+     Office of the Blessed Virgin.
+
+     2. The Retreatants are requested to make their Confessions at an
+     early date, in order to have their mind more free for meditation.
+
+     3. After each meditation an analogous chapter of the Imitation must
+     be read.
+
+     4. The best time for confessions and the Way of the Cross is from
+     6-9 in the morning, 2-5 in the afternoon, and in summer from 9 in
+     the morning till 5 in the afternoon.
+
+     5. To read the table of notices.
+
+     6. It is well to be punctual at meals to keep no one waiting.
+
+     7. The Father Guestmaster alone is charged with providing for the
+     wants of guests.
+
+     8. Guests may ask for books for the retreat, if they have none
+     themselves.
+
+Confession! He saw this word only in the whole series of rules. He must
+at once have recourse to it. He felt a cold shiver down his back; and
+knew that he must speak to Father Etienne about it as soon as he
+returned.
+
+He had not long to wrestle with himself, for the monk entered almost at
+once and said,
+
+"Have you noticed anything you need, and the presence of which may be
+useful to you?"
+
+"No, Father; yet if you could let me have a little more water."
+
+"Nothing is easier; I will send you up a large pitcher every morning."
+
+"Thank you ... see, I have been studying the rules."
+
+"I will at once put you at ease," said the monk. "You are compelled to
+nothing but the strictest punctuality. You must follow the canonical
+offices to the letter. As to the exercises marked on the card, they are
+not of obligation; they may be useful, as they are laid down, for people
+who are very young and devoid of all initiative, but, as I think at
+least, they somewhat hamper others, and as a general rule we do not
+trouble the retreatants here, we let solitude act on them; it belongs to
+yourself to discriminate and distinguish the best mode of occupying your
+time holily. Therefore I will not impose on you any of the reading laid
+down on this card, and only take leave to get you to say the Little
+Office of the Blessed Virgin. Have you it?"
+
+"Here it is," said Durtal, holding out a bound book.
+
+"Your volume is charming," said Father Etienne, as he turned over the
+pages exquisitely printed in red and black. He paused at one of them,
+and read aloud the third lesson of Matins.
+
+"Is it not fine?" he cried. A sudden joy sprang up in his face; his eyes
+grew bright, his hands trembled on the cover. "Yes," he said, closing
+it, "read this office, here especially, for you know our true patroness,
+the true Abbot of the Trappists, is the Blessed Virgin!"
+
+After a silence he continued: "I have fixed a week as the duration of
+your retreat, in the letter I sent to the Abbe Gevresin, but I need not
+say that if you are not too weary here, you can stay as long as seems
+good to you."
+
+"I hope to be able to prolong my stay among you, but this must depend
+upon the way in which my body stands the struggle; my stomach is
+somewhat weak, and I am not without some fear; I shall, therefore, be
+much obliged to you if you will let me see the confessor as soon as
+possible."
+
+"Good; you shall see him to-morrow. I will tell you the time this
+evening, after compline. As for the food, if you think it insufficient,
+I will see that you have an extra egg, but there ceases the discretion I
+can exercise, for the rule is precise, no fish, no flesh--vegetables,
+and I am bound to admit they are not first rate.
+
+"But you shall judge, and, indeed, as it is just upon supper-time, I
+will show you the room where you will dine in company with M. Bruno."
+
+And as they descended the staircase, the monk went on: "M. Bruno is a
+person who has renounced the world, and, without having taken the vows,
+lives enclosed. He is what our rule calls an oblate, he is a holy and
+learned man, whom you will certainly like; you can talk with him during
+the meal."
+
+"Ah!" said Durtal, "and before and after I must keep silence?"
+
+"Yes, unless you have anything to ask, in which case I shall be always
+at your service, ready to answer you. As for that question of silence,
+as for those of the hours of rising and going to bed, and the offices,
+the rule allows no modification, it must be observed to the letter."
+
+"Good," said Durtal, a little taken aback by the decided tone of the
+Father, "but I saw on my card a note directing me to consult a table of
+regulations, and I have not that table."
+
+"It hangs on the wall of the staircase, near your room; you can read it
+when your head is rested to-morrow. Will you go in?" he said, opening a
+door in the lower corridor, just opposite that of the auditorium.
+
+Durtal bowed to an old gentleman who came to meet him; the monk
+introduced them and vanished.
+
+The dishes were on the table, two poached eggs, a bowl of rice, another
+of French beans, and a pot of honey.
+
+M. Bruno said grace, and proceeded to help Durtal.
+
+He gave him an egg.
+
+"This is a poor supper for a Parisian," he said, with a smile.
+
+"Ah, as long as there is an egg and wine it is bearable. I was afraid, I
+confess, that my only drink would be cold water."
+
+They talked as friends.
+
+The man was pleasant, and distinguished, with ascetic features, but with
+a bright smile, lighting up a grave face, yellow and wrinkled.
+
+He lent himself with perfect good grace to Durtal's inquiries, and told
+him, that after a tempestuous life, he felt that Grace had touched him,
+and he had retired from the world to expiate by years of austerities and
+silence his own sins and those of others.
+
+"And you have never grown tired of being here?"
+
+"Never, during the five years that I have spent in this cloister, time,
+cut up as it is at La Trappe, seems short."
+
+"You are present at all the exercises of the Community?"
+
+"Yes; I only replace manual labour by meditation in my cell; my position
+as oblate, however, dispenses me, if I so wish, from getting up at two
+o'clock to follow the night office, but it is a great joy to me to
+recite the magnificent Benedictine Psalter before daybreak--but you are
+listening to me, and eat nothing. Let me give you a little more rice."
+
+"No, thank you, but I will take, if you will allow me, a spoonful of
+honey.
+
+"The food is not bad," he said, "but I do not quite understand the same
+strange and identical taste in all the dishes; it smells, how shall I
+express it? like burnt fat or suet."
+
+"That is the warm oil with which the vegetables are dressed, you will
+soon grow accustomed to it, in a couple of days you will cease to notice
+it."
+
+"But in what consists, precisely, the part of an oblate?"
+
+"His life is less austere, and more contemplative than that of a monk;
+he may travel if he will, and though he is not bound by vows, he shares
+in all the spiritual advantages of the order.
+
+"In old times the rule admitted those whom it styled 'familiars.'
+
+"Those were oblates who received the tonsure, wore a distinct costume,
+and pronounced the three greater vows; they led in fact a mitigated
+life, half layman, half monk. This rule, which still exists among the
+true Benedictines, has disappeared among the Trappists since the year
+1293, the date at which it was suppressed by the Chapter General.
+
+"At the present time, in the Cistercian abbeys are only the fathers, the
+lay brothers, the oblates, when there are any, and the peasants employed
+in field labour."
+
+"The lay brothers, I suppose, are those whose heads are completely
+shaven, and who are clothed in a brown habit, like the monk who opened
+the door to me?"
+
+"Yes; they do not sing office, and have only manual tasks."
+
+"By the way, the rule for retreat which I read in my room does not seem
+clear. As far as I recall it, it doubles certain offices, places Matins
+at four in the afternoon, and Vespers at two; in any case the horary is
+not the same as that of the Trappists; how am I to understand and
+reconcile them?"
+
+"You have only to take into consideration the exercises set out on your
+card; Father Etienne must, I think, have said so; that mould was only
+made for people who cannot occupy and guide themselves. That explains to
+you how, to prevent them from becoming idle, the priests' breviary has
+been in some degree taken to pieces, and their time has been
+distributed in small slices, so that, for instance, they may be obliged
+to recite the psalms for Matins at hours when there is no psalm."
+
+Dinner was over; M. Bruno said grace, and said to Durtal,
+
+"You have twenty minutes free from now to Compline; you can make
+acquaintance with the garden and woods." He bowed politely and went out.
+
+"I can smoke a cigarette," thought Durtal, when he was alone. He took
+his hat and left the room. Night was coming on. He passed through the
+great court, skirted a small building surmounted by a long
+chimney-stack, discovered by the smell that it was a chocolate factory,
+and entered an avenue of trees.
+
+The sky was so obscure that he could scarcely see the group of trees he
+entered, and not seeing anyone he rolled his cigarettes, and smoked them
+slowly, with enjoyment, consulting his watch from time to time by his
+cigar lights.
+
+He was astonished at the silence of the monastery; not a sound, however
+hushed, however distant, save now and then a gentle rustle of boughs; he
+went to the side whence the noise came, and saw a piece of water, on
+which a swan was sailing, which came towards him.
+
+He saw its white plumage oscillate against the darkness which it
+displaced with a splash, when a bell sounded with slow strokes; "Ah,"
+said he, looking again at his watch, "that is the hour of Compline."
+
+He went to the chapel, which was still empty; and he took occasion of
+the solitude to examine it at his ease.
+
+It was in the form of a truncated cross, a cross without a foot, rounded
+at the summit, holding out two square arms, with a door at either end.
+
+The upper part of the cross, below a cupola painted blue, formed a
+little circular apse, round which was a circle of stalls placed back
+against the wall; in the middle rose a great altar of white marble,
+surmounted by wooden chandeliers, flanked on the left and right by
+candelabra also of wood, placed on marble shafts.
+
+The lower part of the altar was hollow, and closed in front by a glass,
+behind which appeared a shrine in Gothic style, which reflected in its
+copper gilt mirror the light of the lamps.
+
+The apse opened into a large porch, with three steps in front, on the
+arms of the cross, which were prolonged into a kind of vestibule serving
+at once as nave and side aisles to this stumpy church.
+
+The hollowed arms, at their extremities near the doors, held two very
+small chapels set back in niches painted blue, like the cupola,
+containing above two stone altars without ornament, two mediocre
+statues, one of Saint Joseph, the other of Christ.
+
+Lastly, a fourth altar, dedicated to the Virgin, was situated in this
+vestibule opposite the steps leading to the apse, opposite therefore to
+the high altar. It was relieved against a window whose lights
+represented Saint Bernard in white on one hand, and Saint Benedict in
+black on the other, and it appeared to recede into the church, because
+of the two ranges of seats which stood on the left and right before the
+two other little chapels, leaving only room necessary to pass along the
+vestibule, or to go in a straight line from this altar of the Virgin in
+the apse, to the high altar.
+
+"This sanctuary is alarmingly ugly," said Durtal, who had sat down on a
+bench in front of the statue of Saint Joseph. "To judge by the few
+subjects carved along the walls, this edifice dates from the time of
+Louis XVI., an abominable date for a church."
+
+He was disturbed in these thoughts by the sound of bells, and at the
+same time all the doors were opened; one situated in the apse itself, on
+the left of the altar, gave passage to about half a score monks, wrapped
+in great white cowls, who spread out into the choir, and occupied the
+stalls on either side.
+
+Then, by the two doors of the vestibule, came a crowd of brown monks,
+who knelt at the benches on the two sides of Our Lady's altar.
+
+Durtal had some of them near him; but they bowed their heads, and joined
+their hands, he dared not observe them; moreover, the vestibule had
+become almost dark, the light was concentrated in the choir, where the
+lamps were kindled.
+
+He could make out the faces of the white monks in their stalls in the
+part of the apse he could see, and among them he recognized Father
+Etienne on his knees near a short monk; but another at the end of the
+stalls near the porch, almost opposite the altar, and in full light,
+attracted him.
+
+He was tall and strong, and looked like an Arab in his white burnous.
+Durtal could only see him in profile, and he distinguished a long grey
+beard, a shaven skull, surrounded by the monastic crown, a high
+forehead, and a nose like an eagle's beak. He had a grand appearance,
+with his imperious features, and his fine figure as it swayed under the
+cowl.
+
+"That is probably the abbot of La Trappe," thought Durtal, and he felt
+certain when this monk struck a little bell hidden under the desk before
+him, and directed the office.
+
+All the monks bowed to the altar; the abbot recited the opening prayers,
+then there was a pause, and, from the other side of the apse, which
+Durtal could not see, rose the frail voice of an old man, a voice which
+had returned to the clear tones of childhood, but was just a little
+cracked, growing higher as it declaimed the antiphon,
+
+"Deus in adjutorium meum intende."
+
+And the other side of the choir, that on which were Father Etienne and
+the abbot, answered, scanning the syllables very slowly, with voices of
+bass pitch,--
+
+"Domine ad adjuvandum me festina."
+
+And all bowed their heads over the folios placed before them, and took
+up the words,--
+
+"Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto."
+
+And they lifted their heads while the other part of the Fathers
+pronounced the response, "Sicut erat in principio, etc."
+
+The office began.
+
+It was not chanted but declaimed, now rapid and now slow. The side of
+the choir which Durtal saw made all the vowels sharp and short letters;
+the other, on the contrary, altered them all into long letters and
+seemed to cap all the Os with a circumflex accent. It might be said that
+one side had the pronunciation of the South, the other that of the
+North; thus chanted, the office became strange, and ended by rocking
+like an incantation, and soothing the soul which fell asleep in the
+rolling of the verses, interrupted by the recurrent doxology like a
+refrain after the last verse of each of the psalms.
+
+"Ah well, I cannot understand it," thought Durtal, who had his Compline
+at his fingers' ends, "they are not singing the Roman office at all."
+
+The fact is that one of the psalms was wanting. He caught indeed, at one
+moment, the hymn of Saint Ambrose, the "Te lucis ante terminum," sung to
+a simple and rugged tune of the old plain chant, and yet the last stanza
+was not the same; but he lost himself afresh, and waited for the "Short
+Lessons" and the "Nunc Dimittis" which never came.
+
+"Yet Compline does not vary like Vespers," he thought, "I must ask
+Father Etienne the meaning of this to-morrow."
+
+Then his reflections were disturbed by a young white monk, who passed
+him, genuflected to the altar, and lighted two tapers.
+
+Suddenly all rose, and with a great shout, the "Salve Regina" shook the
+arches.
+
+Durtal was affected as he listened to this admirable chant, which had
+nothing in common with that which is bellowed at Paris in the churches.
+This was at once flexible and ardent, sustained by such suppliant
+adoration, that it seemed to concentrate in itself alone, the immemorial
+hope of humanity, and its eternal lamentation.
+
+Chanted without accompaniment, unsustained by the organ, by voices
+indifferent to themselves and blending in one only, masculine and deep,
+it rose with quiet boldness, sprang up with irresistible flight towards
+Our Lady, then made, as it were, a return upon itself, and its
+confidence was lessened; it advanced more tremblingly, but so different,
+so humble, that it felt itself forgiven, and dared then in passionate
+appeals to demand the undeserved pleasures of heaven.
+
+It was the absolute triumph of the neumes, those repetitions of notes on
+the same syllable, the same word, which the Church invented to paint the
+excess of that interior joy or sorrow which words cannot render; it was
+a rush, a going forth of the soul, escaping in the passionate voices,
+breathed forth by the bodies of the monks as they stood and trembled.
+
+Durtal followed in his prayer-book this work with so short a text, so
+long a chant; and as he listened to, and read it with recollection, this
+magnificent prayer seemed to decompose as a whole, and to represent
+three different states of the soul, to exhibit the triple phase of
+humanity, during its youth, its maturity, and its decline; it was, in a
+word, an essential summary of prayer for all ages.
+
+First, there was the canticle of exultation, the joyous welcome of a
+being yet little, stammering forth respectful caresses, petting with
+gentle words, and fondness of a child who seeks to coax his mother--this
+is the "Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo et spes nostra,
+salve." Then the soul so candid, so simply happy, has grown, and knowing
+the wilful failings of thought, the repeated loss through sin, joins her
+hands, and asks, sobbing, for help. She adores no longer with a smile,
+but with tears; it is "Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Hevae; ad te
+suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lachrymarum valle." At last old
+age comes; the soul lies, tormented by the memory of counsels neglected,
+by regret for lost graces; and having become weaker, and more full of
+fears, is alarmed before her deliverance, before the destruction of that
+prison of the flesh which she feels at hand, and then she thinks of the
+eternal death of those whom the Judge condemns. On her knees she
+implores the Advocatress of earth, the Consultrix of heaven; it is the
+"Eia ergo Advocata nostra; illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos
+converte; et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc
+exilium ostende."
+
+And to that essence of prayer composed by Peter of Compostella or
+Hermann Contract, Saint Bernard, in an excess of hyperdulia, added the
+three invocations at the end, "O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria,"
+sealing the inimitable prose with a triple seal, by those three cries of
+love which recall the hymn to the affectionate adoration of its
+beginning.
+
+"This is unprecedented," thought Durtal, as the Trappists chanted these
+sweet and eager appeals; the neumes were prolonged on the Os, which
+passed through all the colours of the soul, through the whole register
+of sound; and these interjections summed up again, in the series of
+notes which clothed them, the inventory of the human soul, which now
+recapitulated the whole body of the hymn.
+
+And suddenly at the word "Maria," at the glorious cry of that name, the
+chant fell, the tapers were extinguished, the monks fell on their knees,
+a silence like death came upon the chapel. The bells rang slowly, and
+the Angelus unfolded under the arches the separated petals of its clear
+sounds.
+
+All, now prostrate, their faces buried in their hands, were praying, and
+this lasted long; then the sound of the little hand-bell was heard,
+everyone rose, genuflected to the altar, and in silent file the monks
+disappeared through the door in the apse.
+
+"Ah! the true creator of plain music, the unknown author who cast into
+the brain of man the seed of plain chant, was the Holy Ghost," said
+Durtal, sick and dazzled, with tears in his eyes.
+
+M. Bruno, whom he had not noticed in the chapel, came and joined him.
+They crossed the court without speaking, and when they had entered the
+guest-house, M. Bruno lighted two candles, gave one to Durtal, and said
+gravely, "I wish you a good night, sir."
+
+Durtal went up the staircase behind him. They bowed again on the
+landing, and Durtal entered his cell.
+
+The wind blew under the door, and the room, scarcely lighted by the low
+flame of the candle, seemed to him gloomy, the high ceiling vanished in
+shadow, and rained down darkness.
+
+Durtal sat down by his bed, discouraged.
+
+And yet he was thrust forward by one of those impulses it is impossible
+to translate into words, in which it seems that the heart swells almost
+to bursting, and before his inability to get away and fly from self,
+Durtal ended by becoming a child again, by weeping without definite
+cause, simply from the need of relieving himself by tears.
+
+He sank down at the prie-Dieu, expecting he knew not what, which never
+came; then before the crucifix which stretched its arms above him, he
+began to speak to Him, and to say to Him in low tones:
+
+"Father, I have driven the swine from my being, but they have trampled
+on me, and covered me with mire, and the very stye is in ruins. Have
+pity on me, for I return from a distant land. Have mercy, O Lord, on the
+swine-herd without a house. I have entered into Thy house; do not send
+me away, be to me a kindly host, wash me."
+
+"Ah," he said suddenly, "that reminds me that I have not seen Father
+Etienne, who was to tell me the hour at which the confessor would
+receive me to-morrow; he has no doubt forgotten to ask him; so much the
+better. At any rate it will put it off for a day; my soul is so cramped
+that I have indeed need of rest."
+
+He undressed, sighing: "I must be up at half-past three to be in the
+chapel at four: I have no time to lose if I wish to sleep. If only I
+have no neuralgia to-morrow, and can wake before dawn!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+He passed a most terrible night; it was so special, so dreadful, that he
+did not remember, in the whole of his existence, to have endured such
+anguish, undergone the like fears.
+
+It was an uninterrupted succession of sudden wakings and of nightmares.
+
+And these nightmares overpassed the limits of abomination that the most
+dangerous madness dreams. They developed themselves in the realm of
+lust; and they were so special, so new to him, that when he woke Durtal
+remained trembling, almost crying out.
+
+It was not at all that involuntary and well known act, that vision which
+ceases just at the moment when the sleeper clasps an amorous form; it
+was as and more complete than in nature, long and accomplished,
+accompanied by all the preludes, all the details, all the sensations,
+and the orgasm took place with a singularly painful acuteness, an
+incredible spasm.
+
+A strange fact, which seemed to point the difference between this state,
+and the unconscious uncleanness of night, was, beyond certain episodes
+and caresses which could only follow each other in reality, but were
+united at the same moment in the dream, the sensation clear and precise
+of a being, of a fluid form disappearing, with the sharp sound of a
+percussion cap, or the crack of a whip close by, on waking. This being
+was felt near him so distinctly, that the sheet, disarranged by the wind
+of the flight, was still in motion, and he looked at the empty place in
+terror.
+
+"Ah," thought Durtal, when he had lighted his candle, "this carries me
+back to the time when I used to visit Madame Chantelouve, and reminds
+me of the stories of the Succubus."
+
+He remained sitting up in bed, astonished, and looked with real
+uneasiness round the cell steeped in shadow. He looked at his watch, it
+was only eleven o'clock at night. "God," he said, "if the nights are
+always like this in monasteries!"
+
+He had recourse to bathing with cold water in order to recover himself,
+opened his window to change the air, and lay down again, thoroughly
+chilled.
+
+He hesitated to blow out his candle, uneasy at the darkness which seemed
+to him inhabited, full of ambushes and threats. He decided at last to
+extinguish it, and repeated the stanza he had already heard sung that
+evening in chapel:
+
+    Procul recedant somnia
+    Et noctium phantasmata,
+    Hostemque nostrum comprime,
+    Ne polluantur corpora.
+
+He ended by falling asleep and dreamt again of impurity, but he came to
+himself in time to break the charm, experiencing again the impression of
+a shadow evaporating before he could seize it in the sheets. He looked
+at his watch; it was two o'clock.
+
+"If this goes on, I shall be broken down to-morrow," he thought, but he
+succeeded somehow or other in dozing, and waking every ten minutes to
+wait for three o'clock.
+
+"If I fall asleep again, I shall not be able to wake at the moment I
+wish," he thought, "suppose I get up."
+
+He sprang out of bed, dressed, prayed, reduced his thoughts to order.
+
+Real excesses would have exhausted him less than these sham freaks, but
+what seemed to him especially odious was the want of satisfaction left
+by the completed rape of these ghosts. Compared with their greedy
+tricks, the caresses of a woman only diffused a temperate pleasure, and
+ended in a feeble shock, but with this Succuba one remained in a fury at
+having clasped only the void, at having been the dupe of a lie, the
+plaything of an appearance, of which one could not remember the form or
+the features. It necessarily brought with it the desire of the flesh,
+the wish to clasp a real body, and Durtal began to think of Florence;
+she at least quenched his desires, and did not leave him thus, panting
+and feverish, in quest of he knew not what, in an atmosphere where he
+was surrounded, spied upon by an unknown whom he could not discern, by a
+phantom he could not escape.
+
+Then Durtal shook himself, and would repulse the assault of these
+memories. "At any rate I will go and breathe the fresh air, and smoke a
+cigarette; we will see afterwards."
+
+He descended the staircase, whose walls seemed not to keep their place,
+and danced in the light of his candle, threaded the corridors, blew out
+his light, placed the candlestick near the auditorium, and rushed out.
+
+It was pitch dark; at the height of the first story a round window in
+the wall of the chapel cut a hole through the darkness like a red moon.
+
+Durtal took a few whiffs of a cigarette, and then made his way to the
+chapel. He turned the latch of the door gently; the vestibule into which
+he entered was dark, but the apse, though it was empty, was lighted by
+numerous lamps.
+
+He made a step, crossed himself, and fell back, for he had stumbled over
+a body; and he looked down at his feet.
+
+He had come upon a battle-field.
+
+On the ground human forms were lying, in the attitudes of combatants
+mowed down by grape shot, some flat on their faces, others on their
+knees, some leaning their hands on the ground as if stricken from
+behind, others extended with their fingers clenched on their breast,
+others again holding their heads or stretching out their arms.
+
+And from this group in their agony rose no groan, no complaint.
+
+Durtal was stupefied as he looked at this massacre of monks, and
+suddenly stopped with open mouth. A shaft of light fell from a lamp
+which the Father Sacristan had just placed in the apse, and crossing the
+porch, it showed a monk on his knees before the altar dedicated to the
+Virgin.
+
+He was an old man of more than four-score years; motionless as a statue,
+his eyes fixed, leaning forward in such an access of adoration, that the
+faces in ecstasy in the Early Masters seemed, compared with his, forced
+and cold.
+
+Yet his features were vulgar, his shaven skull, without a crown, tanned
+by many suns and rains, was brick-coloured, his eye was dim, covered
+with a film by age, his face was wrinkled, shrivelled, stained like an
+old log, hidden in a thicket of white hair, while his somewhat snub nose
+made the general effect of the face singularly common.
+
+But there went out, not from his eyes, nor his mouth, but from
+everywhere and nowhere, a kind of angelic look which was diffused over
+his head, and enveloped all his poor body, bowed in its heap of rags.
+
+In this old man the soul did not even give herself the trouble to reform
+and ennoble his features, she contented herself in annihilating them
+with her rays; it was, as it were, the nimbus of the old saints not now
+remaining round the head, but extending over all the features, pale and
+almost invisible, bathing his whole being.
+
+He saw nothing and heard nothing; monks dragged themselves on their
+knees, came to warm themselves, and to take shelter near him, and he
+never moved, dumb and deaf, so rigid that you might have believed him
+dead, had not his lower lip stirred now and then, lifting in this
+movement his long beard.
+
+The dawn whitened the windows, and as the darkness was gradually
+dissipated, the other brethren were visible in turn to Durtal; all these
+men, wounded by divine love, prayed ardently, flashed out beyond
+themselves noiselessly before the altar. Some were quite young, on their
+knees, with their bodies upright; others, their eyeballs in ecstasy,
+were leaning back, and seated on their heels; others again were making
+the way of the cross, and were often placed each opposite another face
+to face, and they looked without seeing, as with the eyes of the blind.
+
+And among these lay brethren, some fathers buried in their great white
+cowls lay prostrate and kissed the ground.
+
+"Oh to pray, pray like these monks!" cried Durtal within himself.
+
+He felt his unhappy soul grow slack within him; in this atmosphere of
+sanctity he unbent himself, and sank down on the pavement, humbly asking
+pardon from Christ, for having soiled by his presence the purity of this
+place.
+
+He prayed long, unsealing himself for the first time, recognizing his
+unworthiness and vileness so that he could not imagine how, in spite of
+His mercy, the Lord could tolerate him in the little circle of His
+elect; he examined himself, saw clearly, and avowed that he was inferior
+to the least of these lay brothers who perhaps could not even spell out
+a book, understood that the culture of the mind was naught and the
+culture of the soul was all, and little by little, without perceiving
+it, thinking only of stammering forth acts of gratitude, he disappeared
+from the chapel, his soul borne up by the souls of others, away, away
+from the world, far from his charnel-house, far from his body.
+
+In this chapel, the impulse had come at last, the going forth from self,
+till now refused, was at last permitted; he no longer strove with self
+as in the time when he escaped with so great difficulty from his
+prison-house, as at St. Severin or Notre Dame des Victoires.
+
+Then he again realized this chapel, where his animal part had alone
+remained, and he looked round him with astonishment; the greater part of
+the brethren had gone, one father remained prostrate before Our Lady's
+altar; he quitted it in his turn, and went back to the apse, as the
+other fathers entered it.
+
+Durtal looked at them; they were of all sizes and all kinds; one fat and
+bald, with a long black beard and spectacles, some little fair and puffy
+men, some very old, bristling with skin like a wild boar, others very
+young, with a vague air of German dreaminess, with their eyes under
+their glasses; and almost all except the very young had this feature in
+common: a large belly, and cheeks with little red streaks.
+
+Suddenly through the open door in the apse itself appeared the tall monk
+who had conducted the office the evening before. He threw back on his
+chasuble the woollen hood which covered his head, and assisted by two
+white monks went up to the high altar to say mass.
+
+And it was not one of those masses served as so many are cooked in
+Paris, but a mass slow, meditated, and profound, a mass where the priest
+takes long to consecrate, overwhelmed before the altar, and when he
+elevated the Host no little bell tinkled, but the bells of the monastery
+spread abroad their slow peal, brief dull strokes, almost plaintive,
+while the Trappists disappeared; crouched on all-fours, their heads
+hidden below their desks.
+
+When the mass ended it was nearly six o'clock. Durtal took the same way
+as the evening before, passed before the little chocolate factory, and
+saw through the windows the fathers wrapping up the tablets in lead
+paper, and in another room a tiny steam engine which a lay brother was
+directing.
+
+He reached the walk where he had smoked the cigarettes in the shade. So
+gloomy at night, it was now charming with its two rows of aged limes
+which rustled gently while the wind wafted to him their enervating
+scent.
+
+Seated on a bench, he could see at a glance the whole front of the
+abbey.
+
+Before it was a long kitchen garden, with here and there some rose trees
+spread over the blueish basins and large balls of cabbages, and the old
+house, built in the monumental style of the seventeenth century,
+extended, solemn and immense, with eighteen windows in a row, and a
+pediment, in the span of which was placed a mighty clock.
+
+It was roofed with slate, and surmounted by a ring of small bells, and
+was reached by a flight of several steps. It reached a height of at
+least five stories, though it had in reality only a ground and a first
+floor, but to judge by the unexpected height of the windows, the rooms
+had to accommodate their ceilings to the vast altitude of the church; on
+the whole the building was striking and cold, more apt, since it had
+been converted into a convent, to shelter the disciples of Jansen, than
+the sons of Saint Bernard.
+
+The weather was warm that morning; the sun was filtered through the
+moving sieve of foliage, and the daylight, thus screened, was changed to
+rose colour as it touched the white. Durtal, who was about to read his
+prayer-book, saw the pages growing red, and by the law of complementary
+colours all the letters printed in black ink grew green.
+
+He was amused by these details, and with his back to the warmth, he
+brightened up in this aromatic breeze, rested in this bath of sunshine
+from his fatigues of the night, when at the end of the walk he saw some
+of the brothers. They walked in silence, some carrying under their arms
+great round loaves, others holding milk cans, or baskets full of hay and
+eggs; they passed before him, and bowed respectfully.
+
+All had a joyous and serious aspect. "Ah, good fellows," he thought,
+"for they helped me this morning, it is to them I owe it that I could
+keep silence no longer, and was able to pray, to have at last known the
+joy of supplication which at Paris was only a snare for me! to them, and
+above all to Our Lady de l'Atre, who had pity on my poor soul."
+
+He sprang from his bench in an access of joy, went into the lateral
+walks, reached the piece of water he had partially seen the evening
+before; in front of it rose the huge cross he had seen at a distance
+from the carriage, in the wood, before he reached La Trappe.
+
+It was placed opposite the monastery itself, and turned its back upon
+the pond; it bore an eighteenth-century Christ, of natural size, in
+white marble; the pond also took the form of a cross such as is shown on
+the greater part of the plans of churches.
+
+This brown and liquid cross was spotted by duckweed, which the swan
+displaced as he swam.
+
+He came towards Durtal, with extended beak, expecting, no doubt, a piece
+of bread.
+
+Not a sound arose in this deserted spot, save the rustle of dry leaves
+which Durtal brushed as he walked. The clock struck seven.
+
+He remembered that breakfast would be ready, and he walked quickly to
+the abbey. Father Etienne was waiting for him, shook hands, asked if he
+had slept well, then said:
+
+"What would you like? I can only offer you milk and honey; I will send
+to-day to the nearest village and try to get you a little cheese, but
+you will have only a poor meal this morning."
+
+Durtal proposed to exchange the milk for wine, declaring that he should
+then do very well, and said, "In any case I should do ill to complain,
+for you are fasting."
+
+The monk smiled. "Just now," he said, "we are doing penance, on account
+of certain feasts of our order." And he explained that he only took food
+once a day, at two o'clock in the afternoon, after Nones.
+
+"And you have not even wine and eggs to keep up your strength!"
+
+Father Etienne smiled again. "One gets accustomed to it," he said. "What
+is this rule in comparison with that adopted by Saint Bernard and his
+companions, when they went to till the valley of Clairvaux? Their meal
+consisted of oak leaves, salted, cooked in muddy water."
+
+And after a silence the Father continued: "No doubt the Trappist rule is
+hard, but it is mild if we carry our thoughts back to the rule of Saint
+Pacomius in the East. Only think; whoever wished to join that order had
+to remain ten days and nights at the door of the convent, and had to
+endure spitting and insults; if he still desired to enter, he fulfilled
+a three years' novitiate, inhabited a hut where he could not stand up,
+nor lie at full length, ate only olives and cabbage, prayed twelve times
+in the morning, twelve times in the afternoon, twelve times in the
+night; the silence was perpetual, and his mortifications never ceased.
+To prepare himself for this novitiate, and to learn to subdue his
+appetite, Saint Macarius thought of the plan of soaking his bread in a
+vessel with a very narrow neck, and only fed on the crumbs which he
+could take out with his fingers. When he was admitted into the
+monastery, he contented himself with gnawing leaves of raw cabbage on
+Sunday. Ah! they could stand more than we. We, alas! have no longer
+souls nor bodies stout enough to bear such fasts; but do not let that
+stop your meal; make as good an one as you can. Ah, by the way," said
+the monk, "be in the auditorium at ten precisely, where the Father Prior
+will hear your confession."
+
+And he left the room.
+
+If Durtal had received a blow on his head with a mallet, he could not
+have been more overwhelmed. All the scaffolding of his joys, so rapidly
+run up, fell. This strange fact had occurred, in the impulse of joy he
+had felt since daybreak he had wholly forgotten that he had to confess.
+He had a moment of aberration. "But I am forgiven," he thought; "the
+proof is that state of happiness, such as I have never known, that truly
+wonderful expansion of soul which I experienced in the chapel and in the
+wood."
+
+The idea that nothing had begun, that all was still to do, terrified
+him; he had not the courage to swallow his bread, he drank a little
+wine, and rushed out of doors in a wind of panic.
+
+He went, wildly, with great strides. Confession! The prior? Who was the
+prior? He sought in vain among the fathers whose faces he remembered the
+one who would hear him.
+
+"My God!" he said, all at once, "but I do not even know how a confession
+is made."
+
+He sought a deserted corner, where he could recollect himself a little.
+He was striding along without even knowing how he came there, along a
+walnut-tree walk with a wall on one side. There were some enormous
+trees, he hid himself behind the trunk of one of them, and sitting on
+the moss, turned over the leaves of his prayer-book, and read: "On
+arriving at the confessional, place yourself on your knees, make the
+sign of the cross, and ask the priest for his blessing, saying, 'Bless
+me, Father, for I have sinned;' then recite the Confiteor as far as _mea
+culpa_ ... and ..."
+
+He stopped, and without any need of probing it his life sprang out in
+jets of filth.
+
+He shrank from it, there was so much, of every kind, that he was
+overwhelmed with despair.
+
+Then by an effort of his will he pulled himself together, endeavoured to
+control and bank up these torrents, to separate them so as to understand
+them, but one affluent rolled back all the others, ended by overwhelming
+them, and became the river itself.
+
+And this sin appeared at first ape-like and sly, at school where
+everyone tempted and corrupted others; then there was all his greedy
+youth, dragged through tap-rooms, rolled in swine troughs, wallowing in
+the sinks of prostitution, and then an ignoble manhood. To his regular
+tasks had succeeded toll paid to his senses, and shameful memories
+assailed him in a crowd; he recalled to mind how he had sought after
+monstrous iniquities, his pursuit of artifices aggravating the malice of
+the act, and the accomplices and agents of his sins passed in file
+before him.
+
+Among all, at one time, there was a certain Mme. Chantelouve, a
+demoniacal adulteress who had drawn him headlong into frightful
+excesses, who had linked him to nameless crimes, sins against holy
+things, to sacrileges.
+
+"How can I tell all this to the monk?" thought Durtal, terrified by the
+remembrance; "how can I even express myself, so as to make him
+understand without defilement?"
+
+Tears rushed from his eyes. "My God, my God!" he sighed, "this is indeed
+too much."
+
+And in her turn Florence appeared with her little street-arab smile, and
+her childish haunches. "I can never tell the confessor all that was
+brewed in the perfumed shade of her vices," cried Durtal. "I can by no
+means make him face these torrents of pus.
+
+"Yet they say this has to be done;" and he bowed under the weight of the
+foulness of this girl.
+
+"How shameful to have been riveted to her, how disgusting to have
+satisfied the abominable demands of her desires!"
+
+Behind this sewer extended others. He had traversed all the districts of
+sin which the prayer-book patiently enumerated. He had never confessed
+since his first communion, and with the piling up of years had come
+successive deposits of sins. He grew pale at the thought that he was
+about to detail to another man all his dirt, to acknowledge his most
+secret thoughts, to say to him what one dares not repeat to one's own
+self, lest one should despise oneself too much.
+
+He sweated with anguish, then nausea at his being, remorse for his life
+solaced him, and he gave himself up; regret for having lived so long in
+this cesspool was a very crucifixion to him; he wept long, doubting
+pardon, not even daring to ask it, so vile did he feel himself.
+
+At last he sprang up; the hour of expiation must be at hand, in fact his
+watch pointed to a quarter to ten. His agony as he thus wrought with
+himself had lasted more than two hours.
+
+He hurriedly reached the main path which led to the monastery. He walked
+with his head down, forcing back his tears.
+
+He slackened his pace somewhat as he drew near the little pond; he
+lifted his eyes in supplication to the cross, and as he lowered them he
+met a look so moved, so compassionate, so gentle, that he stopped, and
+the look disappeared with the bow of a lay brother, who passed on his
+way.
+
+"He read my thoughts," said Durtal to himself. "Oh, this charitable monk
+has good reason to pity me, for indeed I suffer. Ah, Lord, that I might
+be like that humble brother!" he cried, remembering that he had seen
+that very morning the young tall lad, praying in the chapel with such
+fervour that he seemed to rise from the ground, before Our Lady.
+
+He arrived at the auditorium in a frightful state, and sank on a chair;
+then, like a hunted animal that thinks itself discovered, he sprang up,
+and, disturbed by his fears, moved by a wind of disorder, he thought of
+flight, that he would pack his bag, and make for the train.
+
+He mastered himself, undecided and trembling, his ear on the watch, his
+heart beating with great strokes, and he heard the sound of distant
+steps. "My God," he said, waiting for the steps that drew near, "what
+manner of monk is coming?"
+
+The steps were silent, and the door opened. Durtal in his alarm dared
+not look at the confessor, in whom he recognized the tall Trappist, with
+the imperious profile, whom he believed to be the abbot of the
+monastery.
+
+His breath was taken away, and he drew back without saying a word.
+
+Surprised at this silence, the prior said,--
+
+"You have asked to make your confession, sir?"
+
+And at a sign from Durtal, he pointed out the prie-Dieu placed against
+the wall, and himself knelt down, turning his back.
+
+Durtal braced himself, fell down at the prie-Dieu, and then completely
+lost his head. He had vaguely prepared how to enter on the matter, noted
+the points of his statement, classified his sins in some degree, and now
+remembered nothing.
+
+The monk rose, sat down on a straw chair, leant towards the penitent,
+his hand behind his ear to hear the better.
+
+He waited.
+
+Durtal wished rather to die than speak; he succeeded, however, in
+mastering himself, and bridling his shame; he opened his lips, but no
+word came; he remained overwhelmed, his head in his hands, repressing
+the tears he felt ready to fall.
+
+The monk did not move.
+
+At last he made a desperate effort, stammered the beginning of the
+Confiteor, and said,
+
+"I have not confessed, since my childhood; since then I have led a
+shameful life, I have ..."
+
+The words would not come.
+
+The Trappist remained silent, and did not assist him at all.
+
+"I have committed every kind of debauch, I have done everything ...
+everything ..."
+
+He choked, and the tears he had repressed flowed, he wept, his body was
+shaken, his face hidden in his hands.
+
+And as the prior, still bending over him, did not move,
+
+"But I cannot," he cried; "I cannot."
+
+All that life he could not bring out, stifled him; he sobbed in despair
+at the view of his sins, and crushed also at finding himself thus
+abandoned, without a word of kindness, without help. It seemed to him
+that all was giving way, that he was lost, repulsed even by Him who yet
+had directed him to this abbey.
+
+Then a hand was laid on his shoulder, while a gentle, low voice said,
+
+"Your soul is too tired for me to fatigue you with questions, come back
+at nine o'clock to-morrow, we shall have time before us, we shall not
+then be hurried by any office; from now till then, think of the story of
+Calvary; the cross, which was made for the sins of the whole world, lay
+so heavily on the shoulders of the Saviour, that His knees bent and He
+fell. A man of Cyrene passed by who helped the Lord to bear it. You, in
+detesting, in weeping for your sins, have alleviated and rendered
+lighter, if one may say so, the cross of the burthen of your sins, and
+having made it less heavy, have thus allowed Our Lord to lift it.
+
+"He has recompensed you by the most astonishing of miracles, the miracle
+of having brought you here from so far off. Thank Him, then, with all
+your heart, and be not discomforted. You will say to-day for your
+penance, the Penitential Psalms, and the Litany of the Saints. I will
+give you my blessing."
+
+And the prior blessed him and went out. Durtal raised himself up after
+his tears; what he feared so much had happened; the monk who would take
+him in hand was impassive, almost dumb. "Alas!" he thought, "my
+abscesses are ripe, but it needs the cut of a lancet to open them."
+
+"After all," he went on, as he went upstairs to bathe his eyes in his
+cell, "this Trappist was compassionate at last, not so much in what he
+said, as the tone in which he said it; then, to be just, he was perhaps
+confused by my tears; the Abbe Gevresin certainly did not tell Father
+Etienne that I was taking refuge in La Trappe in order to be converted,
+let us put ourselves in the place of a man living in God, far from the
+world, over whose head a shower bath is suddenly discharged.
+
+"Well, we shall see to-morrow;" and Durtal made haste to sponge his
+face, for it was nearly eleven o'clock and the office of Sext was about
+to begin.
+
+He went to the chapel, which was almost empty, for the brothers were
+working at that time in the chocolate factory, and in the fields.
+
+The fathers were in their places in the apse. The prior struck his bell,
+all signed themselves with a large cross, and on the left, where he
+could not see, for Durtal had taken the same place as in the morning,
+near Saint Joseph's altar, a voice arose:
+
+"Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum."
+
+And the other part of the choir answered:
+
+"Et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus."
+
+There was a moment's pause, and the pure thin voice of the old Trappist
+sang as before the office of Compline the evening before:
+
+"Deus in adjutorium meum intende."
+
+And the liturgy continued its course, with its "Gloria Patri," etc.,
+during which the monks bowed their foreheads on their books, and with
+its series of psalms, accented in short tones on the one side, and long
+on the other.
+
+Durtal, as he knelt, allowed himself to be rocked by the psalmody, too
+tired to be able to pray himself.
+
+Then, when Sext was ended, all the fathers meditated, and Durtal caught
+a look of pity from the prior, who turned a little towards his bench. He
+understood that the monk implored the Saviour for him, and perhaps asked
+God to show him the way in which he might conduct himself on the morrow.
+
+Durtal rejoined M. Bruno in the court; they shook hands, and the oblate
+announced the presence of a new guest.
+
+"A retreatant?"
+
+"No; a curate from the neighbourhood of Lyons, he has come to see the
+abbot, who is ill."
+
+"But I thought the abbot of Notre Dame de l'Atre was the tall monk who
+led the office?"
+
+"Oh no; that was the prior Father Maximin, you have not seen the abbot,
+and I doubt if you will see him, for I do not think he will leave his
+bed before you go."
+
+They reached the guest-house, and found Father Etienne making excuses to
+a short fat priest for the poor fare he could offer.
+
+He was a jovial priest, with strong features moulded in yellow fat.
+
+He joked M. Bruno, whom he seemed to have known some time, on the sin of
+gluttony which must so often be committed at La Trappe, then tasted,
+pretending a chuckle of delight, the scentless bouquet of the poor wine
+he poured out, and lastly, when he divided with a spoon the omelette
+which was the main dish of their dinner, he pretended to cut up a fowl,
+and to be delighted with the fine appearance of the flesh; saying to
+Durtal, "This is a barley-fed fowl, may I offer you a wing?"
+
+This kind of pleasantry exasperated Durtal, who had no wish to laugh
+that day; he therefore was satisfied to make a vague bow, wishing to
+himself that the end of dinner was at hand.
+
+The conversation continued between the priest and M. Bruno.
+
+After it had spread over various commonplaces, it took a more definite
+form, in regard to an invisible otter which plundered the abbey ponds.
+
+"But, no doubt," said the curate, "you have found its lair?"
+
+"Never; it is easy to see in the lain grass the paths it traverses to
+get to the water, but we always lose its traces at the same spot. We
+have watched for days with Father Etienne, but it has never shown
+itself."
+
+The abbe explained various traps which might be set with advantage.
+Durtal thought of the otter-hunt which Balzac tells so pleasantly at the
+beginning of his "Paysans," when the dinner came to an end.
+
+The curate said grace, and said to M. Bruno, "Suppose we take a turn;
+the fresh air will do instead of the coffee, which they forget to give
+us."
+
+Durtal returned to his cell.
+
+He felt himself emptied, injured, cheated, reduced to a state of fibre,
+a state of pulp. His body, crushed by the nightmares of the night,
+enervated by the scene of the morning, needed entire rest, and if his
+soul had not still that infatuation which had broken it in tears at the
+monk's feet, it was sad and restless, and it also asked for silence,
+repose, and sleep.
+
+"Let us see," said Durtal, "I must not give way, let me bestir myself."
+
+He read the Penitential Psalms and the Litanies of the Saints; then he
+hesitated between two volumes of Saint Bonaventure and Saint Angela.
+
+He decided on the Blessed Angela. She had sinned and had been converted,
+and she seemed less far from him, more intelligible, more helpful than
+the Seraphic Doctor, than a Saint who had always remained pure,
+sheltered from falls. For she too had been a carnal sinner; she too had
+reached the Saviour from afar.
+
+A married woman, she lived in adultery and shame; lovers succeeded one
+another, and when she had exhausted them she threw them aside like
+husks. Suddenly grace rose in her and made her soul break forth; she
+went to confession, not daring to avow the more awful of her sins, and
+she communicated, thus grafting sacrilege upon her other faults.
+
+She lived, day and night tortured by remorse, and finally prayed to
+Saint Francis of Assisi to help her; and the next night the saint
+appeared to her. "My sister," he said, "if you had called on me sooner,
+I should have granted your prayer before this." The next day she went to
+church, heard a priest preaching, understood she must address herself to
+him, and laid all before him in a full confession.
+
+Then began the trials of an appalling life of purification. In blow
+after blow she lost her mother, her husband, her children; she went
+through such violent temptations to impurity that she was obliged to
+seize on lighted coals and cauterize the plague of her senses with fire.
+
+During two years the demon sifted her. She parted her goods among the
+poor, assumed the habit of the Third Order of Saint Francis, gathered in
+the sick and infirm, and begged for them in the streets.
+
+One day a feeling of sickness came over her before a leper whose sores
+were stinking. To punish herself she drank the water in which she had
+washed the sores; she was overcome with nausea; and punished herself
+yet more by forcing herself to swallow a scab which had not gone down
+with the water and remained dry in her throat.
+
+For years she dressed ulcers and meditated on the Passion of Christ.
+Then her novitiate of sorrows drew to a close and a radiant day of
+visions dawned on her. Jesus treated her as a spoilt child, called her,
+"My sweetest, my well-beloved daughter;" He dispensed her from the
+necessity of eating, and nourished her only with the Sacred Species; He
+called her, drew her, absorbed her in uncreated light, and by
+anticipating her inheritance, enabled her to understand, in life, the
+joys of heaven.
+
+And she was so simple and timid that she feared in spite of all, for the
+memory of her sins alarmed her. She could not believe herself forgiven,
+and said to Christ; "Ah, if I could but put myself in an iron collar and
+drag myself to the market-place to proclaim my shame."
+
+And He consoled her: "Be easy, My daughter, My sufferings have atoned
+for your sins;" and as she reproached herself for having lived in
+opulence and having delighted in clothes and jewels, He addressed her,
+smiling: "To buy you riches, I have wanted for everything; you required
+a great number of clothes, and I had but one garment of which the
+soldiers stripped Me, for which they drew lots; My nakedness was the
+expiation of your vanity in ornaments."
+
+And all her conversations with Christ were in this tone. He passed His
+time in comforting this humble creature whom His benefits overwhelmed;
+and this has made her the most loving of the saints! her work is a
+succession of spiritual outpourings and caresses; her book is such a
+living hearth that beside it the volumes of other mystics seem but dull
+coal.
+
+"Ah," said Durtal to himself, in turning over these pages, "it was
+indeed the Christ of Saint Francis, the God of mercy who spoke to this
+Franciscan!" and he went on: "that ought to give me courage, for Angela
+of Foligno was as great a sinner as I am, but all her sins were
+remitted! Yes, but then what a soul she had, while mine is good for
+nothing; instead of loving, I reason; nevertheless it is right to
+remember that the conditions of the Blessed Angela were more favourable
+than mine. Living in the thirteenth century she had a shorter journey
+to make to approach God, for since the Middle Ages, each century takes
+us further from Him! she lived in a time full of miracles, which
+overflowed with Saints. For me, I live in Paris in an age when miracles
+are rare and Saints scarcely abound. And once away from here, what a
+vista is before me of falling away, of soaking myself in a stew of
+infamy, in a bath of the sins of great cities."
+
+"By the way" ... he looked at his watch and started; it was two
+o'clock--"I have missed the office of Nones," he said; "I must simplify
+my complicated horary, or I shall never know where I am;" and at once he
+traced in a few lines:
+
+"Morning. Rise at 3 o'clock, or rather at 3.30. Breakfast at 7--Sext at
+11, dinner at 11.30--Nones at 1.30--Vespers at 5.15--Supper at 6, and
+Compline at 7.25."
+
+"There, at least that is clear and easy to remember--If only Father
+Etienne have not noticed my absence from chapel!"
+
+He left his room. "Ah, here is the famous rule," he said to himself, on
+seeing a framed table hung on the landing.
+
+He approached and read:--
+
+      "Rule for Visitors."
+
+It was composed of numerous paragraphs, and opened as follows:--
+
+     "Those whom Divine Providence has guided to this monastery are
+     requested to note the following:--
+
+     "They will at all times avoid meeting the religious and lay
+     brothers, and will not go near their places of work.
+
+     "They are forbidden to leave the cloister for the farm or the
+     neighbourhood of the monastery."
+
+Then came a series of instructions which he had already seen on the
+printed horary.
+
+Durtal skipped several paragraphs, and read again:--
+
+     "Visitors are requested not to write anything on the doors, not to
+     strike matches on the wall, and not to spill water on the floor.
+
+     "They are not allowed to visit each other's rooms or to speak to
+     one another.
+
+     "Smoking is not allowed in the house."
+
+"Nor indeed outside," thought Durtal. "But I want a cigarette badly;"
+and he went down.
+
+In the corridor he ran against Father Etienne, who immediately observed
+that he had not seen him in his place during the office. Durtal excused
+himself as well as he could. The monk said no more, but Durtal
+understood that he was observed, and that under his childlike aspect the
+guest-master would, where discipline was concerned, hold him in an iron
+grip. He was confirmed in this impression when at Vespers he noticed
+that the monk's first glance on entering the chapel was at him, but that
+day he felt so sore and broken that he cared but little. This sudden
+change of existence, and of the manner in which he had been accustomed
+to spend his time, astounded him, and since the crisis of the morning he
+had been in a kind of torpor which took from him all power of recovery.
+He drifted to the end of the day, no longer thinking of anything,
+sleeping as he stood, and when the evening came he fell on his bed a
+mere inert mass.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+He woke with a bound at eleven o'clock, with an impression of someone
+looking at him in his sleep. Lighting a match, he ascertained the time,
+and seeing no one, fell back in bed again, and slept at a stretch till
+four o'clock. Then he dressed himself in haste and ran to the church.
+
+The vestibule, which had been dark on the previous evening, was lit up
+that morning, for an old monk was celebrating mass at the altar of St.
+Joseph. He was bald and infirm, with a white beard waving from side to
+side in long threads with every gust of wind.
+
+A lay brother was assisting him, a small man with black hair and a
+shaven head, like a ball painted blue; he looked like a bandit, with his
+beard in disorder and his worn-out robe of felt.
+
+And the eyes of this bandit were gentle and startled like those of a
+little boy. He served the priest with an almost timid respect and a
+suppressed joy which was touching to see.
+
+Others, kneeling on the flagstones, prayed with concentrated attention
+or read their mass. Durtal noticed the old man of eighty, immovable with
+outstretched face and closed eyes; and the youth whose look of pity had
+helped him near the pond, was following the office in his prayer-book
+with attentive meditation. He looked about twenty years old, tall and
+strong; his face, with an air of fatigue, was at once masculine and
+tender, with emaciated features, and a light beard which fell over his
+habit in a point.
+
+Durtal gave way to his emotions in this chapel, where everyone did a
+little to help him, and thinking of the confession he was about to make,
+he implored the Saviour to help him, and prayed that the monk would
+completely explore his soul.
+
+And he felt himself less dismayed, more master of himself, and firmer.
+He collected and pulled himself together, feeling a melancholy
+confusion, but he had no longer the sense of desolation which had
+overcome him the evening before. He set his mind on the idea that he
+would not abandon himself, that he would help himself with all his
+might, and that in any case he could not collect himself better.
+
+These reflections were interrupted by the departure of the old Trappist,
+who had finished offering the sacrifice, and by the entry of the prior,
+who went up in the rotunda between two white fathers to say mass at the
+high altar.
+
+Durtal was absorbed in his prayer-book, but he ceased reading when the
+priest had consumed the Species, for all rose, and he was amazed at a
+sight of which he had never dreamed, a communion of monks.
+
+They advanced in single file, silent and with downcast eyes, and when
+the first arrived before the altar, he turned round to embrace the
+comrade who followed; he in turn took in his arms the religious who
+followed him, and so on to the last. All, before receiving the
+Eucharist, exchanged the kiss of peace, then they knelt, communicated,
+and came back in single file, turning into the rotunda behind the altar.
+
+And the return was unexpected; with the white fathers at the head of the
+line, they made their way very slowly with closed eyes and joined hands.
+The faces seemed to be somewhat altered; they were differently lit from
+within; it seemed that the soul, driven by the power of the Sacrament
+against the sides of the body, filtered through the pores and lit up the
+skin with a special light of joy, with that kind of brightness which
+pours from white souls, and makes way like a rose-coloured vapour along
+the cheeks, and shines, as if concentrated, on the brow.
+
+Watching the mechanical and hesitating gait of these monks, it seemed as
+if their bodies were no more than automata moving from habit, and that
+the souls, being elsewhere, gave no heed to them.
+
+Durtal recognized the old lay brother, bent so much that his face
+disappeared in his beard which pressed against his chest, and his two
+great knotty hands trembled as he clasped them; he also noticed the tall
+young brother, his features seeming drawn on a dissolved surface,
+gliding with short steps, his eyes closed.
+
+By a fatal chance he thought upon himself. He was the only one who did
+not communicate, for he saw M. Bruno coming last from behind the altar
+and returning to his place with folded arms. This exclusion brought home
+to him clearly how different he was, and how far apart, from those
+around him! All were admitted, and he alone remained outside. His
+unworthiness was more apparent, and he grew sad at being put aside,
+looked on, as he deserved to be, as a stranger, separated like the goat
+of the Scriptures, penned, far from the sheep, on the left of Christ.
+
+These reflections were of use to him, for they relieved him of the
+terror of confession which was again coming over him. This act seemed to
+him so natural and just, in his necessary humiliation and unavoidable
+suffering, that a desire came over him to accomplish it at once, so that
+he might appear in this chapel purified and washed, and with at least
+some resemblance to the others.
+
+When the mass was over, he made his way towards his cell to get a tablet
+of chocolate.
+
+At the top of the stairs M. Bruno, with a large apron round him, was
+getting ready to clean the steps.
+
+Durtal looked on him with surprise. The oblate smiled and shook hands
+with him.
+
+"This is an excellent task for the soul," he said, showing his broom;
+"it recalls modest sentiments which one is too inclined to forget after
+living in the world."
+
+And he began sweeping vigorously, and collecting into a pan the dust
+which like pepper filled every crevice in the floor.
+
+Durtal carried his tablet into the garden. "Let us consider," he said to
+himself as he nibbled it; "supposing I took another walk and tried an
+unknown part of the wood?" And he felt no wish to do so. "No, placed as
+I am, I would rather haunt the same spot and not leave the places to
+which I am accustomed; I am already so little under control, and so
+easily disturbed, that I do not wish to risk anything by curiosity to
+see new places." And he went down to the cross pond. He went along the
+banks, and having reached the end, was astonished to find, a few steps
+farther, a stream spotted with green pellicules, hollowing its way
+between two hedges which fenced in the monastery. The fields stretched
+out beyond, and the roofs of a large farmhouse were visible in the
+trees, and all round the horizon on hills were forests which seemed to
+stop the way before the sky.
+
+"I imagined the grounds were larger," he said to himself, retracing his
+steps; and having reached the end of the cross pond, he gazed on the
+huge wooden crucifix reared in the air which was reflected in that black
+mirror. It sank down, seen from behind, trembling in the small waves
+stirred up by the breeze, and seemed to fall whirling round in that
+stretch of ink. And as the body of the marble Christ was hidden by the
+wood, only the two white arms which hung below the tree could be seen,
+twisted in the blackness of the water.
+
+Seated on the grass, Durtal gazed on the hazy image of the recumbent
+cross, and thinking of his soul, which, like the pond, was tanned and
+stained by a bed of dead leaves and a dunghill of sins, he pitied the
+Saviour whom he was about to invite to bathe Himself there, for it would
+no longer be the Martyr of Golgotha to whom at all events death came on
+a hill, His head high, by daylight, in the open air! but it would be by
+an increase of outrages, the abominable plunging of the crucified body,
+the head low, by night, into a depth of mud.
+
+"Ah! it would be time to spare Him, in filtering and clarifying me," he
+cried to himself. And the swan, till then motionless in an arm of the
+pond, swept over the lamentable image in advancing, and whitened the
+moving mourning of the waters with its peaceful reflection.
+
+And Durtal thought of the absolution which he would perhaps obtain, and
+he reopened his prayer-book and numbered his faults; and, slowly, as on
+the day before, he tapped, in his innermost being, a fountain of tears.
+
+"I must control myself," he said, trembling at the idea that he would
+suffocate again and be unable to speak; and he resolved to begin his
+confession at the other end, first going over the minor sins, keeping
+the great ones for the end so as to finish with the avowal of his carnal
+misdeeds: "if I succumb then I can explain myself in two words. My God!
+may the prior only not remain silent as he did yesterday, may he only
+absolve me!"
+
+He shook off his sadness, left the pond, and returning to the lime
+avenue, he interested himself in a closer inspection of the trees. They
+raised huge trunks, covered with reddish-brown stonecrop, silvered grey
+by mosses; and several that morning were wrapped as in a mantle trimmed
+with pearls, gossamer threads studded with drops of dew.
+
+He sat down on a bench, but fearing a shower, for it looked threatening,
+he retired to his cell.
+
+He felt no desire to read; he was eager for, while yet he dreaded, the
+arrival of nine o'clock, to have done with, to get rid of the weight
+upon his soul, and he prayed mechanically, without knowing what he
+mumbled, always thinking on this confession, full of alarm and harassed
+with fears.
+
+He went down a little before the time, and when he entered the
+auditorium his heart failed him.
+
+In spite of himself, his eyes were fixed upon the prie-Dieu, where he
+had suffered so cruelly.
+
+To think that he had to put himself on that hurdle again, to stretch
+himself on that rack of torture! He tried to collect himself, to compose
+himself--and he drew himself up quickly; he heard the footsteps of the
+monk. The door opened, and, for the first time, Durtal dared to look the
+prior in the face; it seemed to be hardly the same man, nor the face, he
+had noticed from a distance; the profile was so haughty, and the full
+face so sweet; the eye dulled the proud energy of the features, an eye
+familiar and deep, when at the same time there was a quiet joy and a sad
+pity.
+
+"Come," he said, "do not be disturbed, you are about to speak to our
+Saviour alone, who knows all your faults." And he knelt down and prayed
+for some time and came, as on the day before, to sit by the prie-Dieu;
+he bent towards Durtal and listened.
+
+Somewhat reassured, the penitent began without too great anguish. He
+accused himself of faults common to all men, want of charity towards his
+neighbour, evil speaking, hate, rash judgment, abuse, lies, vanity,
+anger, etc.
+
+The monk interrupted him for a moment.
+
+"You said, just now, I think, that in your youth you contracted debts;
+have you paid them?"
+
+And on an affirmative sign from Durtal, he said, "Good," and went on,
+
+"Have you belonged to any secret society? have you fought a duel?--I am
+obliged to ask these questions for they are reserved cases."
+
+"No?--Good"--and he was silent.
+
+"Before God, I accuse myself of everything," resumed Durtal; "as I
+confessed to you, yesterday, since my first communion I have given up
+everything; prayers, mass, everything; I have denied God, I have
+blasphemed, I had entirely lost faith."
+
+And Durtal stopped.
+
+He was reaching the sins of the flesh. His voice fell.
+
+"Here I do not know how to explain myself," he said, keeping back his
+tears.
+
+"Let us see," the monk said gently; "you told me yesterday that you had
+committed all those acts which are comprised in the sin of lust."
+
+"Yes, father;" and trembling, he added, "Must I go into the details?"
+
+"No, it is useless. I will confine myself to asking you, for it alters
+the nature of the sin, whether in your case there have been any private
+sins, or any sins committed between persons of the same sex?"
+
+"Not since I left school."
+
+"Have you committed adultery?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Am I to understand that in your relations with women, you have
+committed every possible excess?"
+
+Durtal made an affirmative sign.
+
+"That is sufficient."
+
+And the monk was silent.
+
+Durtal choked with disgust; the avowal of these horrors was a terrible
+effort to him; yet crushed as he was by shame, he was beginning to
+breathe, when suddenly he plunged his head again in his hands.
+
+The remembrance of the sacrilege in which Madame Chantelouve had made
+him share, came back to him.
+
+Hesitatingly he confessed that he had from curiosity assisted at a black
+mass, and that afterwards, without wishing it, he had defiled a Host
+which that woman, saturated with Satanism, concealed about her.
+
+The prior listened without moving.
+
+"Did you continue your visits to that woman?"
+
+"No; that had given me a horror of her."
+
+The Trappist reflected and said,
+
+"That is all?"
+
+"I think I have confessed everything," replied Durtal.
+
+The confessor was silent for some minutes, and then in a pensive voice,
+he murmured,
+
+"I am struck, even more than yesterday, by the astonishing miracle which
+Heaven has worked in you.
+
+"You were sick, so sick that what Martha said of the body of Lazarus
+might truly have been said of your soul, 'Iam foetet!' And Christ has,
+in some manner, raised you. Only do not deceive yourself, the conversion
+of a sinner is not his cure, but only his convalescence; and this
+convalescence sometimes lasts for several years and is often long.
+
+"It is expedient that you should determine from this moment to fortify
+yourself against any falling back, and to do all in your power for
+recovery. The preventive treatment consists of prayer, the sacrament of
+penance, and holy communion.
+
+"Prayer?--you know it, for without much prayer you could not have
+decided to come here after the troubled life you had led."
+
+"Ah! but I prayed so badly!"
+
+"It does not matter, as your wish was to pray well! Confession?--It was
+painful to you; it will be less so now that you no longer have to avow
+the accumulated sins of years. The communion troubles me more; for it is
+to be feared that when you have triumphed over the flesh the Demon
+should await you there, and endeavour to draw you away, for he knows
+well that, without this divine government, no healing is possible. You
+will therefore have to give this matter all your attention."
+
+The monk reflected a minute, and then went on,
+
+"The holy Eucharist ... you will have more need of it than others, for
+you will be more unhappy than less cultured and simpler beings. You will
+be tortured by the imagination. It has made you sin much; and, by a just
+recompense, it will make you suffer much; it will be the badly closed
+door of your soul by which the Demon will enter and spread himself in
+you. Watch over this, and pray fervently that the Saviour may help you.
+Tell me, have you a rosary?"
+
+"No, father."
+
+"I feel," said the monk, "that the tone in which you said 'No' shows a
+certain hostility to the rosary."
+
+"I admit that this mechanical manner of saying prayers wearies me a
+little; I do not know why, but it seems to me that at the end of some
+seconds I can no longer think of what I am saying; I should mock, and
+should certainly end by stammering out something stupid."
+
+"You have known," quietly answered the prior, "some fathers of families.
+Their children stammer forth caresses, and tell them no matter what, and
+yet they are delighted to listen! Why should not our Lord, who is a good
+Father, love to hear His children when they drawl, or even when they
+talk nonsense?"
+
+And after a pause he went on,
+
+"I scent the devil's artifice in what you say, for the highest graces
+are attached to this crown of prayers. The most Blessed Virgin herself
+revealed to the saints this means of prayer; she declared she delighted
+in it; that should be enough to make us love it.
+
+"Do it, then, for her who has powerfully assisted in your conversion,
+who has interceded with her Son to save you. Remember, also, that God
+wished that all graces should come to us through her. St. Bernard
+expressly declares 'Totum nos habere voluit per Mariam.'"
+
+The monk paused anew, and added,
+
+"However, the rosary enrages fools, and that is a sure sign. You will
+for a penance recite ten every day for a month."
+
+He ceased, and then went on again, slowly,
+
+"All of us, alas! retain that scar of original sin which is the
+inclination towards evil; each man encourages it more or less; as for
+you, since you grew up, the scar has been always open, but as you hate
+the wound God will close it.
+
+"So I will say nothing of your past, as your repentance and your firm
+resolve to sin no more efface it. To-morrow, you will receive the pledge
+of reconciliation, you will communicate; after so many years the Lord
+will set out on the way to your soul and will rest there; approach Him
+with great humility, and prepare yourself from this moment, by prayer,
+for this mysterious meeting of hearts which His goodness desires. Now
+say your act of contrition and I will give you holy absolution."
+
+The monk raised his arms, and the sleeves of his white cowl rose above
+him like two wings. With uplifted eyes he uttered the imperious formula
+which breaks the bonds, and the three words, "Ego te absolvo," spoken
+more distinctly and slowly, fell upon Durtal, who trembled from head to
+foot. He almost sank to the ground, incapable of collecting himself or
+understanding himself, only feeling, in the clearest manner, that Christ
+Himself was present, near him in that place, and finding no word of
+thanks, he wept, ravished and bowed down under the great sign of the
+cross with which the monk enveloped him.
+
+He seemed to be waking from a dream as the prior said to him,
+
+"Rejoice, your life is dead; it is buried in a cloister, and in a
+cloister it will be born again; it is a good omen; have confidence in
+our Lord and go in peace."
+
+And the father added, pressing his hand, "Do not be afraid of disturbing
+me, I am entirely at your service, not only for confession, but for
+interviews and for any advice which may be of use to you; you quite
+understand me?"
+
+They left the auditorium together; the monk bowed to him in the corridor
+and disappeared. Durtal hesitated whether to meditate in his cell or in
+the church, when M. Bruno met him. Approaching Durtal he said,
+
+"Well? that is a fine weight the less on your stomach!"
+
+And as Durtal looked at him in astonishment he laughed.
+
+"Do you think that an old sinner like me could not tell from a thousand
+nothings, if only from the way your poor eyes are now shining, that you
+had not been reconciled when you landed here? Now I have just met the
+reverend father returning to the cloister, and I find you coming out of
+the auditorium; there is no need to be particularly sly to guess that
+the great wash has just taken place."
+
+"But," said Durtal, "you could not have seen the prior with me, for he
+had left before you came in, and he might have been performing some
+other duty."
+
+"No, for he was not in his scapular; he had his cowl on. And as he
+never puts on that robe except to go to church or at confessions, I was
+quite certain that he came from the auditorium, as there is no office at
+this hour. I may also point out that as the Trappists do not come to
+confession in this room, two persons only could have been with him, you
+or I."
+
+"You may say as much," replied Durtal, laughing.
+
+Father Etienne met them in the midst of all this, and Durtal asked him
+for a rosary.
+
+"But I have not one," exclaimed the monk.
+
+"I have several," said M. Bruno, "and shall be most happy to offer you
+one. You will allow me, father?..."
+
+The monk acquiesced by a sign.
+
+"Then if you will come with me," replied the oblate, addressing Durtal,
+"I will hand it you without delay."
+
+They went upstairs together, and Durtal then learnt that M. Bruno lived
+in a room at the bottom of a small corridor, not far from his own.
+
+His cell was very simply furnished with old middle-class furniture, a
+bed, a mahogany bureau, a large book-case full of ascetic books, an
+earthenware stove and some arm-chairs. These articles were evidently the
+property of the oblate, for they were nothing like the furniture of La
+Trappe.
+
+"Pray be seated," said M. Bruno, indicating an arm-chair; and they
+conversed.
+
+Having first discussed the Sacrament of Penance, the talk came round to
+the subject of Father Maximin, and Durtal admitted the high bearing of
+the prior had terrified him at first.
+
+M. Bruno laughed. "Yes," he said, "he produces that effect on those who
+never come near him, but when one associates with him, one finds that he
+is only strict for himself, for no one is more indulgent to others. In
+every acceptation of the term he is a true and holy monk; besides, he
+has great judgment...."
+
+And as Durtal spoke to him of the other cenobites, and wondered that
+there were some quite young men among them, M. Bruno replied,
+
+"It is a mistake to suppose that most Trappists have lived in the world.
+The idea, so widespread, that people take refuge in La Trappe after long
+sorrows or disorderly lives, is absolutely false; besides, to be able to
+stand the weakening rule of the cloister it is necessary to begin
+young, and not to come in worn out with every kind of abuse.
+
+"It is also necessary to avoid confounding misanthropy with the monastic
+vocation; it is not hypochondria, but the divine call, which leads to La
+Trappe. There is a special grace, which makes all young men who have
+never lived in the world long to bury themselves in silence and therein
+suffer the hardest privations; and they are happy as I hope you will be;
+and yet their life is still more rigorous than you would think; take the
+lay brothers, for example.
+
+"Think of their giving themselves up to the most painful labour, and
+that they have not, like the fathers, the consolation of singing and
+assisting at all the offices; remember that even their reward, the
+communion, is not very often conceded to them.
+
+"Now think of the winter here. The cold is frightful; in these decayed
+buildings nothing shuts properly, and the wind sweeps the house from top
+to bottom; they freeze without fires, they sleep upon pallets, and they
+cannot help or encourage each other, for they hardly know each other, as
+all conversation is forbidden.
+
+"Think, also, that these poor people never hear a kindly word, a word
+which would soothe and comfort them. They work from dawn till night, and
+the master never thanks them for their zeal, never tells the good
+workman that he is pleased.
+
+"Consider, also, that in summer when men are hired from the neighbouring
+villages to reap the harvest, these rest when the sun scorches the
+fields; they sit in their shirt sleeves under the shade of the ricks,
+and drink, if they are thirsty, and eat; and the lay brother in his
+heavy clothes looks at them and goes on with his work, and neither eats
+nor drinks. Ah! men must have well-tempered souls to stand such a life."
+
+"But surely there must be some off days," said Durtal, "when the rule is
+relaxed?"
+
+"Never; there is not even, as in some very strict orders--the
+Carmelites, to take one instance--an hour of recreation, when the
+religious may talk and laugh. Here, the silence is eternal."
+
+"Even when they are together in the refectory?"
+
+"Then they read the Conferences of Cassien, the 'Holy Ladder' of
+Climacus, the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, or some other pious
+book."
+
+"And on Sunday?"
+
+"On Sunday they rise an hour earlier; but on the whole it is their best
+day, for they can follow all the offices and pass their whole time in
+church."
+
+"Humility and self-denial carried to such an extent are superhuman!"
+cried Durtal. "But they are surely given a sufficient quantity of strong
+nourishment to enable them to give themselves up from morning till
+evening to exhausting work in the fields?"
+
+M. Bruno smiled.
+
+"They simply get vegetables which are not even as good as those which
+are served to us, and, by way of wine, they quench their thirst with a
+sour and insipid liquid, which leaves half a glass full of sediment.
+They get a pint each, and if they are thirsty they can add water."
+
+"And how often do they eat?"
+
+"That depends. From the 14th September to Lent they only eat once a day,
+at half-past two--and during Lent this meal is put off till four
+o'clock. From Easter to the 14th September, when the Cistercian fast is
+less strict, dinner is at about half-past eleven, and to this may be
+added a light meal in the evening."
+
+"It is frightful! to work for months on one meal a day, two hours after
+noon, after being up since two o'clock in the morning; having had no
+dinner the evening before."
+
+"It is sometimes necessary to relax the rule a little, and when a monk
+fails from weakness he is not refused a morsel of bread.
+
+"It would be well," continued M. Bruno, pensively, "to relax still
+further the grasp of these observances, for this question of food is
+becoming a veritable stumbling-block in recruiting for La Trappe; souls
+which delight in these cloisters are forced to fly them, because their
+bodies cannot stand the rule."[1]
+
+     [1] The opinion of M. Bruno has been lately adopted by all the
+     abbeys of the order. In a General Chapter of La Trappe, held from
+     the 12th to the 18th September, 1894, in Holland, at Tilburg, it
+     was decided that except in seasons of fasting, the monks might eat
+     a little in the morning, dine at eleven, and sup in the evening.
+
+     Article CXVI. of the new constitutions, voted by this assembly of
+     the Chapter and approved by the Holy See, is in effect thus
+     conceived:--
+
+     "Diebus quibus non jejunatur a Sancto Pascha usque ad Idus
+     Septembris, Dominicis per totum annum et omnibus festis Sermonis
+     aut feriatis extra Quadrigesimam, omnes monachi mane accipiant
+     mixtum, hora undecima prandeant et ad seram coenent."
+
+"And the fathers lead the same life as the lay brothers?"
+
+"Absolutely--they set the example; they all swallow the same pittance,
+and sleep in the same dormitory on similar beds; there is complete
+equality. Only, the fathers have the advantage of singing the office and
+obtaining more frequent communions."
+
+"Among the lay brothers there are two who have interested me
+particularly, one quite young, a tall fair man with a pointed beard, the
+other a very old man, quite bent?"
+
+"The young one is Brother Anacletus; this young man is a veritable
+column of prayer, and one of the most precious recruits whom Heaven has
+bestowed upon our abbey. As for old Simeon, he is a child of La Trappe,
+for he was brought up in an orphanage of the order. There you have an
+extraordinary soul, a true saint, who already lives absorbed in God. We
+will talk of him at greater length another day, for it is time we went
+down; the hour of Sext is near.
+
+"Wait, here is the rosary which I am pleased to offer you. Allow me to
+add to it a medal of Saint Benedict." And he made over to Durtal a small
+wooden rosary, and the strange circle engraved with cabalistic letters,
+the amulet of Saint Benedict.
+
+"Do you know the meaning of these signs?"
+
+"Yes; I read it once in a pamphlet of Dom Gueranger."
+
+"Good. And, by-the-bye, when do you communicate?"
+
+"To-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow; it is impossible!"
+
+"Why impossible?"
+
+"Because there will be only a single mass to-morrow, that of five
+o'clock, and at that the rule prevents your communicating alone. Father
+Benedict, who usually says an earlier mass, went away this morning and
+will not return for two days. There is some mistake."
+
+"But the prior positively declared to me that I should communicate
+to-morrow!" exclaimed Durtal. "Not all the fathers here, then, are
+priests?"
+
+"No, in fact, as to priests, there is the abbot who is ill, the prior
+who will offer the sacrifice to-morrow at five o'clock, Father Benedict
+of whom I spoke to you, and another whom you have not seen and who is
+travelling. And then, if it had been possible, I also should have
+approached the Holy Table."
+
+"Then, if the fathers are not all ordained, what difference is there
+between those who have obtained the priesthood and the simple lay
+brothers?"
+
+"Education--to be a father a man must have studied, must know Latin, and
+in a word must not be what the lay brothers are, peasants or workmen. In
+any case I shall see the prior, and as to the communion to-morrow, I
+will let you know, after the office. But it is tiresome; it is a pity
+you could not have come up this morning, with us."
+
+Durtal made a gesture of regret. He went into the chapel, dwelling on
+this misfortune and praying God not to delay his re-entry into grace any
+longer.
+
+After Sext, the oblate came to rejoin him. "It is just as I thought," he
+said, "but nevertheless you will be admitted to take the Sacrament. The
+father prior has arranged with the curate who dines with us. He will say
+a mass to-morrow morning before leaving, and you will then communicate."
+
+"Oh!" groaned Durtal.
+
+This news broke his heart. That he should have come to La Trappe to
+receive the Eucharist from the hands of a priest of passage, from a
+jovial priest such as this man! "Ah, no, I have confessed to a monk, and
+I wished to receive the communion from a monk!" he exclaimed. "It would
+have been better to wait till Father Benedict returned--but what can I
+do? I can hardly explain to the prior how repugnant this unknown priest
+is to me, and how terribly painful it would be to me, after having gone
+through so much, to end by being thus reconciled in a cloister."
+
+And he complained to God, telling Him that all the joy he might have
+felt in being purified and clean at last, was now spoilt by this
+disappointment.
+
+He arrived at the refectory hanging his head.
+
+The curate was there already. Seeing Durtal's sad demeanour, he
+charitably tried to cheer him, but the jokes he attempted produced the
+opposite effect. Durtal smiled in order to be polite, but his air was so
+wearied that M. Bruno, who saw it, turned the conversation and
+monopolized the priest.
+
+Durtal was in a hurry for his dinner to be over. He had eaten his egg
+and was painfully swallowing a warm potato soup made with hot oil, which
+from its appearance might have been mistaken for vaseline; but he now
+cared little about his food.
+
+He said to himself, "It is dreadful to carry away an irritating and
+painful recollection of a first communion--and I know it will haunt me
+for ever. I know well enough that from a theological point of view it
+does not matter whether I am dealing with a priest or a Trappist; both
+are but interpreters between God and me, but yet, I feel very well that
+it is not at all the same thing. For once at least I need a guarantee of
+certain holiness, and how can I have it with an ecclesiastic who hawks
+about jokes like a bagman?" He stopped, remembering that the Abbe
+Gevresin, fearing this mistrust, had specially sent him to a Trappist
+monastery. "What a run of ill-luck!" he said to himself.
+
+He did not even hear the conversation which was going on beside him
+between the curate and the oblate.
+
+He struggled with himself all alone, as he chewed, with his nose in his
+plate.
+
+"I do not wish to communicate to-morrow," he went on, and he was
+shocked. He was cowardly, and becoming foolish at the last. Would not
+the Saviour give Himself to him all the same?
+
+He rose from the table, stirred by a dull anguish, and he wandered in
+the park and went down the paths as chance led him.
+
+Another idea was now growing in him, an idea that Heaven was inflicting
+a trial upon him. "I want humility," he repeated. "Well, it is to punish
+me that I am refused the joy of being sanctified by a monk. Christ has
+forgiven me, that is much. Why should He do more by taking note of my
+preferences and granting my wishes?"
+
+This thought appeased him for a few minutes, and reproaching himself
+for rebelling, he accused himself of being unjust towards a priest who,
+after all, might be a saint.
+
+"Ah, enough of that," he said; "I must accept the fact, and try for once
+to be a little humble! but I have to recite my rosary." He seated
+himself on the grass and began.
+
+He had not reached the second bead, when misunderstanding again pursued
+him. He began again on the Pater and Ave, and went on thinking no more
+of the sense of his prayers, reflecting: "What ill-luck that the one
+monk who says mass every day should be away, so that I have to go
+through such a disappointment to-morrow!"
+
+He was silent and had a moment of calm, when suddenly a new element of
+trouble burst upon him.
+
+He looked at the rosary, of which he had told ten beads.
+
+"Let me see, the prior told me to recite ten every day--ten beads or ten
+rosaries?"
+
+"Beads," he said, and almost at the same moment answered, "Rosaries."
+
+He remained perplexed.
+
+"But that is idiotic, he could not have told me to go through the rosary
+ten times a day; that would amount to something like five hundred
+prayers on end; no one could do such a task without losing his wits.
+There is no doubt, it is clear he meant ten beads!
+
+"But no! for if a confessor gives a penance, it must be admitted that he
+would proportion it to the greatness of the sins. And as I have such
+repugnance for these drops of devotion taken in globules, it is natural
+that he should gorge me with a large dose of the rosary!
+
+"Still ... still ... it cannot be! I should not have even time for it
+all in Paris; it is absurd!"
+
+And the idea that he was deceiving himself came intermittently charging
+back.
+
+"Still, there must be no haggling; in ecclesiastical language 'ten'
+means ten beads; no doubt ... but I remember very well that after he
+pronounced the word rosary, the father expressed himself thus: 'you will
+say ten,' that means ten rosaries, for otherwise he would have specified
+ten ... of a rosary."
+
+And so he thrust and parried with himself--"The father had no need to
+put the dots on all the i's, if he were using an ordinary phrase, known
+to everyone. This cavilling about the value of a word is ridiculous."
+
+He tried to get rid of this torment by appealing to his reason; and
+suddenly there came out some argument which unsettled him.
+
+He found out that it was through cowardice, idleness, desire for
+contradiction and the necessity of rebelling, that he did not wish to
+wind his ten reels. "Of the two interpretations I have chosen the one
+which would relieve me of all effort and trouble, it is really too
+easy!--that alone proves that I deceive myself when I try to persuade
+myself that the prior only ordered me to pick out ten beads!"
+
+"Then a Pater, ten Aves, and a Gloria are nothing; it is not heavy as a
+penance!"
+
+And then he answered himself, "But it is much for you, for you cannot
+even attempt so much without wandering."
+
+He was turning on himself without advancing a step.
+
+"I have never felt such hesitation," he said, trying to pull himself
+together; "I am not stupid and yet I am fighting against my good sense,
+for it is not a matter of doubt, I know it, I ought to say ten Aves and
+not one more!"
+
+He remained nonplussed, almost frightened at his condition which was new
+to him.
+
+And, to get out of the difficulty, to silence himself, he thought of a
+new idea to conciliate both parties, which seemed most concise and which
+presented at least a provisional solution.
+
+"In any case," he reflected, "I cannot communicate to-morrow if I do not
+complete my penance to-day; in the doubt, the wisest course is to yoke
+myself to the ten rosaries; later I shall see; if necessary I shall be
+able to consult the prior. It is true that he will think me an idiot if
+I speak to him of these rosaries! so I shall not be able to ask him
+that!"
+
+"But then, you see, you admit yourself, it can only be ten beads!"
+
+He was furious with himself, and for silence' sake rushed upon the
+rosary.
+
+He might well shut his eyes, and try to collect himself, it was
+impossible for him at the end of the second ten to follow his prayers;
+he hesitated, forgetting the large beads of the Paters, losing his way
+in the small beads of the Aves, stamping on the ground.
+
+To check himself, he thought of transporting himself in imagination at
+each dose, into one of the chapels of the Virgin which he loved to
+attend in Paris, at Notre Dame des Victoires, at St. Sulpice, at St.
+Severin; but these Virgins were not numerous enough for him to dedicate
+each set of ten to them, so he evoked the Madonnas of the early masters,
+and, absorbed before their images, he turned the windlass of his
+prayers, not understanding what he mumbled, but praying the Mother of
+the Saviour to accept his paternosters, as she would receive the lost
+smoke of a censer forgotten before the altar.
+
+"I cannot force myself any more," he said. He left this toil worried and
+crushed and wanting to take breath; there were still three rosaries to
+exhaust.
+
+And as soon as he had stopped, the question of the Eucharist, which had
+been dropped, came up again.
+
+"Better not to communicate than to communicate badly;" and it was
+impossible that after such debates and with such prejudices he could
+properly approach the Holy Table.
+
+"Yes, but then what shall I do?--in reality, was it not monstrous of me
+to dispute the monk's orders, to wish to carry them out in my own way,
+to take them up at my convenience! If this goes on, I shall sin so much
+to-day that I shall have to confess again," he said.
+
+To break through this feeling, he threw himself again upon his wheel,
+but then stupefied himself completely; the device he had tried to keep
+himself before the Virgin at least was used up. When he wished to
+abstract himself and to bring up a recollection of Memling, he could not
+succeed, and his lip-prayers, wearying him, distressed him.
+
+"My soul is worn out," he thought, "I should do well to let it rest,
+while I stay quiet."
+
+He wandered round the pond, not knowing what to do next.
+
+"Suppose I go to my cell!" He went there, tried to become absorbed in
+the Little Office of the Virgin, and did not grasp a single word of the
+phrases he was reading. He went down and began to prowl about the park
+again.
+
+"This is enough to drive me mad," he cried--and mournfully he exclaimed,
+"I ought to be happy, to pray in peace and prepare myself for
+to-morrow's act, yet never have I been so restless, so upset, so far
+from God!
+
+"But I must finish this penance!" Despair seized him, and he was on the
+point of letting all go; he mortified himself again, and compelled
+himself to tell the beads.
+
+He finished by despatching them; he was at the end of his powers. And he
+immediately found a new means of torture.
+
+He reproached himself with having moaned the prayers negligently,
+without having even seriously tried to follow their meaning. And he was
+on the point of beginning the rosary over again, but in the face of the
+evident folly of this suggestion he pulled himself up, refused to
+listen, and then he worried himself again.
+
+"It is none the less true that you have not literally fulfilled the task
+assigned you by the confessor, for your conscience reproaches you for
+your want of reflection and your wandering."
+
+"But I am half dead!" he exclaimed. "I cannot go through the exercises
+again in this condition!"--and once again he ended, by giving a casting
+vote, and finding a new weakness.
+
+By saying over another ten, thoughtfully pronouncing the prayers with
+care, he might make up for all the beads of the rosary which he had
+mumbled without understanding them.
+
+And he tried to turn the crank, but as soon as he had got out the Pater,
+he wandered; he was obstinate in wishing to grind out the Aves, but then
+his mind gave way and became thoroughly distracted.
+
+He stopped, thinking, "What is the use of it? besides, would one set of
+ten, however well said, be equal to five hundred prayers that have
+missed fire? and then why one set of ten and not two, why not three? it
+is absurd!"
+
+He grew angry; "After all," he concluded, "these repetitions are absurd;
+Christ positively declared that we should not use vain repetitions in
+our prayers. Then what is the object of this wheel of Aves?"
+
+"If I dwell upon such ideas, if I cavil at the injunctions of the monk,
+I am lost," said he suddenly; and by an effort of will, he stifled the
+revolt which was rumbling in him.
+
+He took refuge in his cell; the hours lengthened interminably; he killed
+the time by recapitulating all the same objections with all the same
+answers. It was a repetition of which he was himself ashamed.
+
+"So much is certain, that I am the victim of an aberration," he said. "I
+do not speak of the Eucharist; there my thoughts may not be exact, but
+at least they are not maddening, while as for this question of
+paternosters!"
+
+He confused himself so much that he felt hammered like an anvil between
+these two opposing ideas, and finally sank drowsily on a chair.
+
+Thus he passed the time till the hour of vespers and supper. After this
+meal he returned to the park.
+
+And then the slumbering dispute revived and all came back. A furious
+battle was raging within him. He remained there, immovable, astounded,
+listening to himself, when a rapid footstep approached and M. Bruno said
+to him,
+
+"Take care, you are possessed by the devil!"
+
+And as Durtal, stupefied, did not answer,
+
+"Yes," he said, "God sometimes allows me intuitions, and I am certain at
+this moment that the devil is working in you. Let us see, what is wrong
+with you?"
+
+"I ... I do not know myself;" and Durtal told him of the extraordinary
+conflict about the rosary which had been raging in him since the
+morning.
+
+"But this is madness," exclaimed the oblate; "it is ten beads the prior
+ordered you to tell; ten rosaries would be impossible."
+
+"I know it ... and yet I doubt still."
+
+"Always the same tactics," said M. Bruno; "contriving to render
+disgusting the thing you ought to do. Yes, the devil wished to make the
+rosary odious to you by crushing you with it. And what is there besides?
+You do not wish to communicate to-morrow?"
+
+"True," replied Durtal.
+
+"I thought as much, when I was watching you at supper. Ah! well, after
+conversions the Evil One is at work; and it is nothing, believe me; he
+was harder on me than that."
+
+He slipped his arm under Durtal's, and leading him to the auditorium,
+begged him to wait, and disappeared.
+
+Some minutes afterwards, the prior entered.
+
+"Well," said he, "M. Bruno tells me that you are suffering. What is it,
+exactly?"
+
+"It is so stupid that I am ashamed to explain myself."
+
+"You will never astonish a monk," said the prior, smiling.
+
+"Well, I know precisely, I am certain that you gave me ten beads of the
+rosary to recite every day for a month, and, since this morning, I have
+been arguing with myself against all common sense, to convince myself
+that my daily penance is to be the rosary ten times."
+
+"Hand me your rosary," said the monk, "and look at these ten beads;
+well, that is all I prescribed for you, and all you have to recite. So
+you have told all the beads ten times to-day?"
+
+Durtal signified assent.
+
+"And naturally you were perplexed, you lost all patience, and ended up
+by rambling."
+
+And seeing Durtal's pitiful smile,
+
+"Well, listen to me," declared the father, in an energetic tone, "I
+absolutely forbid you for the future to begin a prayer again; it has
+been badly said; so much the worse, go on, do not repeat it.
+
+"I need not ask you if the idea of abstaining from communion occurred to
+you, for that comes of itself; it is there that the enemy directs all
+his efforts. Do not listen to the devil's voice which would keep you
+away; whatever happens you will communicate to-morrow. You should have
+no scruple, for I command you to receive the Sacrament; I take it all
+upon myself.
+
+"And now another question; what sort of nights have you?"
+
+Durtal told him of the awful night of his arrival at La Trappe, and of
+the feeling of being spied upon which had awakened him the day before.
+
+"We have long known these manifestations, they are without imminent
+danger; do not therefore let them trouble you. At the same time, if they
+continue you will let me know, and we will not neglect attending to
+them."
+
+And the Trappist left quietly, while Durtal remained thinking.
+
+"I never doubted that those phenomena were satanic," he thought, "but I
+did not understand these attacks upon the soul, this charge at full
+speed against my reason which remains untouched, and yet is overcome;
+that is remarkable; if only this lesson may be useful to me so that I
+may not be unhorsed on the first alarm!"
+
+He went up to his cell again and a great peace fell upon him. All had
+died down at the voice of the monk; he now only felt surprise at having
+been off the rails for hours; he understood now that he had been
+assailed unawares and that the struggle had not been with himself.
+
+He said his prayers and lay down. And, suddenly, the assault began again
+by new tactics he had not guessed at.
+
+"No doubt I shall communicate to-morrow," he said to himself; "but ...
+but ... am I prepared for such an act? I ought to have collected my
+thoughts in the day-time, I ought to have thanked the Lord for having
+absolved me, and I have lost my time in nonsense."
+
+"Why did I not say that just now to Father Maximin? how is it I did not
+think of it? Then I ought to have confessed again. And this priest who
+will give me the communion, this priest!"
+
+The horror which he felt for this man increased suddenly and became so
+vehement that he was astonished. "Ah, but there I am again knocked about
+by the enemy," he said, and he went on:
+
+"All that shall not prevent me from receiving the Heavenly Bread
+to-morrow, for I have quite decided; only how frightful it is that the
+Spirit of Malice should be allowed to oppress and harass me without
+respite while I have no sign from Heaven which does not interfere, and I
+know nothing.
+
+"Ah! Lord, if I were only certain this communion would please Thee! Give
+me a sign, show me that I may ally myself with Thee without remorse; let
+the impossible take place so that, to-morrow, it may be a monk and not
+this priest...."
+
+And he stopped himself, astonished at his boldness, asking himself how
+he dared ask for, and indicate a sign.
+
+"It is idiotic!" he exclaimed; "in the first place, no one has a right
+to claim such favours from God; and then, as He will not grant my
+prayer, what shall I have gained? I shall infer from the refusal that my
+communion will be worth nothing!"
+
+And he prayed the Lord to forget his wish, excused himself for having
+formed it, and wished to convince himself that He should not take it
+into account, and, helped by the agitations of the day, he ended by
+falling asleep as he prayed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+When he left his cell he said to himself, "This morning I shall
+communicate," and these words, which should have thrilled him through
+and through, woke no zeal in him. He remained dull, tired and caring for
+nothing, feeling cold in the depth of his being.
+
+Nevertheless a fear stimulated him when he was outside. "I do not know,"
+he said to himself, "when I must leave my seat and go to kneel before
+the priest; I know that the congregation should communicate after the
+celebrant; but at what moment exactly ought I to move? It is indeed
+another misfortune that I should have to go up, alone, towards this
+Table which so disturbs me; otherwise I shall only have to follow the
+others and at least be sure of not doing anything improperly."
+
+He scrutinized the chapel as he went in, looking round for M. Bruno who,
+had he been by his side, might have kept off his scruples, but the
+oblate could not be found. Durtal sat down, disabled, dreaming of the
+sign he had asked for the evening before, endeavouring to throw off the
+recollection, thinking of it all the same.
+
+He wished to examine himself and collect himself, and he was praying
+Heaven to forgive him his mental vacillations when M. Bruno came in, and
+went to kneel before the statue of the Virgin.
+
+Almost at the same minute a brother, who had a beard like seaweed
+growing from a face like a pear, took up to the altar of St. Joseph a
+small rustic table on which he placed a basin, a towel, two vases and a
+napkin.
+
+Before these preparations, which recalled the imminence of the
+Sacrifice, Durtal stiffened himself and succeeded by an effort in
+keeping back his anxieties and overthrowing his troubles, and escaping
+from himself he ardently implored Our Lady to intervene so that he
+might, for this hour at least, without wandering, pray in peace.
+
+And when he had finished his prayer he lifted his eyes and looked with a
+start at the priest who was advancing, preceded by a lay brother, to
+celebrate mass.
+
+This was not the curate whom he knew, but another, younger, very tall,
+with a majestic air, with cheeks pale and shaven, and a bald head.
+
+Durtal was watching him solemnly marching towards the altar with his
+eyes cast down when he suddenly noticed a violet flame light up his
+fingers.
+
+"He wears an episcopal ring, he is a bishop," thought Durtal, who leant
+forward to see the colour of the vestment underneath the chasuble and
+alb. It was white.
+
+"Then it is a monk," he said, astounded; and, mechanically, he turned
+towards the statue of the Virgin, summoning the oblate by a hasty
+glance, who came to sit beside him.
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"Dom Anselm, the abbot of the monastery."
+
+"He who was ill?"
+
+"Yes, he will give us communion."
+
+Durtal fell upon his knees, suffocated, almost trembling: he was not
+dreaming! Heaven was answering him by the sign on which he had fixed.
+
+He ought to abase himself before God, to be overwhelmed at His feet, to
+spread himself in a passion of gratitude; he knew and wished it! And
+without knowing how, he was exercising himself in seeking natural causes
+which might account for the substitution of a monk for the priest.
+
+No doubt it was very simple; for on the whole, before admitting a kind
+of miracle.... "anyhow, I will keep an open mind, for after the ceremony
+I wish to clear the matter up."
+
+And he repelled the insinuations which crept into him. Well! what
+interest could there be in the motive of this change? there clearly must
+be a motive, but it was only a consequence, an accessory; the important
+point was the supernatural will which had produced it. "In any case you
+have obtained more than you asked; you have even a better than the
+simple monk you wished for, you have the abbot of La Trappe himself!"
+And he cried: "Oh, to believe, to believe like these poor lay brothers,
+not to be endowed with a soul which is blown about by every wind; to
+have the faith of a child, an immovable faith, a faith which cannot be
+rooted up! Ah, Father, Father, bury it, rivet it in me!"
+
+And such was his enthusiasm that he came out of himself; all around him
+seemed to disappear and he cried, stammering, to Christ: "Lord, go not
+far from me. Let Thy pity curb Thy justice; be unjust, forgive me;
+receive Thy poor bedesman for communion, the poor in spirit!"
+
+M. Bruno touched his arm, and with a glance invited him to accompany
+him. They went up to the altar and knelt upon the flagstones, then, when
+the priest had blessed them, they knelt closer on the single step, and
+the lay brother handed them a napkin, for there was no bar or cloth.
+
+And the abbot of La Trappe gave them the communion.
+
+They returned to their places. Durtal was in a state of absolute torpor;
+the Sacrament had, in a manner, anaesthetized his mind; he fell on his
+knees at his bench, incapable even of unravelling what might be moving
+within him, unable to rally and pull himself together.
+
+And all of a sudden the impression came over him that he was suffocating
+and wanted air; the mass was finished; he rushed out and ran to his
+walk; there he wished to take an account of himself and he found
+nothing.
+
+And in front of the cross pond, in whose waters the Christ was drowning,
+there came over him an infinite melancholy, a vast sadness.
+
+It was a true syncope of the soul; it lost consciousness; and when it
+came to itself, he was astonished that he had not felt an unknown
+transport of joy; then he dwelt on a troublesome recollection, on the
+all too human side of the deglutition of a God; the Host had stuck
+against his palate, and he had had to seek it with his tongue and roll
+it about like a pancake in order to swallow it.
+
+Ah! it was still too material! he only wanted a fluid, a perfume, a
+fire, a breath!
+
+And he tried to explain to himself the treatment that the Saviour made
+him follow.
+
+All his anticipations had returned; it was the absolution and not the
+communion which had worked. When with the confessor he had very clearly
+perceived the presence of the Redeemer; all his being had, in a manner,
+been injected with divine effluvia, and the Eucharist had only brought
+him suffocation and trouble.
+
+It seemed that the effects of the two Sacraments had changed places the
+one with the other; they had worked the wrong way with him; Christ had
+been perceptible to his soul before and not afterwards.
+
+"But it is easy enough to see," he reflected, "that the great question
+for me is to have an absolute certainty of my forgiveness! By a special
+favour, Jesus has ratified my faith in the healing power of Penance. Why
+should He have done more?"
+
+"And then, what bounties would He reserve for His saints? After all I am
+astonishing. It is too much that I should wish to be treated as He
+certainly treats Brother Anacletus and Brother Simeon."
+
+"I have obtained more than I deserve. And what an answer I had, this
+very morning? Yes, indeed, but why should such advances end suddenly in
+this recoil?"
+
+And making his way towards the abbey to eat his bread and cheese, he
+said to himself: "My error towards God is to be always arguing, when I
+ought to adore stupidly as these monks here do. Ah! to be able to keep
+silence, silence to one's self, that is indeed a grace!"
+
+He reached the refectory, which, as a rule, he had to himself, M. Bruno
+never coming to the meal at seven o'clock in the morning. He was
+beginning to cut himself a piece of bread, when the father guest-master
+appeared.
+
+He had a whetstone and some knives in his hand, and smiling at Durtal,
+he said: "I am going to polish the knives of the monastery, for they
+want it badly." And he placed them on a table in a small room attached
+to the refectory.
+
+"Well, are you satisfied?" he said, on coming back.
+
+"Certainly--but, what happened this morning, how is it I was
+communicated by the abbot of La Trappe, when I should have been by the
+curate who dines with me?"
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the monk, "I was as much surprised as you. On waking,
+the Father Abbot suddenly declared that he must say mass this morning.
+He got up in spite of the observations of the prior, who as a doctor,
+forbade him to leave his bed. Neither I, nor any one else, knows what
+took him. Then they told him that a retreatant would communicate and he
+answered 'Just so, I shall communicate him.' And then M. Bruno took the
+opportunity of also approaching the Sacrament, for he loves to receive
+our Saviour from the hands of Dom Anselm."
+
+"And this arrangement also satisfied the curate," the monk went on,
+smiling; "for he left La Trappe at an earlier hour this morning and has
+been able to say his mass in a parish where he was expected.... By the
+way, he told me to make his excuses to you for not having been able to
+bid you good-bye."
+
+Durtal bowed. "There is no doubt about it," he thought, "God wished to
+give me an unmistakable answer."
+
+"And your health?"
+
+"It is good, father; I am astounded; my digestion has never been so good
+as it is here; to say nothing of the fact that the neuralgia, which I
+feared so much, has spared me."
+
+"That shows that Heaven protects you."
+
+"Yes, indeed. But now that I remember it, I have long wished to ask you
+this--how are your offices arranged? They do not correspond with those
+printed in my prayer-book."
+
+"No, they differ from yours, which belong to the Roman ritual. At the
+same time, the Vespers are almost similar, except sometimes the lessons,
+and then what may put you out is that ours are often preceded by the
+Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. As a general rule we have a psalm less in
+the office, and the lessons are nearly always short.
+
+"Except," Father Etienne went on, smiling, "in Compline, the very one
+you recite. Thus you may have noticed we know nothing of 'In manus tuas,
+Domine,' which is one of the few short lessons sung in parish churches.
+
+"We have also a special Proper of Saints; we celebrate the commemoration
+of the Blessed of our order which you will not find in your books. In
+fact we follow the letter of the monastic breviary of Saint Benedict."
+
+Durtal had finished his breakfast. He rose, fearing to trouble the
+father by his questions.
+
+One word of the monk, however, was troubling his brain, that relating to
+the prior as a doctor; and before going out he spoke of this again to
+Father Etienne.
+
+"No--the Reverend Father Maximin is not a doctor, but he understands
+simples very well, and he has a small pharmacy which is enough as long
+as no one is seriously ill."
+
+"And in that case?"
+
+"In that case the practitioner can be called in from one of the nearest
+towns, but no one is ever so ill as that; or else the end is approaching
+and the doctor's visit would be useless...."
+
+"So on the whole the prior looks after soul and body at La Trappe."
+
+The monk signified assent.
+
+Durtal went out. He hoped to get rid of his suffocation by a long walk.
+
+He took a road which he had not been along before, and came out on a
+glade where stood the ruins of an ancient convent, some bits of wall,
+truncated columns and capitals in the Roman style; unhappily these
+remains were in a deplorable condition, rough, covered with moss and
+riddled with holes like pumice stones.
+
+He went on and came to the end of a long walk, at the top of which was a
+pond five or six times as large as the small one in the form of a cross,
+which he frequented.
+
+The walk was planted with old oaks on each side, and in the middle, near
+a wooden bench, stood a cast-iron statue of the Virgin.
+
+He groaned as he looked at it. The crime of the church followed him once
+more; even in this little chapel so full of divine compassion, all the
+statues came from the religious bazaars of Paris or Lyons.
+
+He took his position below, near the pond whose banks were bordered by
+reeds surrounded by tufts of osiers; and he amused himself by examining
+the colours of these shrubs, with their smooth green leaves and stalks
+of citron yellow, or blood red, noticing the curling water which began
+to foam with a gust of wind. And the martins skimmed it, touching it
+with the tips of their wings from which drops of water fell like pearls
+of quicksilver. And the birds rose whirling above and giving out their
+cries of weet, weet, weet, while the dragon-flies shone brightly in the
+air which they slashed with blue flames.
+
+"Peaceful refuge!" thought Durtal; "I ought to have come to rest here
+before." He sat down on a bed of moss and interested himself in the
+noiseless and active life of the waters. Now the splash and flash of the
+turn of a leaping carp; now great spiders skating on the surface, making
+little circles and driving one against another, stopping, going back and
+making new rounds; then, near him on the ground, Durtal noticed jumping,
+green grasshoppers with vermilion bellies, or, scaling the oaks,
+colonies of queer insects on whose backs a devil's head was painted in
+red lead on a black ground.
+
+And above all that, if he raised his eyes, there was the silent upturned
+sea of heaven, a blue sea crested with surging white clouds like waves;
+and at the same time this firmament moved in the water where it billowed
+under a blueish gray glass.
+
+Durtal felt himself expand as he smoked cigarettes; the melancholy which
+had oppressed him since the dawn began to melt away, and joy crept into
+him as he felt his soul was washed in the pool of the Sacraments and
+dried in the air of a cloister. And he was at once happy and uneasy;
+happy, for the meeting he had had with the father guest-master, had
+removed all the doubts he had entertained as to the supernatural side to
+the sudden change of a priest for a monk to communicate him; happy,
+also, to know that not only had Christ not repulsed him in spite of all
+the disorders of his life, but that He was encouraging him and giving
+him pledges, ratifying the signs of His favours by perceptible acts. And
+nevertheless he was uneasy, for he knew himself to be barren, and felt
+that it was necessary for him to be grateful for this goodness by a
+struggle with himself and an entirely new existence differing completely
+from that he had hitherto led.
+
+"Well, we shall see!" and he went off to the office of Sext almost
+calmed, and thence to dinner, where he found M. Bruno.
+
+"We will go for a walk to-day," said the oblate, rubbing his hands.
+
+Durtal looked at him with astonishment.
+
+"Yes, indeed, I thought that after a communion a little air outside the
+walls would do you good, and I proposed to the Reverend Father Abbot to
+free you from the rule for to-day, if the offer is not disagreeable to
+you."
+
+"I gladly accept, and thank you sincerely for your kind attention," said
+Durtal.
+
+They dined off a soup made with oil in which a stick of cabbage and some
+peas were swimming; it was not bad; but the bread made at La Trappe
+reminded him, when stale, of the bread in the siege of Paris, and made
+the soup turn sour.
+
+Then they tasted an egg with sorrel and some rice steeped in milk.
+
+"If it suits you," said the oblate, "we will begin by paying a visit to
+Dom Anselm, who has expressed a wish to know you."
+
+And M. Bruno led Durtal through a labyrinth of passages and staircases
+to a small cell where the abbot was. He was dressed like the fathers in
+a white robe and a black scapular; only at the end of a violet cord he
+bore on his breast an abbot's cross of ivory, in the centre of which,
+under a round glass, some relics were inserted.
+
+He gave his hand to Durtal and begged him to sit down.
+
+Then he asked if the food seemed to be enough for him. And on receiving
+a reply in the affirmative from Durtal he inquired if the long silence
+did not weigh upon him too much.
+
+"Not at all, this solitude suits me perfectly."
+
+"Well," said the abbot, laughing, "you are one of the few laymen who
+have borne our rule so easily. Generally those who have tried to make a
+retreat here have been devoured by home sickness and spleen, and have
+had but one idea, to get away."
+
+"Let us see," he said after a pause; "it is not possible, all the same,
+that such a sudden change of habits should not bring with it some
+painful privations; there must be at least one which you feel above all
+the others?"
+
+"True, I feel the want of being able to light a cigarette whenever I
+like."
+
+The abbot answered smiling, "But I suppose you have not been entirely
+without smoking, since you came here?"
+
+"I should tell a lie if I said I had not smoked in secret."
+
+"Why, bless me, tobacco was not foreseen by St. Benedict; there is no
+mention of it in his rule, and I am therefore free to allow its use; so
+smoke as many cigarettes as you like without being uneasy."
+
+And Dom Anselm added:
+
+"I hope shortly to have a little more time to myself, unless, indeed, I
+am obliged to keep my room, in that case I shall be happy to have a
+longer talk with you."
+
+And the monk, who seemed exhausted, shook them by the hand.
+
+Going down into the court with the oblate Durtal exclaimed,
+
+"The Father Abbot is charming, and quite young."
+
+"He is hardly forty."
+
+"He appears to be really ill."
+
+"Yes, he is not well, and he required no common energy to say his mass
+this morning; but let us see, we will first of all visit the grounds of
+La Trappe which you can hardly have been over completely, then we will
+leave the enclosure and push on to the farm."
+
+They started, skirting the remains of the ancient abbey, and as they
+walked, turning by the piece of water near which Durtal had been seated
+in the morning, M. Bruno entered into explanations about the ruins.
+
+"This monastery was founded in 1127 by St. Bernard, who installed the
+Blessed Humbert as abbot, an epileptic Cistercian, whom he had cured by
+a miracle. At that time there were apparitions in the convent; a legend
+relates that two angels came and cut one of the lilies planted in the
+cemetery every time one of the monks died.
+
+"The second abbot was the Blessed Guerric, who was famous for his
+knowledge, his humility and his patience in enduring evils. We possess
+his relics and they are enclosed in the shrine under the high altar.
+
+"But the most remarkable of the superiors, who succeeded each other here
+in the middle ages, was Peter Monoculus, whose story was written by his
+friend, the member of the synod, Thomas de Reuil.
+
+"Pierre, called Monoculus, or the one-eyed, was a saint thirsting for
+austerities and sufferings. He was assailed by horrible temptations at
+which he laughed. Exasperated, the Devil attacked his body and, by fits
+of neuralgia, broke his skull, but Heaven came to his aid and cured it.
+By shedding tears from a spirit of penitence, Peter lost an eye, and he
+thanked our Lord for this blessing, 'I had' he said, 'two enemies; I
+have escaped the first, but the one I retain troubles me more than the
+one I have lost.'
+
+"He worked miracles of healing. The king of France, Louis VII.,
+venerated him so much that, on seeing the empty eyelid, he wished to
+kiss it. Monoculus died in 1186; they soaked linen cloths in his blood,
+and washed his entrails in wine which was distributed, for the mixture
+was a powerful remedy.
+
+"The property of the abbey was then immense; it comprised all the
+country which surrounds us, kept up several lazar houses in the
+neighbourhood, and was the home of more than three hundred monks.
+Unfortunately what happened to others happened to Notre-Dame de l'Atre.
+Under the rule of abbots in commendam it declined, and it was dying with
+only six religious to look after it when the Revolution suppressed it.
+The church was then pulled down and afterwards replaced by the rotunda
+chapel.
+
+"Only in 1875 the present house, which I think dates from 1733, was
+reconciled and became a monastery again. Trappists were brought here
+from Sainte Marie de la Mer, in the diocese of Toulouse, and this small
+colony has made Notre-Dame de l'Atre the Cistercian nursery you see.
+
+"Such, in few words, is the history of the convent," said the oblate.
+"As for the ruins they are buried underground, and no doubt precious
+fragments might be discovered, but for want of money and men no
+excavations have been made.
+
+"In addition to the broken columns and the capitals we passed, there
+remains from the old church a large statue of the Virgin which has been
+erected in one of the corridors of the abbey; besides this there are two
+angels fairly well preserved and which you may see down there at the end
+of the cloister in a small chapel, hidden behind a curtain of trees."
+
+"A virgin, before which St. Bernard may possibly have knelt, ought
+surely to have been put in the church on the altar dedicated to Mary,
+for the coloured statue, which surmounts it, is of crying
+ugliness--like that one also," said Durtal, pointing out in the distance
+the cast-iron Madonna which towered above the pond.
+
+The oblate bowed his head and did not reply.
+
+"Do you know," exclaimed Durtal, who in the face of this silence did not
+persist and changed the conversation, "do you know that I envy you
+living here?"
+
+"It is certain that I do not deserve this favour, for, on the whole, the
+cloister is less an expiation than a reward; it is the only place where,
+far from the world and near heaven, the only place where a man may give
+himself up to this mystic life which only develops in solitude and
+silence."
+
+"Yes, and if possible, I envy you yet more that you should have had the
+courage to venture into regions which, I confess, frightened me. And I
+know so well that, in spite of the spring-board of prayers and fasts, in
+spite of the green house, or orchid house atmosphere, wherein mysticism
+is grown, I should wither away in these regions without ever expanding
+again."
+
+The oblate smiled. "What do you know about it?" he replied, "the thing
+is not done in an hour; the orchid you speak of does not flower in a
+day; the advance is so slow, that mortifications space themselves out,
+fatigues are distributed over years, and, on the whole, are easily
+borne.
+
+"As a general rule it is necessary, to cross the distance which
+separates us from the Creator, to go through three grades to attain that
+science of Christian perfection which is called mysticism; we must live
+in turn the life of Purification, of Illumination and of Unity--to join
+the uncreated Good and be poured out in Him.
+
+"It matters little that these three grand phases of ascetic existence
+subdivide themselves into an infinity of stages; which are degrees
+according to Saint Bonaventure, dwelling places according to Saint
+Teresa, steps according to Saint Angela; they may vary in length and
+number, according to the will of the Lord and the temperament of those
+who go through them. It is not disputed that the journey of the soul
+towards God includes, first, perpendicular and breakneck roads--these
+are the roads of the life of Purification--next, narrower paths still,
+but well marked out and accessible--these are the paths of the life of
+Illumination--at length, a wide road almost smooth, the road of the
+life of unity, at the end of which the soul throws itself into the
+furnace of Love, and falls into the abyss of the most adorable Infinity!
+
+"On the whole, these three ways are successively reserved to those who
+start in Christian asceticism, to those who practise it, and finally to
+those who attain to the supreme end, the death of self and the life in
+God.
+
+"Long," pursued the oblate, "I have placed my desires beyond the
+horizon, yet I progress little; I am scarcely disengaged from the life
+of Purification, scarcely...."
+
+"And you do not fear--how shall I say--material infirmities, for if at
+last you succeed in attaining the limits of contemplation, you risk the
+ruin of your body for ever. Experience seems to show, in effect, that
+the deified soul acts on the constitution and brings incurable
+troubles."
+
+The oblate smiled. "In the first place I should, no doubt, fail to
+attain to the last degree of initiation, the extreme point of mysticism;
+then, supposing I attain it, what would corporal accidents be in the
+face of such results?
+
+"Let me also assure you that these accidents are neither so frequent nor
+so certain as you seem to think.
+
+"A man may be a great mystic, or an admirable saint, and not be the
+subject of visible phenomena for those who surround him. Would you not
+think, for example, that levitation, or the flight of bodies in the air,
+which seems to constitute the highest state of rapture, is one of the
+rarest? Whom can you quote to me? Saint Teresa, Saint Christina the
+Admirable, Saint Peter of Alcantara, Dominic of Mary Jesus, Agnes of
+Bohemia, Margaret of the Blessed Sacrament, the Blessed Gorardesca of
+Pisa, and above all Saint Joseph of Cupertino, who raised himself at
+will from the ground. But they are ten or twenty out of thousands of the
+elect!
+
+"And note well that these gifts do not prove their superiority over
+other Saints. Saint Teresa declares expressly: it must not be imagined
+that anyone, blessed as he may be in this respect, is better than those
+who are not so blessed, for our Lord directs each one according to his
+particular need.
+
+"And then the doctrine of the Church is seen in the untiring prudence
+shown in the canonization of the dead. Qualities and not extraordinary
+acts decide this; for the Church, miracles themselves are only secondary
+proofs, for she knows that the Spirit of Evil imitates them.
+
+"In the lives of the Blessed you will find, too, the most unusual deeds,
+and more amazing phenomena than in the biographies of the Saints. These
+phenomena have rather hindered than helped them. After having beatified
+them for their virtues, the Church has put off--and no doubt for a long
+time--their promotion to the sovereign dignity of Saints.
+
+"It is difficult, on the whole, to formulate an exact theory on this
+subject, for if the cause, if the mental action is the same in all
+mystics, it differs a little, as I have said, according to God's will
+and the character of the subjects; the difference of sex often changes
+the form of the mystic flow, though in essence it never varies; the rush
+of the Spirit from on High may produce different effects, but is none
+the less identical.
+
+"The only observation we dare make in these matters is that women, as a
+rule, are more passive and less reserved, while men resist more
+violently the wishes of Heaven."
+
+"That makes me think," said Durtal, "that even in religion there are
+souls which seem to have mistaken their sex. Saint Francis of Assisi,
+who was all love, had rather the feminine soul of a nun, and Saint
+Teresa, who was the most attentive of psychologists, had the virile soul
+of a monk. We might correctly speak of Saint Francis as a woman and
+Saint Teresa as a man."
+
+The oblate smiled. "To return to your question," he resumed, "I do not
+at all believe that illness can be the necessary consequence of
+phenomena aroused by the impetuous force of mysticism."
+
+"But look at Saint Colette, Lidwine, Saint Aldegonde, Jane-Mary of the
+Cross, Sister Emmerich and how many more who passed their existence,
+half paralyzed, upon a bed! They are a small minority. Besides, the
+Saints or Blessed ones whose names you quote were victims of
+substitution, expiating the sins of others, a part God had reserved to
+them; it is not, therefore, surprising that they were bed-ridden and
+cripples, and were constantly half dead.
+
+"No, the truth is that mysticism can modify the needs of the body,
+without, for all that, having much effect on, or destroying the health.
+I know well, you would answer me with that terrible phrase of Saint
+Hildegarde, a phrase at once just and sinister: 'the Lord dwells not in
+the bodies of the healthy and vigorous,' and you might add, with Saint
+Teresa, that evils are more frequent in the last of the castles of the
+soul. Yes, but these saints hoist themselves on the summit of life and
+retain God in a permanent manner in their carnal shell. Having reached
+this point, nature, too feeble to support a perfect state, gives way,
+but, I assert again, these cases are an exception and not a rule. And,
+alas, such maladies are not contagious.
+
+"I am quite aware," resumed the oblate, after a pause, "that the very
+existence of mysticism is resolutely denied by some who in consequence
+can never admit the possibility of any influence over the bodily organs,
+but the experience of this supernatural reality is from all time, and
+proofs abound.
+
+"Let us take the stomach for example. Well, under the heavenly
+influence, it becomes transformed, omits all earthly nourishment and
+consumes the Holy Species only.
+
+"Saint Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno lived for years
+exclusively on the Sacrament; and this gift devolved equally upon Saint
+Colette, Saint Lidwine, Dominic of Paradise, Saint Columba of Rieti,
+Mary Bagnesi, Rose of Lima, Saint Peter of Alcantara, Mother Agnes of
+Langeac and on many others.
+
+"Under the divine impress the senses of smell and taste presented no
+less strange metamorphoses. Saint Philip Nevi, Saint Angela, Saint
+Margaret of Cortona recognized a special taste in unleavened bread, when
+after the consecration there was no longer any wheat, but the very flesh
+of Christ. Saint Pacomius knew heretics by their foul smell; Saint
+Catherine of Siena, Saint Joseph of Cupertino and Mother Agnes of Jesus
+discovered sins by their evil odours; Saint Hilarion, Saint Lutgarde,
+Gentilla of Ravenna, could tell merely by the scent of those whom they
+met what faults they had committed.
+
+"And the Saints themselves, whether living or dead, exhaled powerful
+perfumes.
+
+"When Saint Francis de Paul and Venturini of Bergamo offered the
+Sacrifice they smelt sweet. Saint Joseph of Cupertino secreted such
+fragrant odours that his track could be followed; and sometimes it was
+during illness that these aromas were diffused.
+
+"The pus of Saint John of the Cross and of the Blessed Didee gave forth
+strong and distinct scent of lilies; Barthole, the tertiary, gnawed to
+the bones by leprosy, gave out pleasant emanations, and the same was the
+case with Lidwine, Ida of Louvain, Saint Colette, Saint Humiliana,
+Maria-Victoria of Genoa, Dominic of Paradise, whose wounds were boxes of
+perfume, whence fresh scents escaped.
+
+"And thus we can enumerate organs and senses one after another, and
+declare marvellous effects. Without speaking of those faithful stigmata
+which open or shut according to the Proper of the liturgical year, what
+is more astounding than the gift of bilocation, the power of doubling
+oneself, of being in two places at the same time, at the same moment?
+And yet what numerous examples exist of this incredible fact: many are
+celebrated, amongst others those of Saint Antony of Padua, Saint Francis
+Xavier, Marie of Agreda, who was at the same time in her monastery in
+Spain and in Mexico when she was preaching to infidels, Mother Agnes of
+Jesus, who came to visit M. Olier at Paris without leaving her convent
+at Langeac. And, again, the action from on High seems singularly
+energetic when it takes hold of the central organ of circulation, the
+motor which drives the blood into all parts of the body.
+
+"Numbers of the elect had such a burning heart that the linen they wore
+was singed; the fire which consumed Ursula Benincasa, the foundress of
+the Theatines, was so strong that this saint breathed columns of smoke
+as soon as she opened her mouth; Saint Catherine of Genoa dipped her
+feet or her hands in iced water and the water boiled; snow melted round
+Saint Peter of Alcantara, and, one day when the blessed Gerlach was
+crossing a forest in the depth of winter he advised his companion, who
+walked behind him, and who could not go on, as his legs were numb, to
+put his feet into his footsteps, and immediately he ceased to feel cold.
+
+"I will add that certain of these phenomena, which make freethinkers
+smile, have been renewed and have been verified quite recently.
+
+"Linen scorched by the fire of the heart has been observed by Dr.
+Imbert-Gourbeyre on the stigmatized Palma d'Oria, and phenomena of high
+mysticism, which no science can explain, were watched in the case of
+Louise Lateau, minute by minute, and noted and controlled by Professor
+Rohling, Dr. Lafebvre, Dr. Imbert Gourbeyre, Dr. de Nouee, by medical
+delegates from all countries....
+
+"But here we are," said the oblate; "excuse me, I will go first to show
+you the way."
+
+They had left the enclosure as he spoke, and cutting across the fields,
+reached an immense farm. Trappists bowed respectfully as they entered
+the court yard. M. Bruno, addressing himself to one of them, asked him
+to be good enough to take them over the property.
+
+The lay brother took them to the cattle sheds, then to the stables, then
+to the poultry yard; Durtal, who was not interested in such sights,
+confined himself to admiring the grace of these good people. No one
+spoke, but they replied to questions by signs and winks.
+
+"But how do they communicate with each other?" asked Durtal, when they
+were outside the farm.
+
+"You have just seen; they correspond by signs; they have a simpler
+alphabet than that of the deaf and dumb, for each idea that they may
+require to express for their common work is foreseen.
+
+"Thus the word 'wash' is translated by one hand tapping on the other;
+the word 'vegetable' by scratching the left forefinger; sleep is feigned
+by leaning the head upon the fist; drink by raising a closed hand to the
+lips. And for more spiritual expressions they employ a like method.
+Confession is translated by a finger kissed and laid upon the heart;
+holy water by five fingers of the left hand clasped on which a cross is
+made with the thumb of the right hand; fasting by fingers which close
+the mouth; the word 'yesterday' by turning the arm back towards the
+shoulder; shame by covering the eyes with the hand."
+
+"But supposing they wished to indicate me, who am not one of themselves,
+how would they set about it?"
+
+"They would use the sign of 'guest,' which they make by stretching out
+the hand and bringing it near the body."
+
+"That means that I come to them from far, an open and even transparent
+fact if you like."
+
+They went silently along a walk which led down into the labour fields.
+
+"I have not noticed Brother Anacletus or old Simeon among these monks,"
+exclaimed Durtal, suddenly.
+
+"They are not occupied on the farm; Brother Anacletus is employed in the
+chocolate factory, and Brother Simeon looks after the pigs; both are
+working in the immediate neighbourhood of the monastery. If you like, we
+will go and wish Simeon good-morning."
+
+And the oblate added, "You can tell them, when you go back to Paris,
+that you have seen a real saint, such as existed in the eleventh
+century; he carries us back to the time of St. Francis of Assisi; he is
+in some sense the reincarnation of that astonishing Juniper whose
+innocent exploits the Fioretti celebrate for us. You know that work?"
+
+"Yes; after the Golden Legend it is the book on which the soul of the
+Middle Ages is most clearly impressed."
+
+"But to return to Simeon; this old man is a saint of uncommon
+simplicity. Here is one proof out of a thousand. Several months ago I
+was in the prior's cell when Brother Simeon appeared. He made use of the
+ordinary formula in asking permission to speak, 'Benedicite.' Father
+Maximin replied 'Dominus,' and on this word, which permitted him to
+speak, the brother showed his glasses and said he could no longer see
+clearly.
+
+"'That is not very surprising,' said the prior, 'you have been using the
+same glasses for nearly ten years, and since then your eyes may well
+have become weaker; never mind, we will find the number which suits your
+sight now.'
+
+"As he spoke, Father Maximin mechanically moved the glass of the
+spectacles between his hands, and suddenly he laughed, showing me his
+fingers, which were black. He turned round, took a cloth, cleaned the
+spectacles, and replacing them on the brother's nose, said to him, 'Do
+you see, Brother Simeon?'
+
+"And the old man, astonished, cried 'Yes ... I see!'
+
+"But this is only one side of this good man. Another is the love of his
+beasts. When a sow is going to bring forth, he asks permission to pass
+the night by her, and delivers her, looking after her like his child,
+weeps when they sell his little pigs or when the big ones are sent to
+the slaughter-house! And how all the animals adore him!"
+
+"Truly," the oblate went on, after a silence, "God loves simple souls
+above all, for he loads Brother Simeon with graces. Alone, here, he can
+reabsorb and even prevent the demoniacal accidents which arise in
+cloisters. Then we assist at strange performances: one fine morning all
+the pigs fall on their sides; they are ill and at the point of death.
+
+"Simeon, who knows the origin of these evils, cries to the Devil: 'Wait,
+wait, and you will see!' He runs for holy water, and sprinkles them with
+it, praying the while, and all the beasts who were dying jump up,
+frisking about and wagging their tails.
+
+"As for diabolic incursions into the convent itself, they are but too
+real, and sometimes are only driven back after persistent prayers and
+energetic fastings; at certain times in most convents the Demon sows a
+harvest of hobgoblins of whom no one knows how to get rid. Here, the
+father abbot, the prior, and all those who are priests have failed; it
+was necessary, to give efficacy to the exorcisms, that the humble lay
+brother should intervene; so, to forestall new attacks, he has obtained
+the right to wash the monastery with holy water and to use prayers
+whenever he thinks well to do so.
+
+"He has the power of feeling where the Evil One is hidden, and he
+follows him, tracks him, and finally casts him out."
+
+"Here is the piggery," continued M. Bruno, showing a tumble-down old
+place in front of the left wing of the cloister, surrounded by
+palisades; and he added,
+
+"I warn you, the old man grunts like a pig, but he will not answer your
+questions except by signs."
+
+"But he can speak to his animals?"
+
+"Yes, to them only."
+
+The oblate opened a small door, and the lay brother, all bent, lifted
+his head with difficulty.
+
+"Good-day, brother," said M. Bruno; "here is a gentleman who would like
+to see your pupils."
+
+There was a grunt of joy on the lips of the old man. He smiled and
+invited them by a sign to follow him.
+
+He introduced them into a shed, and Durtal recoiled, deafened by
+horrible cries, suffocated by the pestilential heat of the liquid
+manure. All the pigs jumped up behind their barrier, and howled with
+joy at the sight of the brother.
+
+"Peace, peace," said the old man, in a gentle voice; and lifting an arm
+over the paling, he caressed the snouts which, on smelling him, were
+almost suffocated by grunting.
+
+He drew Durtal aside by the arm, and making him lean over the trellis
+work, showed him an enormous sow with a snub nose, of English breed, a
+monstrous animal surrounded by a company of sucking pigs which rushed,
+as if mad, at her teats.
+
+"Yes, my beauty; go, my beauty," murmured the old man, stroking her
+bristles with his hand.
+
+And the sow looked at him with little languishing eyes, and licked his
+fingers; she ended by screaming abominably when he went away.
+
+And Brother Simeon showed off other pupils, pigs with ears like the
+mouth of a trumpet and corkscrew tails, sows whose stomachs trailed and
+whose feet seemed hardly outside their bodies, new-born pigs which
+sucked ravenously at the teats, larger ones, who delighted in chasing
+each other about and rolled in the mud, snorting.
+
+Durtal complimented him on the beasts, and the old man was jubilant,
+wiping his face with his great hand; then, on the oblate inquiring about
+the litter of some sow, he felt his fingers in a row; replying to the
+observation that the animals were very greedy, by stretching his arms to
+heaven, showing the empty troughs, lifting ends of wood, tearing up
+tufts of grass which he carried to his lips, grunting as if he had his
+muzzle full.
+
+Then he took them into the courtyard, placed them against the wall,
+opened a door beyond, and hid himself. A formidable boar passed like a
+waterspout, upset a wheelbarrow, scattering everything round him with a
+noise like a shell bursting; then he broke into a gallop all round the
+courtyard, and ended by taking a header into a sea of liquid manure. He
+wallowed, turned head over heels, kicked about with his four feet in the
+air, and got up black and disgusting as the inside of a chimney.
+
+After this he halted, grunted a cheerful note, and wished to fawn on the
+monk, who checked him with a gesture.
+
+"Your boar is splendid!" said Durtal.
+
+And the lay brother looked on Durtal with moist eyes as he rubbed his
+neck with his hand, sighing.
+
+"That means they are going to kill him soon," said the oblate.
+
+And the old man acquiesced with a melancholy shake of his head.
+
+They left him, thanking him for his kindness.
+
+"When I think of how this being, who is devoted to the lowest duties,
+prays in church, I long to kneel before him and, like his pigs, kiss his
+hands!" exclaimed Durtal after a silence.
+
+"Brother Simeon is an angelic being," replied the oblate. "He lives the
+Unitive life, his soul plunged, drowned in the divine essence. Under a
+rough exterior an absolutely white soul, a soul without sin, lives in
+this poor body; it is right that God should spoil him! As I have told
+you, He has given him all power over the Demon; and in certain cases He
+allows him also the power of healing by the imposition of hands. He has
+renewed here the wonderful cures of the ancient saints."
+
+They ceased speaking, and, warned by the bells which were ringing for
+Vespers, they moved towards the church.
+
+And, coming to himself again, trying to recover, Durtal remained
+astounded. Monastic life retarded time. How many weeks had he been at La
+Trappe, and how many days since had he approached the Sacraments? that
+was lost in the distance. Ah, life was double in these cloisters! And
+yet he was not tired of it; he had bent himself easily to the hard rule,
+and, in spite of the scanty meals, he felt no sick headaches or failing;
+he had never felt so well!--but what remained was a feeling of stifling,
+of restrained sighs, this burning melancholy for hours, and, more than
+all, this vague anxiety at listening again within himself, and hearing
+united in his person the voices of this Trinity, God, the Devil, and
+Man.
+
+"This is not the peace of the soul I dreamed of--and it is even worse
+than at Paris," he said to himself, recalling the maddening trial of the
+rosary--"and yet--how can I explain it? I am happy here all the same."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Rising, somewhat earlier than his wont, Durtal went down to the chapel.
+The office of Matins was over, but some lay brothers, amongst whom was
+Brother Simeon, were praying on their knees on the ground.
+
+The sight of this holy swine-herd threw Durtal into a long train of
+thought. He tried in vain to penetrate into the sanctuary of that soul,
+hidden like an invisible chapel behind the dunghill rampart of a body;
+he did not even succeed in representing to himself the docile and
+clinging soul of this man, who had attained the highest state to which
+the human creature can reach here below.
+
+"What a power of prayer he has," thought he, as he looked at the old
+man.
+
+He remembered the details of his interview the evening before. "It is
+true," he thought, "that in this monk I find something of the charm of
+that brother Juniper, whose surprising simplicity has come down through
+the ages."
+
+And he brought to mind the adventures of that Franciscan whom his
+companions left one day by himself in the convent, telling him to
+prepare dinner against their return.
+
+Juniper reflected, "What an amount of time is spent in preparing food!
+The brothers who take turns in that work have not even time to
+pray"--and desiring to lighten the work of those who should succeed him
+in the kitchen, he determined to cook such plentiful dishes that the
+community might dine on them for a fortnight.
+
+He lighted all the stoves, procured, we are not told how, enormous
+boilers, filled them with water, threw into them, pell-mell, eggs with
+their shells, chickens with their feathers, vegetables he had neglected
+to trim, and before a fire which would roast an ox, he exerted himself
+to pile up and stir the ridiculous jumble of his stock-pots.
+
+When the brothers came home, and sat down in the refectory, he ran, his
+face browned and his hands burnt, and joyously served up his stew. The
+superior asked him if he were not mad, while he remained stupefied that
+no one gobbled up this astonishing mess. He declared in all humility
+that he thought he was doing a service to his brethren, and only when he
+observed that so much food would be wasted, did he weep hot tears, and
+declare himself a wretch; he cried that he was good for nothing but to
+spoil the property of Almighty God, while the monks smiled, admiring
+this debauch of charity, and the excess of Juniper's simplicity.
+
+"Brother Simeon would be humble enough and simple enough to renew again
+such splendid jokes," thought Durtal, "but better still than the good
+Franciscan, he recalls the memory of that astonishing Saint Joseph of
+Cupertino, of whom the oblate spoke yesterday."
+
+He, who called himself brother Ass, was a charming and poor creature, so
+modest, and so ignorant, that he was turned away wherever he went. He
+passed through life, with open mouth, thrusting himself eagerly against
+all the cloisters that repulsed him. He wandered about unable to perform
+even the lowest tasks. He was, to use a popular expression, a regular
+butter-fingers, and broke whatever he touched. They ordered him to go
+and fetch water, and he wandered without understanding, absorbed in God,
+and at the end, when no one thought about it any more, brought some
+after a month.
+
+A monastery of Capucins which had received him, got rid of him. He went
+his way, vaguely, out of his orbit among the towns, stumbled into
+another convent where he employed himself in taking care of the animals,
+whom he adored, and he rose into a perpetual ecstasy, revealing himself
+as the most singular of wonder workers, putting the demons to flight,
+and healing the sick. He was at once idiotic and sublime; in the
+hagiography he stands alone, and seems to figure there to furnish a
+proof that the soul is identified with Eternal Wisdom, rather by
+ignorance than by science.
+
+"He also loves animals," said Durtal to himself, as he looked at old
+Simeon; "and he too puts to flight the Evil One, and works cures by his
+sanctity.
+
+"In a time when all men are exclusively haunted by the thoughts of
+luxury and lucre, the soul appears extraordinary when divested of its
+bark, as the candid and naked soul of this good monk. He is eighty years
+old and more, and he has led from his youth up the restricted life of
+the Trappists; he probably does not know in what time he lives, nor what
+latitudes he inhabits, whether he is in America or in France, for he has
+never read a newspaper, and outside rumours do not reach him.
+
+"He does not even know the taste of flesh meat or wine; he has no notion
+of money, of which he does not suspect the value nor the appearance; he
+does not imagine how a woman is made; and save for the breeding of his
+pigs, he perhaps cannot even guess the meaning and the consequences of
+the sin of the flesh.
+
+"He lives alone ringed round by silence, and buried in the shade; he
+meditates on the mortifications of the Fathers in the Desert, which are
+read to him as he eats, and the frenzy of their fasts makes him ashamed
+of his miserable repast, and he accuses himself that he is so well to
+do.
+
+"Ah! this Father Simeon is innocent; he knows nothing that we know, and
+knows that of which all others are ignorant; his education has been
+taken in hand by the Lord Himself, who teaches him truths which we
+cannot comprehend, models his soul after heaven, infuses Himself into
+him, possesses him, and deifies him in the union of Blessedness.
+
+"This puts us somewhat at a distance from hypocrites and devout persons;
+as far indeed as modern Catholicism is from Mysticism, for certainly
+that religion is as grovelling on the ground as Mysticism is high!
+
+"And that is true. Instead of directing all our forces to that unknown
+end, of taking our soul to fashion it in that form of a dove which the
+Middle Ages gave to the pyxes; instead of making it the shrine where the
+Host reposes in the very image of the Holy Spirit, the Catholic confines
+himself to trying to conceal his conscience, to deceive his Judge by the
+fear of a salutary hell; he acts not by choice, but by fear: he with the
+aid of his clergy, and the help of his imbecile literature, and his
+feeble press, has made of religion a mere fetishism, a ridiculous
+worship composed of statuettes and alms boxes; candles and
+chromo-lithographs; he has materialized the ideal of Love, in inventing
+an entirely physical devotion to the Sacred Heart.
+
+"What baseness of conception!" continued Durtal, who had come out of the
+chapel, and was strolling along the bank of the great pond. He looked at
+the reeds, which bent like an harvest still green, under a puff of wind;
+then he half saw as he leant forward, an old boat, which bore almost
+effaced on its blueish hull the name "Alleluia." This bark disappeared
+under the tufts of leaves round which were twined the bells of the
+convolvulus, a symbolic flower, since it widens out like a chalice, and
+has the dead white of a wafer.
+
+The scent of the water, at once enticing and bitter, intoxicated him.
+"Ah!" he thought, "happiness certainly consists in being restricted to a
+place closely locked, a prison very confined, or a chapel always open,"
+and he caught himself up: "Ah! there is Brother Anacletus;" the lay
+brother was coming towards him, bending under a hamper.
+
+He passed before Durtal, smiling at him with his eyes: and while he went
+his way, Durtal thought, "This man is a true friend of mine; when I was
+suffering so much before my confession, he expressed all to me in a
+look. To-day when he believes me serener, and more joyous, he is
+content, and shows it to me by a smile; and I shall never speak to him,
+I shall never thank him, I shall never even know who he is, I shall
+perhaps never even see him again.
+
+"In leaving this place, I shall keep a friend, for whom I too feel
+affection; yet neither of us has even exchanged a gesture with the
+other.
+
+"After all," he thought, "does not this absolute reserve make our
+friendship more perfect? it is stamped in the eternal distance, it
+remains mysterious and incomplete, and more certain."
+
+While thinking over these reflections, Durtal went towards the chapel,
+where the Office called him, and thence to the refectory.
+
+He was surprised to find the table laid only for one. "What has happened
+to M. Bruno? Yet I may as well wait a while," and to kill time, he
+occupied himself by reading a printed card, hung upon the wall.
+
+It was a sort of advertisement which began thus:
+
+     "ETERNITY.
+
+     "Fellow sinners, you will die. Be ye always ready.
+
+     "Watch then, pray without ceasing, never forget the Four Last
+     Things which you see here traced
+
+    "Death, the gate of Eternity,
+    Judgment, which decides Eternity,
+    Hell, the abode of unhappy Eternity,
+    Paradise, the abode of blessed Eternity."
+
+Father Etienne interrupted Durtal, telling him that M. Bruno had gone to
+Saint Landry to make some purchases, and would only return at bed-time
+at eight o'clock. "Dine then without waiting, and make haste, or all
+your dishes will be cold."
+
+"And how is the father abbot?"
+
+"Better, he keeps his room still, but he hopes to be able to come down a
+while, the day after to-morrow, and assist at least at some of the
+offices."
+
+And the monk bowed and disappeared.
+
+Durtal seated himself at table, ate some bean broth, swallowed a
+soft-boiled egg and a spoonful of warm beans, then once outside, he
+passed along the chapel, entered it, and knelt before the altar of the
+Virgin; but at once the spirit of blasphemy filled him; he wished,
+whatever it cost him, to insult the Virgin; it seemed to him that he
+would experience a sharp joy, an acute pleasure in soiling her; but he
+restrained himself, he wrinkled his face not to allow the coal-heaver's
+abuse, which was on his lips, to escape.
+
+And he detested these abominations; he revolted against them, strove
+against them with horror; and the impulse became so irresistible, that
+in order to keep silence he was obliged to bite his lips till they bled.
+
+"This is somewhat strong," he said, "to hear grumbling in oneself, the
+contrary of what one is thinking;" but he had need to call to his help
+all his will, he felt that he should yield, and spit out all these
+impurities; wherefore he fled, thinking, that should he find no means of
+resistance, it were better to vomit this filth in the court rather than
+in the church.
+
+And so soon as he quitted the chapel this madness of blasphemy ceased;
+he walked along the pond astonished by the strange violence of the
+attack.
+
+Little by little there came to him the unexplained intuition of a danger
+that menaced him. As a beast that scents a hidden enemy, he looked with
+precaution within himself, and ended by seeing a black point on the
+horizon of his soul, and suddenly, before he had time to reconnoitre,
+and take account of the danger he saw arising, this point extended, and
+covered him with its shadow; there was no more light in him.
+
+He had that minute of unrest which precedes the storm, and in the
+anxious silence of his being, arguments fell like drops of rain.
+
+The painful effects of the Sacrament justified themselves, had he not
+proceeded in such a way that his communion could not but be unfaithful?
+Evidently; instead of collecting and straining himself, he had passed an
+afternoon of revolt and anger; the very evening before he had unworthily
+judged an ecclesiastic whose only wrong was that he took pleasure in the
+vanity of easy jokes. Had he confessed this injustice, and these
+revolts? Not the least in the world; and after the communion still less;
+had he, as he should have done, shut himself up alone with his Guest? He
+had abandoned Him, without thinking more of Him; had quitted his
+innermost cell, had taken a walk in the wood, had not even been present
+at the Offices.
+
+"But come, come, this blame is foolish. I communicated, just as I was,
+on the formal order of the confessor; as for the walk, I did not ask for
+it nor wish for it. M. Bruno, in agreement with the abbot of La Trappe,
+decided it would do me good; I have then nothing to reproach myself
+with; I am blameless.
+
+"This does not prove that you would not have done better to spend the
+day in prayer, in the church.
+
+"But," he cried, "with such a system one could not move, one could not
+eat, nor sleep, for one should never leave the church. There must be
+time for everything, or the devil take it all!
+
+"No doubt, but a more diligent soul would have refused that excursion,
+just because it was pleasant; would have avoided it, out of
+mortification, in a spirit of penance."
+
+"Evidently, but" ... these scruples tortured him; "the fact is," he
+said, "I might have employed my afternoon more wholesomely than that;"
+to believe that he had spent it ill was but a step, and he made it. He
+pelted himself for an hour, sweating with agony, heaping on himself
+imaginary sins, and entering so far on that road that he ended by
+suddenly realizing his position and understanding he was out of the
+right track.
+
+The story of the rosary returned to his memory, and then he blamed
+himself for allowing himself to be again driven into a corner by the
+demon. He began to breathe again, to regain his footing, when other
+attacks equally formidable presented themselves.
+
+It was no longer an insinuation of arguments which ran drop by drop, but
+a furious rain, which threw itself like an avalanche on his soul. The
+storm, of which the wave of scruples was only the prelude, burst in its
+fulness; and in the panic of the first moment, in the violence of the
+tempest, the enemy unmasked his batteries, and struck him to the heart.
+
+He had got no good from that communion, but he was also too young at it.
+Ah! indeed, was he to believe that because a priest uttered five Latin
+words over a bit of unleavened bread, that bread was transubstantiated
+into the flesh of Christ? That a child should accept such nonsense,
+might be possible, but that a man past forty should listen to such
+formidable shams, was excessive; almost disquieting.
+
+And these insinuations lashed him like hail showers: how could bread
+made of wheat before, have only the appearance of wheat afterwards; what
+is flesh that is neither seen nor felt; what is a body, which has such
+ubiquity as to be at the same time on the altars of divers countries;
+what is that power which is annihilated when the Host is not made of
+pure wheat?
+
+And this became a regular deluge which overwhelmed him, and yet like an
+impenetrable pile, that Faith he had acquired without ever having known
+how, remained immovable, disappeared under torrents of interrogation,
+but never stirred.
+
+He revolted, and said to himself: "This only proves that the sacramental
+darkness of the Eucharist cannot be sounded. Moreover, if it were
+intelligible, it would not be divine. If the God whom we serve could be
+comprehended by reason, He could not be worth the trouble of serving,
+said Tauler; and the 'Imitation' declares plainly also at the end of the
+IVth book that if the works of God were such as man's intelligence could
+easily grasp, they would cease to be marvellous, and could not be
+qualified as ineffable."
+
+And a mocking voice replied,
+
+"That is what you call answering, avowing that there is nothing to
+answer."
+
+"In fact," said Durtal, who reflected, "I have been present at
+spiritualistic experiences, where no trickery was possible. It was quite
+evident that there was no fluid from the spectators, no suggestion of
+persons surrounding the table who dictated the responses; then in giving
+its raps, the table expressed itself suddenly in English, though no one
+spoke that language, then a few minutes later, addressing itself to me,
+who was at a distance from it, and consequently was not touching it, it
+told me this time in French, facts which I had forgotten, and I alone
+could know. I am then certainly obliged to suppose an element of the
+supernatural, using a table in guise of an interpreter, to accept if not
+the evocation of the dead, but at least the proved existence of ghosts.
+
+"Then it is not more impossible, more surprising that Christ should
+substitute Himself for a piece of bread, than that a ghost should hide
+and brag in the foot of a table. These phenomena equally put our senses
+to rout; but if one of them be undeniable, and spiritualistic
+manifestation certainly is so, what motives can we invoke to deny the
+other, which is moreover attested by thousands of saints?
+
+"After all," he went on with a smile, "we have already demonstration by
+the absurd, but this may be called demonstration by the abject, for if
+the Eucharistic mystery is sublime, it is not the same with
+spiritualism, which is after all only the latrine of the supernatural!"
+
+"If this were the only enigma," began the voice again, "but all the
+Catholic doctrines are on the same model; examine religion from its
+birth, and see if it do not always issue by an absurd dogma.
+
+"Here is a God, infinitely perfect, infinitely good, a God who is not
+ignorant of past, present, or future. He knew then that Eve would sin;
+therefore of two things, one; either He is not good, in that He
+submitted her to that proof knowing that she had not power to stand it;
+or again, He was not certain of her defeat; in that case He is not
+omniscient, He is not perfect."
+
+Durtal gave no answer to this dilemma; which is in fact difficult to
+resolve.
+
+"Yet," he thought, "we may at once exclude one of these two
+propositions, the latter; for it is childish to concern ourselves about
+the future, when we have to do with God; we judge Him by our miserable
+understanding, and there is for Him neither present nor past, nor
+future; He sees them all at the same moment in light uncreate. For Him
+distance has no figure, and space is nought. It is consequently
+impossible to doubt that the Serpent will conquer. This amputated
+dilemma is then out of order."
+
+"Be it so, but the other alternative remains; what do you make of His
+goodness?"
+
+"His goodness?" And Durtal had need to repeat again the arguments drawn
+from free will, and the promised coming of the Saviour; and he was
+obliged to admit that these answers were weak.
+
+And the voice became more pressing,
+
+"Then you admit original sin?"
+
+"I am obliged to admit it, because it exists. What are heredity and
+atavism, save, under another name, the terrible sin of the beginning?"
+
+"And does it appear to you just that innocent generations should make
+amends now and always for the sin of the first man?"
+
+And as Durtal did not reply, the voice insinuated gently,
+
+"This law is so iniquitous that it seems as if the Creator were ashamed
+of it, and that in order to punish Himself for His ferocity, and not to
+make Himself for ever execrated by His creature, He wished to suffer on
+the Cross, and expiate His crime in the person of His own Son."
+
+"But," cried Durtal, exasperated, "God could not commit a crime and
+punish Himself: were that so, Jesus would be the Redeemer of His Father,
+and not ours; it is madness!"
+
+Little by little he recovered his balance; he recited slowly the
+Apostles' Creed, while the objections which demolished it, pressed one
+after the other within him.
+
+"There is one fact certain," he said to himself, for in all this
+tumult, he was perfectly lucid, "that for the moment we are two persons
+in one. I can follow my reasonings, and I hear on the other side, the
+sophisms my double breathes in me. This duality has never appeared so
+clear to me."
+
+And the attack grew feebler, on this reflection; it might have been
+believed that the enemy now discovered was beating a retreat.
+
+But nothing of the kind; after a short truce, the assault began again on
+another point.
+
+"Are you very sure that you have not suggested and shown the blow to
+yourself? By having wished, you have ended by begetting belief, and by
+implanting in yourself a fixed idea, disguised under the name of grace,
+round which everything now clings. You complain that you did not
+experience sensible joys after your communion; this simply proves that
+you were not careful enough, or that, tired by the excess of the evening
+before, your imagination showed itself unready to play the infatuating
+fairy story you expected from yourself after the mass.
+
+"Moreover, you ought to know that in these questions all depends on the
+more or less feverish activity of the brain and the senses; see what
+takes place in the case of women, who deceive themselves more easily
+than men; for that again declares the difference of conformations, the
+variety between the sexes; Christ gives Himself carnally under the
+appearances of bread; that is mystical marriage, the divine union
+consummated by the way of the lips; He is indeed the spouse of women,
+while we men, without willing it, by the very lodestone of our nature,
+are more attracted by the Virgin. But she does not give herself, like
+her Son, to us; she does not reside in the Sacrament; possession is in
+her case impossible; she is our Mother, but she is not our Spouse, as he
+is the Spouse of virgins.
+
+"We conceive, therefore, that women are more violently duped, that they
+adore better, and imagine more easily the more they are petted.
+Moreover, M. Bruno said to you yesterday, 'Woman is more passive, less
+rebellious to the action of Heaven ...'
+
+"Well, what has that to do with me; what does that prove? that the more
+we love the better we are loved: but if that axiom is false, from the
+earthly point of view, it is certainly exact from the divine point of
+view; which would be monstrous, and would come to this, that the Lord
+would not treat the soul of a Poor Clare better than mine."
+
+There was again a time of rest, and the attack turned and rushed on a
+new place.
+
+"Then you believe in an eternal hell? You suppose a God more cruel than
+yourself, a God who has created people, without their having been
+consulted, without their having asked to be born; and after having
+suffered during their existence, they will be again punished without
+mercy after their death; but consider, if you were to see your worst
+enemy in torture, you would be taken by pity, and would ask pardon for
+him. You would pardon, and the Almighty be implacable; you will admit
+this is to have a singular idea of Him."
+
+Durtal was silent; hell going on infinitely became in fact wearisome.
+The reply that it is legitimate, that punishment should be infinite,
+because rewards are so, was not decisive, since indeed it were the
+property of perfect goodness, to abridge the chastisements and prolong
+the joys.
+
+"But, in fact," he said to himself, "Saint Catherine of Genoa has
+elucidated the question. She explains very well that God sends a ray of
+mercy, a current of pity into hell, that no damned soul suffers as much
+as it deserves to suffer; that if expiation ought not to cease, it may
+be modified, and weakened, and become at length less rigorous, less
+intense.
+
+"She remarks also, that at the moment of its separation from the body,
+the soul becomes obstinate or yields; if it remain hardened and shows no
+contrition for its faults, its guilt cannot be remitted, since, after
+death, free will subsists no more; the will which we possess at the
+moment of quitting the world remains invariable.
+
+"If, on the contrary, it does not persist in those impenitent
+sentiments, a part of the repression will no doubt be removed; and
+consequently is not devoted to a continual gehenna, as that which
+deliberately, while there is yet time, will not return to amendment,
+refuses in fact to lay aside its sins.
+
+"Let us add that according to the saint, God does not even make the soul
+empty to be never polluted by sin, for it goes there of itself; it is
+led there by the very nature of its sins, it flings itself in as into
+its own good; is, if one may say so, naturally engulfed there.
+
+"In fact we may imagine to ourselves a very small hell, and a very large
+purgatory; may imagine that hell is scantily peopled, is only reserved
+for cases of rare wickedness, that in reality the crowd of disincarnate
+souls presses into Purgatory and there endures punishments proportioned
+to the misdeeds it has willed here below. These ideas have nothing which
+cannot be sustained, and they have the advantage of being in accord with
+the ideas of mercy and justice."
+
+"Exactly," replied the voice in railing tones. "Man then will do well to
+constrain himself; he may steal, rob, kill his father, and violate his
+daughter; the price is the same; provided he repent at the last minute,
+he is saved!"
+
+"But no, contrition takes away the eternity of punishment only, and not
+punishment itself; everyone must be punished or rewarded according to
+his works. He who will be soiled by a parricide or an incest will bear a
+chastisement different in pain and length to him who has not committed
+them; equality in expiatory suffering, in reparative pain, does not
+exist.
+
+"Moreover this idea of a purgative life after death is so natural, so
+certain, that all religions assume it. All consider the soul is a sort
+of air balloon, which cannot mount and attain its last end in space
+except by throwing away its ballast. In the religions of the East, the
+soul is re-incarnistic; in order to purify itself it rubs itself against
+a new body, like a blade in sandstone troughs, to brighten it. For us
+Catholics it undergoes no terrestrial avatar, but it lightens and scours
+itself, clears itself in the Purgatory, where God transforms it, draws
+it out, extracts it little by little from the dross of its sins, till it
+can raise itself and lose itself in Him.
+
+"To have done with this irritating question of a perpetual hell, why not
+conceive that divine justice hesitates in the majority of cases to
+pronounce inexorable decrees? Humanity is for the most part composed of
+unconscious rascals and fools, who do not take any count of the reach of
+their faults. These are saved by their complete want of comprehension.
+As for others who rot, knowing what they do, they are evidently more
+blameworthy, but society which hates superior beings takes on itself
+their punishment, humiliates and persecutes them; and it is therefore
+allowed us to hope that our Lord will pity these poor souls so miserably
+pelted during their stay upon earth by a horde of fools."
+
+"Then there is every advantage in being imbecile, since one is spared
+both on earth and in heaven?"
+
+"Ah! certainly, and yet ... and yet.... What is the good of discussion,
+since we cannot frame for ourselves the least idea of the infinite
+justice of a God?"
+
+"Moreover, this is enough, these debates overwhelm me." He tried to
+distract his thoughts from these subjects, and would feign to break the
+obsession, betake himself to Paris; but five minutes had not passed
+before his double returned to the charge.
+
+He entered once more on that halting dilemma which had so recently
+assailed the goodness of the Creator in regard to the sins of man.
+"Purgatory is then exorbitant, for after all," said he, "God knew that
+man would yield to temptations; then why allow them, and above all why
+condemn them? Is that goodness, is that justice?"
+
+"But it is a sophism," cried Durtal, growing angry. "God has left to
+every man his liberty; no one is tempted beyond his power. If in certain
+cases, he allows the seduction to overpass our means of resistance, it
+is to recall us to humility, to bring us back to Him by remorse, for
+other causes which we know not, which it is not His business to show us.
+Then probably those transgressions are appreciated in a different way to
+those which we have practised with our full accord."
+
+"The liberty of man! it is a pretty thing. Yes, let us speak of it, and
+atavism, and our surroundings and diseases of the brain, and of the
+marrow. Is a man driven by the impulses of sickness, overwhelmed by
+troubles of the generative organs, responsible for his acts?"
+
+"But what can be said if under these conditions these acts are imputed
+to him on high. It is after all idiotic always to compare divine justice
+to man's tribunals; for it is exactly the contrary; human judgments are
+often so infamous that they attest the existence of another equity.
+Rather than the proofs of a theodicy, the magistrature proves God; for
+without Him, how can be satisfied that instinct of justice so innate in
+each of us, that even the humblest beast possesses it?"
+
+"Yet," replied the voice, "all this does not hinder the change of
+character according as the stomach does its work ill or well; slander,
+anger, envy are accumulated bile, or faulty digestion; good temper, joy,
+come from a free circulation of blood, the expansion of the body at
+will; mystics are anemo-nervous people; your ecstatics are hysterical
+patients badly-fed, madhouses are full of them; they depend on science
+when visions begin."
+
+All at once Durtal recovered himself, the material arguments were but
+little disquieting, for none could remain standing: all confounded the
+function and the organ, the lodger and the lodging, the clock and the
+hour. Their assertions rested on no base. To liken the happy lucidity
+and unequalled genius of a Saint Teresa to the extravagances of
+nymphomaniacs and other mad women were so obtuse, so clumsy, that it
+could only raise a smile!
+
+The mystery would remain complete; no doctor has been able to discover
+or could discover the psyche in those round or fusiform cells, in the
+white matter or grey substance of the brain. They would recognize more
+or less justly the organs which the soul uses to pull the strings of the
+puppet, which it is condemned to move, but itself remains invisible; it
+has gone, when after death they force open the rooms of its habitation.
+
+"No; these newsmongers have no effect on me," Durtal assured himself.
+
+"But does this one do any better? Do you believe in the utility of life,
+in the necessity of this endless chain, this towage of sufferings, to be
+prolonged for the most part after death? True goodness would have
+consisted in inventing nothing, creating nothing, in leaving all as it
+was, in nothingness, in peace."
+
+The attack turned round on itself, and after apparent variations,
+returned always to the same starting point.
+
+Durtal lowered his head, for this argument dismasted him; all the
+replies which could be imagined were remarkably weak, and the least
+feeble, that which consists in denying to ourselves the right to judge
+because we only see the details of the divine plan, because we can
+possess no general view of it cannot avail against that terrible phrase
+of Schopenhauer: "If God made the world I would not be that God, for
+the misery of the world would break my heart!"
+
+"There is no haggling in the matter," he said to himself. "I can quite
+understand that sorrow is the true disinfectant of souls, yet I am
+obliged to ask myself why the Creator has not invented a less atrocious
+way of purifying us?
+
+"Ah! when I think of the sufferings shut up in madhouses, and hospital
+wards, I am revolted, and inclined to doubt everything.
+
+"If, again, grief were an antiseptic for future misdeeds or a detersive
+for past faults, one might again understand, but now it falls
+indifferently on the bad and on the good; it is blind. The best proof is
+the Virgin who was without spot, and who had not like her Son to expiate
+for us. She consequently ought not to be punished; yet she too underwent
+at the foot of Calvary the punishment exacted by this horrible law.
+
+"Good; but then," replied Durtal, after a silence of reflection, "if the
+innocent Virgin has given us an example, by what right do we who are
+culpable dare to complain?
+
+"No; we must therefore resolve to dwell in darkness, to live surrounded
+by enigmas. Money, love, nothing is clear; chance if it exist is as
+mysterious as Providence, and indeed still more so; it is inexplicable.
+God is at least an origin of the unknown, a key.
+
+"An origin which is itself another secret, a key which opens nothing!
+
+"Ah! it is irritating," he said to himself, "to be thus harassed in
+every sense. Enough of it; besides these are questions which a
+theologian is alone able to discuss; I am unarmed, the game is not
+equal; I will not answer any more."
+
+And he could not but hear a vague laughter which arose in him.
+
+He quitted the garden, and directed his steps towards the chapel, but
+the fear of being seized again by the madness of blasphemy turned him
+away from it. Knowing not whither to go, he regained his cell, saying to
+himself, that he ought not to wrangle thus; yes, but how could he help
+hearing the cavils which rose he knew not whence? He almost shouted
+aloud: "Be silent, let the other speak!"
+
+When he was in his chamber he desired to pray, and fell on his knees at
+his bedside.
+
+This was abominable; for memories of Florence recurred to him. He rose,
+but the old aberrations returned.
+
+He thought of that creature, her strange tastes, her mania for biting
+his ears, for drinking toilet scents in little glasses, for nibbling
+bread and butter with caviare, and dates. She was so wild, and so
+strange; a fool no doubt, but obscure.
+
+"And if she were in this room, before you, what would you do?"
+
+He stammered to himself: "I would try not to yield."
+
+"You lie; admit then that you would send your conversion, the monastery,
+all, to the devil."
+
+He grew pale at the thought; the possibility of his cowardice was a
+punishment. To have communicated, when one was no more certain of the
+future, no more certain of oneself, was almost a sacrilege, he thought.
+
+And he became angry. Up till now he had kept right, but the vision of
+Florence subdued him. He threw himself, in desperation, on a chair, no
+longer knowing what would become of him, gathering what of courage
+remained to him to descend to the church, where the Office was
+beginning.
+
+He dragged himself there, and held himself down, assailed by filthy
+temptations, disgusted with himself, feeling his will yielding, wounded
+in every part.
+
+And when he was in the court he remained overwhelmed, asking himself
+where he could take shelter. Every place had become hostile to him; in
+his cell were carnal memories, outside were temptations against Faith,
+"or rather," he cried, "I carry these with me always. My God, my God! I
+was yesterday so tranquil."
+
+He strolled by chance into an alley, when a new phenomenon arose.
+
+He had had, up to this hour, in the sky within him, a rain of scruples,
+a tempest of doubts, a thunderstroke of lust; now was silence and death.
+
+Complete darkness was within him.
+
+He sought his soul by groping for it, and found it inert, without
+consciousness, almost icy. He had a body living and healthy; all his
+intelligence, all his reason, and his other powers, his other faculties,
+were benumbed little by little, and stopped. In his being there was
+manifested an effect at once analogous and contrary to that which curara
+produces on the organism, when it circulates in the network of the
+blood; the members are paralyzed, no pain is experienced, but cold
+rises, the soul ends by being sequestered alive in a corpse; in this
+case it was the living body that detained a dead soul.
+
+Harassed by fear, he disengaged himself with a supreme effort, he would
+make a visit to himself, see where he was, and like a sailor who
+descends into the hold in a ship that has sprung a leak, he had to step
+backwards, for the gangway was cut, the steps opened upon an abyss.
+
+In spite of the terror which rushed upon him, he hung fascinated over
+the hole, and by fixing the black point he distinguished appearances; in
+a light as of eclipse in rarefied air, he perceived at the basis of
+himself the panorama of his soul, a desert twilight on the horizons that
+approached the night, and under this doubtful light there seemed
+something like bare fields, a marsh heaped with rubbish and cinders; the
+place of the sins torn up by the confessor remained visible, but besides
+the dry darnel of dead vices which grew still, nothing budded.
+
+He saw himself exhausted; he knew that he had no further force to
+extirpate the last roots, and he fancied that he had again to sow the
+seed of virtues, to till this arid soil, manure this dead ground. He
+felt himself incapable of all work, and had at the same time the
+conviction that God rejected him, that God would aid him no more. This
+certainty tore him to pieces. It could not be expressed, for nothing
+could translate the anxiety, the anguish of a state through which he
+must have passed who could understand it. The terror of a child who has
+never left its mother's petticoats, and who is deserted, without
+warning, in the open country in a fog, could only give a vestige of an
+idea of it, and again by reason of his age the child after having felt
+desolate would end by growing calmer, by distracting himself from his
+grief, no longer seeing the danger which surrounds him, while in this
+state is danger, clinging and absolute, the immovable thought of
+abandonment, obstinate fear, which nothing diminishes, nothing appeases.
+
+One dare not advance nor retreat; rather cast oneself on the ground,
+with bowed head, and wait the end of what we know not, and be assured
+that the menaces we ignore, and those at which we guess, are removed.
+Durtal was at this point; he could not return on his steps, for the way
+he had quitted horrified him. He would rather have died than return to
+Paris, there to begin again his carnal experiences, to live again his
+hours of libertinage and lassitude; but if he could not again retrace
+his road, neither could he advance, for the road ended in a blind alley.
+If earth repulsed him, heaven at the same time was closed for him.
+
+He was lying, half on his side, in the darkness, in the shade, he knew
+not where.
+
+And this state was aggravated by an absolute failure to understand the
+causes which brought him there, was exaggerated by the memory of graces
+before received.
+
+Durtal remembered the sweetness of the beginning, the caress of the
+divine touches, the steady progress without obstacles, the encounter
+with a solitary priest, his being sent to La Trappe, the very ease with
+which he bent to the monastic life, the absolution which had such truly
+sensible effects, the rapid and clear answer that he might communicate
+without fear.
+
+And suddenly, without his will, he had in fact failed. He who had till
+then held him by the hand, refused to guide him, cast him off into the
+darkness without a word.
+
+"All is over," he thought; "I am condemned to float here below, like a
+waif which no one wants; no shore is henceforward accessible, for if the
+world refuses me, I disgust God. Ah! Lord, remember the garden of
+Gethsemani, the tragic defection of the Father whom Thou didst implore
+in unspeakable pangs." In the silence which received his cry he gave
+way, and yet he desired to react against this desolation, endeavoured to
+escape from his despair; he prayed, and had again that very precise
+sensation that his petitions did not carry, were not even heard. He
+called her who superintends allegiance, the Mediatrix of pardon, to his
+aid, and he was persuaded that the Virgin heard him no longer.
+
+He was silent and discouraged, while the shade grew still more dense,
+and complete darkness covered him. He did not then suffer any longer in
+the true sense of the word, but it was worse, for this was annihilation
+in the void, the giddiness of a man who is bent over a gulf; and the
+scraps of reasoning which he could gather and knit together in this
+breaking up, ended by branching out into scruples.
+
+He sought for any sins which since his communion might justify such a
+trial, and he could not find them. He even tried to magnify his small
+faults, enlarge his want of patience; he wished to convince himself that
+he had taken a certain pleasure in finding the image of Florence in his
+cell, and he tortured himself so violently that he reanimated the soul,
+which had half fainted, by these moxas, and placed it again, without
+wishing it, in that acute state of scruples, in which it was when the
+crisis declared itself.
+
+And in these brawling reflections he did not lose the sad faculty of
+analysis. He said to himself while gauging himself at a glance: "I am
+like the litter in a circus, trodden down by all the sorrows which go
+and come to play their parts. Doubts about Faith, which seemed to
+stretch into every sense, turned in fact in the same circle. And now
+scruples, from which I thought myself freed, reappear and course through
+me."
+
+How should he explain this? Was he who inflicted this torture on him the
+Spirit of Malice, or God?
+
+That he had been bruised by the Evil One was certain, the very nature of
+his attacks showed his handiwork, but how could this abandonment of God
+be explained, for in fact, the Demon could not prevent the Saviour from
+assisting him, and he was quite obliged to conclude that if he were
+martyrized by the one, the Other took no interest in him, let him be,
+and retired from him completely?
+
+This certainty deduced from precise observations, this reasoned
+assurance, finished him. He cried out from the anguish of it, looking at
+the pond by which he was walking, wishing he might fall in, thinking
+that death by drowning were preferable to such a life.
+
+Then he trembled before the water which attracted him, and carried away
+his sorrows to the charm of the woods. He tried to wear himself out by
+long walking, but he wearied himself without effect, and he ended by
+sinking down worn and broken at the refectory table.
+
+He looked at his plate, with no courage to eat, no desire to drink; he
+breathed hard, and, exhausted as he was, could not keep in one place. He
+rose and wandered in the court till Compline, and there in the chapel,
+where at least he hoped to find some solace, was the crowning point of
+all; the mine went off; the soul, sapped since the morning, exploded.
+
+On his knees, desolate, he tried again to invoke help, and nothing came;
+he choked, immured in so deep a trench, under a vault so thick, that
+every appeal was stifled, and no sound vibrated. Without courage, he
+wept with his head in his hands, and while he complained to God that He
+had brought him thither to punish him in a Trappist monastery, ignoble
+visions assailed him.
+
+Fluids passed before his face, and peopled the space with priapisms. He
+did not see them with the eyes of his body, which were in no degree
+hallucinated, but perceived them outside him, and felt them within him;
+in a word, the touch was external, and the vision internal.
+
+He tried to gaze on the statue of Saint Joseph, before which he kept
+himself, and to see nothing but it, but his eyes seemed to revolve, to
+see only within, and were filled with indecencies. It was a medley of
+apparitions with undecided outlines, and confused colours, which gained
+precision only in those parts coveted by the secular infamy of man. And
+this changed again. The human forms vanished. There remained only, in
+invisible landscapes of flesh, marshes reddened by the fires of what
+sunset it was impossible to say, marshes shuddering under the divided
+shelter of the grasses. Then the sensual spot grew smaller still, but
+remained, and this time did not move; it was the growth of an unclean
+flood, the spreading of the daisy of darkness, the unfolding of the
+lotos of the caverns, hidden at the bottom of the valley.
+
+And there, burning gasps excited Durtal, enwrapped him, stifled him with
+furious gasps which drank his mouth.
+
+He looked in spite of himself, unable to withdraw himself from the
+outrages imposed by these violations, but the body was still and
+remained calm, while the soul revolted with a groan; the temptation was
+then of no effect; but if the tricks only succeeded in suggesting to him
+disgust and horror, they made him suffer beyond measure, while they
+delayed; all the days of his shameful existence came to the surface, all
+these enticements to greedy desires crucified him. Joined to the sum of
+sorrows accumulated since the dawn, the overcharge of these sorrows
+overwhelmed him, and a cold sweat bathed him from head to foot.
+
+He was in agony, and suddenly, as though he had come to overlook his
+ministers, and to see if his orders were carried out, the executioner
+himself entered on the scene. Durtal did not see him, but felt him, and
+it was indescribable. Since he had the impression of a real demoniac
+presence, his whole soul trembled and desired to fly, like a terrified
+bird that clings to the window-panes.
+
+And it fell back exhausted; then unlikely as it may appear, the parts of
+his life were inverted, the body was upright, and held its own,
+commanding the terrified soul, repressed this panic in a furious
+tension.
+
+Durtal perceived very plainly and clearly for the first time the
+distinction, the separation of the soul from the body, and for the first
+time also, he was conscious of the phenomenon of a body, which had so
+tortured its companion by its needs and wants, to forget all its hatred
+in the common danger, and hinder her who resisted it, the habit of
+sinking.
+
+He saw that in a flash, and suddenly all vanished. It seemed that the
+Demon had taken himself off, the wall of darkness which encompassed
+Durtal opened, and light issued from all parts; with an immense impulse
+the "Salve Regina," springing up from the choir, swept aside the
+phantoms, and put the goblins to flight.
+
+The elevated cordial of this chant restored him. He took courage, and
+began again to hope that this frightful desertion might cease; he
+prayed, and his petitions found vent; he understood that they were at
+last heard.
+
+The Office was at an end; he gained the guest-house, and when he
+appeared so worn out and pale before Father Etienne and the oblate, they
+cried: "What is the matter with you?"
+
+He sank on a chair, and endeavoured to describe to them the terrible
+Calvary he had climbed. "This has lasted," he said, "for more than nine
+hours; I wonder that I have not gone mad;" and he added, "Yet I never
+could have believed that the soul could suffer so much."
+
+The face of the father was illuminated. He pressed Durtal's hands and
+said,
+
+"Rejoice, my brother, you have been treated here like a monk."
+
+"How is that?" said Durtal, surprised.
+
+"Yes, this agony, for there is no other word to define the horror of the
+state, is one of the most serious trials which God inflicts on us; it is
+one of the operations of the purgative life. Be happy, for it is a great
+grace which Jesus does to you."
+
+"And this proves that your conversion is good," affirmed the oblate.
+
+"God! But it was not He at any rate who insinuated doubts about the
+Faith, who caused to be born in me that madness of scruples, who raised
+in me that spirit of blasphemy, who caressed my face with disgusting
+apparitions."
+
+"No, but He allows it. It is frightful, I know it," said the
+guest-master. "God conceals Himself, and however you may call on Him, He
+does not answer you. You think yourself deserted, yet He is very near
+you; and while He effaces Himself, Satan advances. He twists you about,
+places a microscope over your faults, his malice gnaws your brain like a
+dull file, and when to all this are joined, to try you to the utmost,
+impure visions...."
+
+The Trappist stopped; then, speaking to himself, he said, slowly,
+
+"It would be nothing to be in presence of a real temptation, of a true
+woman in flesh and bone, but these appearances on which imagination
+works, are horrible!"
+
+"And I used to think there was peace in the cloister!"
+
+"No, we are here on this earth to strive, and it is just in the cloister
+that the Lowest works; there, souls escape him, and he will at all price
+conquer them. No place on earth is more haunted by him than a cell, no
+one is more harassed than a monk."
+
+"A story which is told in the Lives of the Fathers in the Desert, is
+typical from this point of view. One demon only was charged to watch a
+town; and he went to sleep while two or three hundred demons who had
+orders to guard a monastery had no rest, but behaved themselves, here is
+the place for the phrase, like very devils.
+
+"And indeed, the mission to increase the sin of the towns is a sinecure,
+for Satan holds them, though they are not aware of it; all then he has
+to do is to torment them so as to take from them trust in God, since all
+obey him without his taking the least trouble about it.
+
+"And so he keeps his legions to besiege convents where resistance is
+determined. And indeed, you see the way in which he conducts the
+attack."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Durtal, "it is not he who makes you suffer the most; for
+what is worse than scruples, worse than temptations against purity, or
+against the Faith, is the supposed abandonment of Heaven; no, nothing
+can describe that."
+
+"That is what mystical theology calls 'the Night Obscure,'" answered M.
+Bruno.
+
+And Durtal exclaimed,
+
+"Ah! now I am with you; I remember.... That is why Saint John of the
+Cross declares that it is impossible to describe the sorrows of that
+night, and why he exaggerates nothing when he says, that one is then
+plunged alive into hell.
+
+"And I doubted the veracity of his books, I accused him of excess;
+rather he minimized. Only one must have felt this oneself to believe
+it."
+
+"And you have seen nothing," the oblate replied quietly; "you have
+passed through the first portion of that night, through the night of the
+senses; it is terrible enough, as I know by experience, but it is
+nothing in comparison with the Night of the Spirit which sometimes
+succeeds it. That is the exact image of the sufferings which our Lord
+endured in the Garden of Olives, when, sweating blood, He cried at the
+end of His force, 'Lord, let this chalice pass from me.'
+
+"This is so terrible ..." and M. Bruno was silent and grew pale.
+"Whoever has undergone that martyrdom," he said, after a pause, "knows
+beforehand what awaits the damned in another life."
+
+"But," said the monk, "the hour of bed-time has struck. There exists but
+one remedy for all these evils, the Holy Eucharist; to-morrow, Sunday,
+the community approaches the Sacrament; you must join us."
+
+"But I cannot communicate in the state in which I am...."
+
+"Well, then, be up to-night, at three o'clock. I will come for you to
+your cell, and will take you to Father Maximin, who confesses us at that
+time."
+
+And without waiting for his answer, the guest-master pressed his hand
+and went.
+
+"He is right," said the oblate; "it is the true remedy."
+
+And when he had regained his room, Durtal thought,
+
+"I now understand why the Abbe Gevresin made such a point of lending me
+Saint John of the Cross; he knew that I should enter into the 'Night
+Obscure'; he did not dare warn me clearly, for fear of alarming me, and
+yet he would put me on my guard against despair, and aid me by the
+remembrance here of that reading. Only how could he think that in such a
+shipwreck I should remember anything!
+
+"All this makes me think that I have omitted to write to him, and that
+to-morrow I must keep my promise by sending him a letter."
+
+And he thought again of Saint John of the Cross, that extraordinary
+Carmelite who described so placidly that terrible phase of the mystic
+genesis.
+
+He took count of the lucidity, the power of spirit of this saint,
+explaining the most obscure vicissitude of the soul and the least known,
+catching and following the operations of God, who dealt with that soul,
+pressed it in His hands, squeezed it like a sponge, then let it suck up
+again, fill itself out with sorrows, then wrung it again; making it drip
+tears of blood to cleanse it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"No," said Durtal, in a whisper, "I will not take the place of these
+good people."
+
+"But I assure you it is quite the same to them."
+
+And while Durtal was still refusing to go before the lay brothers who
+were waiting their turn for confession, Father Etienne insisted: "I will
+stay with you, and as soon as the cell is free, you will enter."
+
+Durtal was then on the landing of a staircase on every step of which was
+posted a brother kneeling or standing, his head wrapped in his hood, his
+face turned to the wall. All were sifting and closely examining their
+souls.
+
+"Of what sins can they really accuse themselves?" thought Durtal. "Who
+knows?" he continued, perceiving Brother Anacletus, his head sunk on his
+breast, and his hands joined, "who knows if he does not reproach himself
+for the discreet affection he has for me; for in monasteries all
+friendship is forbidden!"
+
+And he called to memory in the "Way of Perfection" of Saint Teresa, a
+page at once glowing and icy in which she cries out on the nothingness
+of human ties, declares that friendship is a weakness, and asserts
+clearly that every nun who desires to see her relations is imperfect.
+
+"Come," said Father Etienne, who interrupted these reflections, and
+pushed him towards the door of the cell out of which a monk came. Father
+Maximin was there, seated close to a prie-Dieu.
+
+Durtal knelt, and told him briefly his scruples and strifes of the
+evening before.
+
+"What has happened to you is not surprising after a conversion; indeed,
+it is a good sign, for those persons alone for whom God has views are
+submitted to these proofs," said the monk slowly, when Durtal had ended
+his story.
+
+And he continued,
+
+"Now that you have no more grave sins, the Demon endeavours to drown you
+by spitting at you. In fact, in these episodes of malice at bay, there
+is for you temptation and no sin.
+
+"You have, if I may sum up what you have said, undergone temptation of
+the flesh, and of Faith, and you have been tortured by scruples.
+
+"Let us leave on one side the sensual visions; such as they have been
+were produced independently of your will, painful no doubt, but
+ineffectual.
+
+"Doubts about Faith are more dangerous.
+
+"Steep yourself in this truth that besides prayer there exists but one
+efficacious remedy against this evil, to despise it.
+
+"Satan is pride; despise him, and at once his audacity gives way; he
+speaks; shrug your shoulders and he is silent. You must not discuss with
+him; however good a reasoner you may be, you will be worsted, for he is
+a most tricky dialectician."
+
+"Yes, but what can I do? I do not wish to listen to him, but I hear him
+all the same. I was obliged to answer him if only to refute him."
+
+"And it was just on that he counted to subdue you; keep this carefully
+in your mind; in order to let you give him an easy throw, he will
+present you at need grotesque arguments, and so soon as he sees you
+confident, simply satisfied with the excellence of your replies, he will
+involve you in sophisms so specious that you will fight in vain to solve
+them.
+
+"No; I repeat to you, had you the best reasons to oppose to him, do not
+riposte, refuse the strife."
+
+The prior was silent; then he began again, quietly,
+
+"There are two ways of getting rid of a thing which troubles you--to
+throw it far away, or let it fall. To throw it to a distance demands an
+effort of which one may not be capable; to let it fall imposes no
+fatigue, is simple, without danger, within the reach of all.
+
+"To throw to a distance implies again a certain interest, a certain
+animation, perhaps even a certain fear; to let it fall is indifference,
+complete contempt; believe me, use this means and Satan will fly.
+
+"This weapon of contempt will be also all-powerful to conquer the
+assault of scruples, if in combats of this nature the person assailed
+sees clear. Unfortunately, the peculiarity of scruples is to alarm
+people, to make them lose at once the clearing breeze, and then it is
+indispensable to have recourse to a priest to defend oneself.
+
+"Indeed," pursued the monk, who had interrupted himself a moment to
+think--"the closer one looks the less one sees; one becomes
+short-sighted the moment one observes; it is necessary to place oneself
+at a certain point of view to distinguish objects, for when they are
+very close they become as confused as if they were far. Therefore in
+such a case we must have recourse to the confessor, who is neither too
+distant, nor too near, who holds himself precisely at the spot where
+objects detach themselves in their relief. Only it is with scruples as
+with certain maladies which, when they are not taken in time, become
+almost incurable.
+
+"Do not allow them, then, to become implanted in you; scruple cannot
+resist being told as soon as it begins. The moment you formulate it
+before the priest it dissolves; it is a kind of mirage which a word
+effaces.
+
+"You will object to me," continued the monk, after a silence, "that it
+is very mortifying to avow delusions which generally are absurd; but it
+is for this very reason that the demon suggests to you less clever
+arguments than foolish. He takes hold of you thus by vanity, by false
+shame."
+
+The monk was silent again; then he continued,
+
+"Scruples not treated, scruples not cured, lead to discouragement which
+is the worst of temptations; for in other cases Satan attacks one virtue
+only in particular, and he shows himself; while in this case he attacks
+all at once, and he hides himself.
+
+"And this is so true that if you are seduced by lust, by the love of
+money, or by pride, you can, in examining yourself, give yourself
+account of the nature of the temptation which exhausts you; in
+discouragement, on the contrary, your understanding is obscured to such
+a degree that you do not even suspect that the state in which you
+succumb is only a diabolic manoeuvre which you must combat; and you let
+go all, you give up the only arm which can save you, prayer, from which
+the demon turns you aside as a vain thing.
+
+"Never hesitate, then, to cut the evil at its root, to take care of a
+scruple as soon as it is born.
+
+"Now tell me; you have nothing else to confess?"
+
+"No, except the indesire for the Eucharist, the languor in which I now
+faint."
+
+"There is some fatigue in your case, for no one can endure such a shock
+with impunity; do not be uneasy about that, have confidence, do not
+attempt to present yourself before God all neat and trim; go to Him
+simply, naturally, in undress even, just as you are; do not forget that
+if you are a servant you are also a son; have good courage, our Lord
+will dispel all these nightmares."
+
+And when he had received absolution, Durtal went down to the church to
+await the hour of mass.
+
+And when the moment for communion came, he followed M. Bruno behind the
+lay brothers. All were kneeling on the pavement, and one after the other
+rose to exchange the kiss of peace, and reach the altar.
+
+Though he repeated to himself the counsels of Father Maximin, though he
+exhorted himself to dismiss all his unrest, Durtal could not help
+thinking as he saw these monks approach the Table, "The Lord will find a
+change when I advance in my turn; after having descended into the
+sanctuaries, He will be reduced to visit hovel." And sincerely, humbly,
+he was sorry for Him.
+
+And as the first time that he approached this peace-giving mystery, he
+experienced a sensation of stifling, as if his heart were too large when
+he returned to his place. As soon as the mass was over, he quitted the
+chapel and escaped into the park.
+
+Then gently, without sensible effects, the Sacrament worked; Christ
+opened, little by little, his closed house and gave it air, light
+entered into Durtal in a flood. From the windows of his senses which had
+looked till then into he knew not what cesspool, into what enclosure,
+dank, and steeped in shadow; he now looked suddenly, through a burst of
+light, on a vista which lost itself in heaven.
+
+His vision of nature was modified; the surroundings were transformed;
+the fog of sadness which visited them vanished; the sudden clearness of
+his soul was repeated in its surroundings.
+
+He had the sensation of expansion, the almost childlike joy of a sick
+man who takes his first outing, of the convalescent, who having long
+crawled in a chamber, sets foot without; all grew young again. These
+alleys, this wood, through which he had wandered so much, which he began
+to know in all their windings, and in every corner, began to appear to
+him in a new aspect. A restrained joy, a repressed gladness emanated
+from this site, which appeared to him, instead of extending as formerly,
+to draw near and gather round the crucifix, to turn, as it were, with
+attention towards the liquid cross.
+
+The trees rustled trembling, in a whisper of prayers, inclining towards
+the Christ, who no longer twisted His painful arms in the mirror of the
+pool, but He constrained these waters, and displayed them before Him,
+blessing them.
+
+They were themselves different; the dark fluid was covered with monastic
+visions, in white robes, which the reflections of clouds left there in
+passing, and the swan scattered them, in a splash of sunlight, making as
+he swam great oily circles round him.
+
+One might have said that these waves were gilt by the oil of the
+catechumens, and the sacred Chrism, which the Church exorcises on the
+Saturday of Holy Week, and above them heaven half-opened its tabernacle
+of clouds, out of which came a clear sun like a monstrance of molten
+gold in a Blessed Sacrament of flames.
+
+It was a Benediction of nature, a genuflection of trees and flowers,
+singing in the wind, incensing with their perfume the sacred Bread which
+shone on high, in the flaming custody of the planet.
+
+Durtal looked on in transport. He desired to cry aloud his enthusiasm
+and his Faith to the landscape; he felt a joy in living. The horror of
+existence counted for nothing when there were such moments, as no
+earthly happiness can give. God alone had the power of thus filling a
+soul, of making it overflow, and rush in floods of joy; and He alone
+could also fill the basin of sorrows, as no event in this world could
+do. Durtal had just tried it; his spiritual sufferings and joys attained
+under the divine imprint an acuteness, which people most humanly happy
+or unhappy cannot even suspect.
+
+This idea brought him back to the terrible distresses of the evening
+before. He endeavoured to sum up what he had been able to observe of
+himself in this Trappist monastery.
+
+First, the clear distinction between body and soul; then the action of
+the demon, insinuating and obstinate, almost visible, while the heavenly
+action remained, on the contrary, dull and veiled, appeared only at
+certain moments, and seemed at others to vanish for ever.
+
+And all this, when felt and understood, had an appearance simple in
+itself, but scarcely explaining itself. The body appearing to throw
+itself forward to the rescue of the soul, and no doubt borrowing from it
+its will, to help it when it fainted, was unintelligible. How a body
+could itself react obscurely, and yet show, all at once, so strong a
+decision that it pressed its companion into a vice, and prevented its
+flight--
+
+"It is as mysterious as the rest," thought Durtal, and as in a dream he
+continued,
+
+"The secret action of Jesus in His Sacrament is not less strange. If I
+may judge by what has happened to me; a first communion exasperates the
+action of the devil, while a second represses it.
+
+"Ah, and how I put myself in line with all my calculations! In taking
+shelter here I thought myself pretty sure of my soul, and that my body
+would trouble me; whereas just the contrary has been the case.
+
+"My stomach has grown vigorous and shown itself fit to support an effort
+of which I should never have thought it capable, and my soul has been
+below everything, vacillating and dry, so fragile, so feeble!
+
+"But we will let all that alone."
+
+He walked about, lifted from earth by a confused joy. He grew vaporized
+in a sort of intoxication, in a vague etherization, in which arose,
+without his even thinking of formulating words, acts of thanksgiving; it
+was an effort of thanks of his soul, of his body, of his whole being, to
+that God whom he felt living in him, and diffused in that kneeling
+landscape which also seemed to expand in mute hymns of gratitude.
+
+The hour which struck by the clock in the portico reminded him it was
+breakfast time. He went to the guest-house, cut himself a slice of bread
+and butter with some cheese, drank half a glass of wine, and was about
+to go out again when he reflected that the horary of the offices was
+changed.
+
+"They must be different from those of the week," he thought; and he went
+up into his cell to consult his placards.
+
+He found only one, that of the rule of the monks themselves, which
+contained the regulations for the Sunday practices for the cloister; and
+he read:
+
+EXERCISES OF THE COMMUNITY FOR ALL ORDINARY SUNDAYS.
+
+          MORNING.
+
+           1.     Rise. Little Office. Prayer till 1.30.
+           2.     Grand Canonical Office chanted.
+           5.30.  Prime, Morning Mass, 6 o'clock.
+           6.45.  Chapter Instructions. Great Silence.
+           9.15.  Asperges, Tierce, Procession.
+          10.     High Mass.
+          11.10.  Sext and special examination.
+          11.30.  Angelus, Dinner.
+          12.15.  Siesta, Great Silence.
+
+
+          EVENING.
+
+           2.     End of Repose. None.
+           4.     Vespers and Benediction.
+           5.45.  Quarter of an hour for Prayer.
+           6.     Supper.
+           7.     Reading before Compline.
+           7.15.  Compline.
+           7.30.  Salve, Angelus.
+           7.45.  Examination of conscience and Retreat.
+           8.     Bed time, Great Silence.
+
+     Note.--After the Cross of September, no siesta. None is at 2
+     o'clock; Vespers at 3; Supper at 5; Compline at 6, and bed time at
+     7.
+
+Durtal copied this rule for his use on a scrap of paper. "In fact," he
+said to himself, "I have to be in chapel at 9.15 for Asperges, High Mass
+and the Office of Sext, afterwards at 2 for None, then at 4 for Vespers
+and Benediction, and lastly at 7.30 for Compline.
+
+"Here is a day which will be occupied, without counting that I got up at
+half-past two this morning," he concluded; and when he reached the
+chapel, about nine o'clock, he found the greater part of the lay
+brothers on their knees, the others saying their rosary; and when the
+clock struck all returned to their place.
+
+Assisted by two fathers in cowls, the prior, vested in a white alb,
+entered, and while the antiphon "Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et
+mundabor" was sung, all the monks in succession defiled before Father
+Maximin, standing on the steps, turning his back to the altar; and he
+sprinkled them with holy water, while they regained their stalls, each
+making the sign of the cross.
+
+Then the prior descended from the altar, and came to the entrance to the
+vestibule, where he dispersed the water crosswise, traced by the
+sprinkler over the oblate, and over Durtal.
+
+At last he vested, and went to celebrate the sacrifice.
+
+Then Durtal was able to think over his Sundays at the Benedictine nuns.
+
+The "Kyrie Eleison" was the same but slower and more sonorous, more
+grave on the prolonged termination of the last word; at Paris the voices
+of the nuns drew it out and put a gloss on it at the same time, turned
+into satin its final sound, rendered it less dull, less spaced, less
+ample. The "Gloria in Excelsis" differed; that of La Trappe was more
+primitive, more mounting, more sombre, interesting by its very
+barbarism, but less touching, for in its forms of adoration, in the
+"Adoramus te," for example, the "te" did not detach itself, did not drop
+like a tear of amorous essence, like an avowal retained by humility on
+the tip of the lips; but it was when the Credo arose, that Durtal could
+uplift himself at ease.
+
+He had never yet heard it so authoritative, and so imposing; it
+advanced, chanted in unison, developing its slow procession of dogmas,
+in sounds well furnished and rigid, of a violet almost obscure, a red
+almost black, growing lighter towards the end, till it expired in a long
+and plaintive Amen.
+
+In following the Cistercian office Durtal could recognize the morsels of
+plain chant still preserved in parish masses. All the part of the Canon,
+the "Sursum Corda," the "Vere Dignum," the Antiphons, the "Pater,"
+remained intact. Only the "Sanctus" and the "Agnus Dei" were changed.
+
+Massive, built up, as it were, in the Roman style, they draped
+themselves in the colour, glowing and dull, which clothes, in fact, the
+offices of La Trappe.
+
+"Well," said the oblate, when, after the ceremony, they sat at the table
+of the refectory; "well, what do you think of our High Mass?"
+
+"It is superb," answered Durtal. And he said dreamily, "Would that one
+could have the whole complete! to bring here, instead of this
+uninteresting chapel, the apse of St. Severin; hang on the walls the
+pictures of Fra Angelico, Memling, Gruenewald, Gerard David, Roger van
+den Weyden, Bouts; add to these, admirable sculptures such as those of
+the great door of Chartres, altar screens of sculptured wood, such as
+those of the Cathedral of Amiens, what a dream!"
+
+"Yet," he went on after a silence, "this dream has been a reality, it is
+evident. This ideal church existed for ages, everywhere in the Middle
+Ages! The chant, the goldsmith's work, the panels, the sculptures, the
+tissues were all attractive; the liturgies possessed, to give them
+value, fabulous caskets, but all that is far off."
+
+"But you certainly cannot say," replied M. Bruno, with a smile, "that
+the church ornaments are ugly here!"
+
+"No; they are exquisite. First, the chasubles have not the shapes of a
+miner's apron, and they do not hoist themselves up on the shoulders of
+the priest, that excrescence, that puffing like the ear of a little
+donkey lying back, which the vestment makers use at Paris.
+
+"Nor is it any more that cross in stripe or woven, filling all the
+stuff, falling like a sack-coat over the back of the celebrant; the
+Trappist chasubles have kept the old form, as the old image makers and
+the old painters preserved them in their religious scenes; and that
+cross with four leaves, like those which the Gothic style chiselled on
+the walls of its churches, is related to the very expanded lotus a
+flower so full-blown that its falling petals droop."
+
+"Without counting," pursued Durtal, "that the stuff which seems cut in a
+sort of flannel or thick soft felt must have been plunged in threefold
+dyes, for it takes a depth, and a magnificent clearness of tone. The
+religious trimming-makers could trim these watered and plain silks with
+silver and gold, yet never attain to give a colour at once so vehement
+and so familiar to the eye as that crimson with sulphur-yellow flowers,
+which Father Maximin wore the other day."
+
+"Yes, and the mourning chasuble with its lobed crosses, and its discreet
+white fullings, in which the Father abbot vested himself, the day on
+which he communicated us, is not it also a caress for the eyes?"
+
+Durtal sighed: "Ah! if the statues in the chapel showed a like taste!"
+
+"By the way," said the oblate, "come and salute that Notre Dame de
+l'Atre, of which I have spoken to you, found among the remains of the
+old cloister."
+
+They rose from table, passed along a corridor, and struck into a lateral
+gallery, at the end of which they stopped before a statue of life size,
+in stone.
+
+It was heavy and massive, representing in a robe of long folds, a
+peasant woman, crowned, and round-cheeked, holding on her arm a child
+who blessed a ball.
+
+But in this portrait of a robust peasant woman, sprung from Burgundy or
+Flanders, there was a candour, a goodness almost tumultuous, which
+sprang from her smiling face, her innocent eyes, her good and large
+lips, indulgent, ready for all forgiveness.
+
+She was a rustic Virgin made for the humble lay brothers; she was not a
+great lady who could hold them at a distance, but she was indeed the
+nursing mother of their souls, their true mother. "How was it they had
+not understood her here? how instead of presiding in the chapel, did she
+grow chill at the end of a corridor?" cried Durtal.
+
+The oblate turned the conversation--"I warn you," he said, "that
+Benediction will not take place after Vespers as your placard indicates,
+but directly after Compline; this latter office will therefore be
+advanced a quarter of an hour at least."
+
+And the oblate went up to his cell, while Durtal went towards the large
+pond. There he lay down on a bed of dry reed, looking at the water which
+broke in wavelets at his feet. The coming and going of these limited
+waters, folding back on themselves, yet never overpassing the basin they
+had hollowed for themselves, led him on into long reveries.
+
+He said to himself that a river was the most exact symbol of the active
+life; one follows it from its source through all its courses across the
+territories it fertilizes; it has fulfilled its assigned task before it
+dies, immersing itself in the gaping sepulchre of the seas; but the
+pond, that tamed water, imprisoned in a hedge of reeds which it has
+itself caused to grow in fertilizing the soil of its bank, has
+concentrated itself, lived on itself, not seemed to achieve any known
+work, save to keep silence and reflect on the infinite of heaven.
+
+"Still water troubles me," continued Durtal. "It seems to me that unable
+to extend itself, it grows deeper, and that while running waters borrow
+only the shadows of things they reflect, it swallows them without giving
+them back. Most certainly in this pond is a continued and profound
+absorption of forgotten clouds, of lost trees, even of sensations seized
+on the faces of monks who hung over it. This water is full, and not
+empty, like those which are distracted in wandering about the country
+and in bathing the towns. It is a contemplative water, in perfect accord
+with the recollected life of the cloisters.
+
+"The fact is," he concluded, "that a river would have here no meaning;
+it would only be passing, would remain indifferent and in a hurry, would
+be in all cases unfit to pacify the soul which the monastic water of the
+ponds appeases. Ah! in founding Notre Dame de l'Atre, Saint Bernard knew
+how to fit the Cistercian rule and the site.
+
+"But we must leave these fancies," he said, rising; and, remembering
+that it was Sunday, he transferred himself to Paris, and revisited in
+thought his halts on this day in the churches.
+
+In the morning St. Severin enchanted him, but he ought not to thrust
+himself into that sanctuary for the other Offices. Vespers there were
+botched and mean; and if it were a feast day the organ master showed
+himself possessed by the love of ignoble music.
+
+Occasionally Durtal had taken refuge at St. Gervais, where at least they
+played at certain times motets of the old masters; but that church was,
+as well as St. Eustache, a paying concert, where Faith had nothing to
+do. No recollection was possible in the midst of ladies who fainted
+behind, their faces in their hands, and grew agitated in creaking
+chairs. These were frivolous assemblies for pious music, a compromise
+between the theatre and God.
+
+St. Sulpice was better, where at least the public was silent. There,
+moreover, Vespers were celebrated with more solemnity and less haste.
+
+In general the seminary reinforced the choir, and rendered by this
+imposing choir they rolled on majestically sustained by the grand organ.
+
+Chanted, only in half, and not in unison, reduced to a state of
+couplets, given, some by a baritone, others by the choir, they were
+twisted and frizzled by a curling iron, but as they were not less
+adulterated at the other churches, there was every advantage in
+listening to them at St. Sulpice, whose powerful choir, very well led,
+had not, as for example at Notre Dame, those dusty voices which break at
+the least whisper.
+
+This only became really odious when, with a formidable explosion, the
+first strophe of the Magnificat struck the arches.
+
+The organ then swallowed up one stanza out of two, and under the
+seditious pretext that the length of the Office of incensing was too
+long to be filled up entirely by singing, M. Widor, seated at his desk,
+rolled forth stale fragments of music splashed about above, imitating
+the human voice and the flute, the bagpipe and the bassoon, or indeed,
+tired of affectations, he blew furiously on the keys, ending by
+imitating the roll of locomotives over iron bridges, letting all the
+stops go.
+
+And the choirmaster, not wishing to show himself inferior to the
+organist in his instinctive hatred of plain chant, was delighted, when
+the Benediction began, to put aside Gregorian melodies and make his
+choristers gurgle rigadoons.
+
+It was no longer a sanctuary, but a howling place. The "Ave Maria," the
+"Ave Verum," all the mystical indecencies of the late Gounod, the
+rhapsodies of old Thomas, the capers of indigent musicasters, defiled in
+a chain wound by choir leaders from Lamoureux, chanted unfortunately by
+children, the chastity of whose voices no one feared to pollute in these
+middle-class passages of music, these by-ways of art.
+
+"Ah," thought Durtal, "if only this choirmaster, who is evidently an
+excellent musician; for indeed, when he must, he knows how to get
+executed better than anywhere else in Paris, the 'De Profundis' with
+organ accompaniment, and the 'Dies Irae'; if only this man would as at
+St. Gervais give us some Palestrina and Vittoria, some Aichinger and
+Allegri, some Orlando Lasso and De Pres; but no, he must detest these
+masters also, consider them as archaic rubbish, good to send into the
+dust-heaps."
+
+And Durtal continued,
+
+"What we hear now at Paris, in the churches, is wholly incredible! Under
+pretence of managing an income for the singers, they suppress half the
+stanzas of canticles and hymns, and substitute, to vary the pleasure,
+the tiresome divagations of an organ.
+
+"There they howl the 'Tantum Ergo' to the Austrian National air; or what
+is still worse, muffle it up with operatic choruses, or refrains from
+canteens. The very text is divided into couplets which are ornamented
+like a drinking song with a little burthen.
+
+"The other Church sequences are treated in the same manner.
+
+"And yet the Papacy has formally forbidden, in many bulls, that the
+sanctuary should be soiled by those liberties. To cite one only, John
+XXII., in his Extravagant 'Doctor Sanctorum,' expressly forbade profane
+voices and music in churches. He prohibited choirs at the same time to
+change plain chant into fiorituri. The decrees of the Council of Trent
+are not less clear from this point of view, and more recently still a
+regulation of the Sacred Congregation of Rites has intervened to
+proscribe musical rioting in holy places.
+
+"Then what are the parish-priests doing who, in fact, have musical
+police charge in their churches? Nothing, they laugh at it.
+
+"Nor is this a mere phrase, but with those priests who, hoping for
+receipts, permit on fete days the shameless voices of actresses to dance
+gambols to the heavy sounds of the organ, the poor Church has become far
+from clean.
+
+"At St. Sulpice," Durtal went on, "the priest tolerates the villainy of
+jolly songs which are served up to him; but at least he does not, like
+the one at St. Severin, allow strolling women players to lighten up the
+Office by the shouts of such voices as remain to them. Nor has he
+accepted the solo on the English horn which I heard at St. Thomas one
+evening during the Perpetual Adoration. In short, if the grand
+Benedictions at St. Sulpice are a shame, the Complines remain in spite
+of their theatrical attitude really charming."
+
+And Durtal thought of those Complines of which the paternity is often
+attributed to Saint Benedict; they were in fact the integral prayer of
+the evenings, the preventive adjuration, the safeguard against the
+attempts of the Demon, they were in some measure the advanced sentinels
+of the out-posts placed round the soul to protect it during the night.
+
+And the regulation of this entrenched camp of prayer was perfect. After
+the benediction the best trained voice, the most threadlike of the
+choir, the voice of the smallest of the children, sang forth the short
+lesson taken from the first Epistle of Saint Peter, warning the faithful
+that they must be sober and watch, not allow themselves to be surprised
+unexpectedly. A priest then recited the usual evening prayers; the choir
+organ gave the intonation, and the psalms fell, chanted one by one, the
+twilight psalms, in which before the approaches of night peopled with
+goblins, and furrowed by ghosts, man calls God to aid, and prays Him to
+guard his sleep from the violence of the ways of hell, the rape of the
+lamias that pass.
+
+And the hymn of Saint Ambrose, the "Te lucis ante terminum," made still
+more precise the scattered meaning of these psalms, gathering it up in
+its short stanzas. Unfortunately, the most important, that which
+foresees and declares the luxurious dangers of darkness, was swallowed
+up by the full organ. This hymn was not rendered in plain chant at St.
+Sulpice as at La Trappe, but was sung to a pompous and elaborate air, an
+air full of glory, with a certain proud attractiveness, originating no
+doubt in the eighteenth century.
+
+Then there was a pause--and man, feeling himself more sheltered, behind
+a rampart of prayers, recollected himself, more assured, and borrowed
+innocent voices to address new supplications to God. After the chapter
+read by the officiant, the children of the choir chanted the short
+response "In manus tuus Domine, commendo spiritum meum," which rolled
+out, dividing in two parts, then doubled itself, and resolved at the
+last its two separate portions by a verse, and part of an antiphon.
+
+And after that prayer there was still the canticle of Simeon, who, as
+soon as he had seen the Messiah, desired to die. This "Nunc dimittis,"
+which the Church has incorporated in Compline to stimulate us at
+eventide to self-examination--for none can tell whether he shall wake on
+the morrow--was raised by the whole choir, which alternated with the
+responses of the organ.
+
+In fact, to end this Office of a besieged town, to take its last
+dispositions and try to repose in shelter from a violent attack, the
+Church built up again a few prayers, and placed her parishes under the
+tutelage of the Virgin, to whom it chanted one of the four antiphons
+which follow, according to the Proper.
+
+"At La Trappe Compline was evidently less solemn, less interesting than
+at St. Sulpice," concluded Durtal, "for the monastic breviary is, for a
+wonder, less complete for that Office than the Roman breviary. As for
+Sunday Vespers, I am curious to hear them."
+
+And he heard them; but they hardly differed from the Vespers adopted by
+the Benedictine nuns of the Rue Monsieur; they were more massive, more
+grave, more Roman, if it may be said, for necessarily the voice of women
+drew them out into sharp points, made them like acute arches, as it
+were, in Gothic style, but the Gregorian tunes were the same.
+
+On the other hand they resembled in nothing those at St. Sulpice, where
+the modern sauces spoilt the very essences of the plain chants. Only the
+Magnificat of La Trappe, abrupt, and with dry tone, was not so good as
+the majestic, the admirable Royal Magnificat chanted at Paris.
+
+"These monks are astonishing with their superb voices," said Durtal to
+himself, and he smiled as they finished the antiphon of Our Lady, for he
+remembered that in the primitive Church the chanter was called "Fabarius
+cantor," "eater of beans," because he was obliged to eat that vegetable
+to strengthen his voice. Now, at La Trappe, dishes of beans were common;
+perhaps that was the secret of the ever young monastic voices.
+
+He thought over the liturgy and plain chant while smoking cigarettes, in
+the walks, after Vespers.
+
+He brought to mind the symbolism of those canonical hours which recalled
+every day to the Christian the shortness of life in summing up for him
+its image from infancy to death.
+
+Recited soon after dawn, Prime was the figure of childhood; Tierce of
+youth; Sext the full vigour of age; None the approaches of old age,
+while Vespers were an allegory of decrepitude. They belonged, moreover,
+to the Nocturns, and were sung about six o'clock in the evening, at that
+hour when, at the time of the Equinoxes, the sun sets in the red cinder
+of the clouds. As for Compline, it resounds when night, the symbol of
+death, has come.
+
+This canonical Office was a marvellous rosary of psalms; every bead of
+each of these hours bore reference to the different phases of human
+existence, followed, little by little, the periods of the day, the
+decline of destiny, to end in the most perfect of offices, in Compline,
+that provisional absolution of a death, itself represented by sleep.
+
+And if, from these texts so wisely selected, these Sequences so solemnly
+sealed, Durtal passed to the sacerdotal robe of their sounds, to those
+neumatic chants, that divine psalmody all uniform, all simple, which is
+plain chant, he had to admit, that except in Benedictine cloisters, an
+organ accompaniment was everywhere added, that plain chant had been put
+forcibly in modern tonality, and it disappeared under vegetations which
+stifled it, became everywhere discoloured, amorphous and
+incomprehensible.
+
+One only of its executioners, Niedermayer, showed himself at least
+pitiful. He tried a system more ingenious and more honest. He reversed
+the terms of torture. Instead of wishing to make plain chant supple and
+to thrust it into the mould of modern harmony, he constrained that
+harmony to bend itself to the austere tonality of plain chant. He thus
+preserved its character, but how far more natural would it have been to
+leave it solitary and not obliged it to tow an useless companion and
+awkward following?
+
+Here at least at La Trappe it lived and spread in all security, without
+treason on the part of the monks. There was always sameness of sound, it
+was always chanted without accompaniment in unison.
+
+He was able to satisfy himself about this truth once more after supper,
+that evening, when at the end of Compline the father sacristan lighted
+all the candles on the altar.
+
+At that moment, in the silence of the Trappists on their knees, their
+head in their hands, or their cheek resting on the sleeve of their great
+cowl, three lay brothers entered, two carrying torches, and another
+preceding them with a censer, and behind them a few paces, came the
+prior with his hands joined.
+
+Durtal looked at the changed costume of the three brothers. They had no
+longer their robes of serge, made of bits and scraps, stained mud
+colour, but robes of violet-brown, like plums on which was spread the
+white twilling of a new surplice.
+
+While Father Maximin, vested in a copy of milky white, woven with a
+cross in orange yellow, placed the Host in the monstrance, the thurifer
+put down the censer, on the coals of which melted tears of real incense.
+Contrary to what takes place in Paris, where the censer, swung before
+the altar, sounds against its chains, and is like the clear tinkling of
+a horse which, as he lifts his head, shakes his curb and bit, the censer
+at La Trappe remained immovable before the altar, and smoked by itself
+behind the officiants.
+
+And everyone chanted the imploring and melancholy antiphon "Parce
+Domine," then the "Tantum Ergo," that magnificent song, which could be
+almost acted, so clear in their changes are the sentiments which succeed
+each other in their rhymed sequence.
+
+In the first stanza it seems indeed to shake the head gently, to put
+forward the chin, so to speak, so as to affirm the insufficiency of the
+senses to explain the dogma of the real presence, the finished avatar of
+the Bread. It is then admiring and reflective; then that melody so
+attentive, so respectful, does not wait to affirm the weakness of the
+reason, and the power of faith, but in the second stanza it goes
+forward, adores the glory of the three Persons, exults with joy, only
+recovers itself at the end, where the music adds a new sense to the text
+of Saint Thomas, in avowing in a long and mournful Amen the unworthiness
+of those present to receive the Benediction of the Flesh placed upon
+that cross which the monstrance is about to trace in the air.
+
+And slowly, while unrolling its coil of smoke, the censer spread, as it
+were, a blue gauze before the altar, while the Blessed Sacrament was
+lifted like a golden moon, amid the stars of the tapers, sparkling in
+the growing darkness of that fog, the bells of the abbey sounded with
+musical and sweet strokes. And all the monks bowed low with their eyes
+closed, then recovered themselves and entoned the "Laudate" to the old
+melody which is also sung at Notre Dame des Victoires at the Benediction
+in the evening.
+
+Then one by one, having genuflected before the altar, they went out,
+while Durtal and the oblate returned to the guest-house, where Father
+Etienne was waiting for them.
+
+He said to Durtal: "I would not go to bed without knowing how you have
+borne the day;" and as Durtal thanked him, assuring him that this Sunday
+had been very peaceful, Father Etienne smiled and revealed in a word,
+that under their reserved attitude all at La Trappe were more interested
+in their guest than he had himself believed.
+
+"The reverend Father abbot and the Father prior will be glad when I give
+them this answer," said the monk, who wished Durtal good-night, pressing
+his hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+At seven o'clock, just as he was preparing to eat his bread, Durtal
+encountered Father Etienne.
+
+"Father," he said, "to-morrow is Tuesday; the time of my retreat has
+expired, and I am going; how should I order a carriage for Saint
+Landry?"
+
+The monk smiled. "When the postman brings the letters I can charge him
+with the commission, but let us see; are you in a great hurry to leave
+us?"
+
+"No, but I would not trespass...."
+
+"Listen, since you are so well broken in to the life at La Trappe, stay
+here two days more. The Father procurator must go to settle a dispute at
+Saint Landry. He will take you to the station in our carriage. So you
+will avoid some expense, and the journey hence to the railroad will seem
+to you less long, since there will be two of you."
+
+Durtal accepted, and as it rained, he went up to his room. "It is
+strange," he said, as he sat down, "how impossible one finds it in a
+cloister to read a book; one wants nothing, one thinks of God by
+Himself, and not by the volumes which speak about Him."
+
+Mechanically he had taken up from a heap of books one in octavo, which
+he had found on his table the day he took possession of his cell; it
+bore the title "Manresa," or the "Spiritual Exercises" of Ignatius of
+Loyola.
+
+He had already run through the work at Paris, and the pages which he
+turned over afresh did not change the harsh, almost hostile, opinion
+which he had retained of this book.
+
+The fact is that these exercises leave no initiative to the soul; they
+consider it as a soft paste good to run into a mould; they show it no
+horizon, no sky. Instead of trying to stretch it, and make it greater,
+they make it smaller deliberately; they put it back into the cases of
+their wafer box, nourish it only on faded trifles, on dry nothings.
+
+This Japanese culture of deformed toes which remain dwarf; this Chinese
+deformation of children planted in pots, horrified Durtal, who closed
+the volume.
+
+He opened another, the "Introduction to the Devout Life," by Saint
+Francis de Sales.
+
+Certainly he found no need to read it again, in spite of its
+affectations, and its good nature, at first charming, but which ends by
+making you sick, by making the soul sticky with sweets with liqueurs in
+them, and lollypops; in a word, that work so much praised by Catholics
+was a julep scented with bergamot and ambergris. It was like a fine
+handkerchief shaken in a church in which a musty smell of incense
+remained.
+
+But the man himself, the Bishop Saint Francis de Sales, was suggestive;
+with his name was called up the whole mystical history of the
+seventeenth century.
+
+And Durtal recalled the memories he had kept of the religious life of
+that time. There were then in the Church two currents:
+
+That of the high Mysticism, as it was called, originating from Saint
+Teresa and Saint John of the Cross; and this current was concentrated on
+Marie Guyon.
+
+And another that of so-called temperate Mysticism, of which the adepts
+were Saint Francis de Sales and his friend the celebrated Baroness de
+Chantal.
+
+It was naturally this second current which triumphed. Jesus, putting
+Himself within the reach of drawing-rooms, descending to the level of
+women of the world, a moderate and proper Jesus, only dealing with the
+soul of His creature just enough to give it one attraction the more,
+this elegant Jesus became all the fashion; but Madame Guyon, whose
+source was above all Saint Teresa, who taught the mystical theory of
+love, and familiar intercourse with heaven, raised the opposition of the
+whole clergy who abominated Mysticism without understanding it; she
+exasperated the terrible Bossuet, who accused her of the fashionable
+heresy, Molinism and Quietism. She refuted, unhappy as she was, this
+trouble without much difficulty, but he persecuted her for it none the
+less; he was furious against her, and had her imprisoned at Vincennes;
+revealed himself obstinate, surly, and atrocious.
+
+Fenelon, who tried to conciliate these two tendencies in preparing a
+small Mysticism neither too hot nor too cold, a little less lukewarm
+than that of Saint Francis de Sales, and above all things much less
+ardent than that of Saint Teresa, ended in his turn by displeasing the
+cormorant of Meaux, and though he abandoned and denied Madame de Guyon,
+whose friend he had been for long years, he was persecuted and tracked
+down by Bossuet, condemned at Rome, and sent in exile to Cambrai.
+
+And here Durtal could not but smile, for he remembered the desolate
+complaints of his partisans weeping for this disgrace, representing thus
+as a martyr this archbishop whose punishment consisted in quitting his
+post as courtier at Versailles to go at last and administer his diocese,
+in which he appeared till then to have never resided.
+
+This mitred Job, who remained in his misfortune Archbishop and Duke of
+Cambrai, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and rich, so unhappy because
+he was obliged to visit his flock, well shows the state of the
+episcopate under the redundant reign of the great king. It was a
+priesthood of financiers and valets.
+
+Only there was at any rate a certain attraction, there was talent in
+every case; while now bishops are not for the most part less intriguing
+nor less servile, but they have no longer either talent or manners.
+Caught in part, in the fishpond of bad priests, they show themselves
+ready for everything, and turn out to be souls of old usurers, low
+jobbers, beggars, when you press them.
+
+"It is sad to say it, but so it is," concluded Durtal. "As for Madame
+Guyon," he went on, "she was neither an original writer nor a saint; she
+was only an unwelcome substitute for the true mystics; she was presuming
+and certainly lacked that humility which magnified Saint Teresa and
+Saint Clare; but after all she burst into a flame, she was overcome by
+Jesus; above all, she was not a pious courtier, a bigot softened by a
+court like the Maintenon.
+
+"After all, what a time for religion it was? All its saints have
+something formal and restricted, wordy and cold, which turns me away
+from them. Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Chantal
+... No, I prefer Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Bernard, Saint Angela
+... The Mysticism of the seventeenth century is all the fashion with its
+emphatic and mean churches, its pompous and icy painting, its solemn
+poetry, its gloomy prose.
+
+"But look," he said, "my cell is still neither swept nor set in order,
+and I am afraid that in lingering here I may give some trouble to Father
+Etienne. It rains, however, too hard to allow of my walking in the wood;
+the simplest thing is to go and read the Little Office of Our Lady in
+the chapel."
+
+He went down there; it was at this hour almost empty; the monks were at
+work in the fields or in the factory; two fathers only, on their knees
+before the altar of Our Lady, were praying so absorbedly that they did
+not even hear the opening of the door.
+
+And Durtal, who had placed himself near them opposite the porch which
+gave upon the high altar, saw them reflected in the sheet of glass,
+placed before the shrine of the Blessed Guerric. This sheet had indeed
+the effect of a mirror, and the white fathers were in the depths of it,
+lived in prayers under the table, in the very heart of the altar.
+
+And he also appeared there in a corner, reflected, at the back of the
+shrine, near the sacred remains of the monk.
+
+At one moment he lifted his head, and saw that the round window in the
+apse, behind the altar, reproduced on its glass ornamented with grey and
+blue, the marks engraved on the reverse of the medal of Saint Benedict,
+the first letters of its imperative formulas, the initials of its
+distiches.
+
+It might have been called an immense clear medal, sifting a pale light,
+straining it through prayers, not allowing them to penetrate to the
+altar till sanctified and blessed by the Patriarch.
+
+And while he was dreaming, the clock struck; the two Trappists regained
+their stalls, while the others entered.
+
+Waiting thus in the chapel, the hour of Sext had struck. The abbot
+advanced. Durtal saw him again for the first time since their
+conversation; he seemed less ill, less pale; he marched majestically in
+his great white cowl, at the hood of which hung a violet acorn, and the
+fathers bowed, kissing their sleeve before him; he reached his place,
+which was designated by a wooden cross standing before a stall, and all
+enfolded themselves with a great sign of the cross, bowed to the altar,
+and the feeble imploring voice of the old Trappist rose: "Deus in
+adjutorium meum intende."
+
+And the Office continued, in the monotonous and charming pitch of the
+doxology, interrupted by profound reverences, large movements of the arm
+lifting the sleeve of the cowl as it fell to the ground, to allow the
+hand freedom to turn the pages.
+
+When Sext was over Durtal went to rejoin the oblate.
+
+They found on the table of the refectory a little omelette, leeks cooked
+in a sauce of flour and oil, haricots and cheese.
+
+"It is astonishing," said Durtal, "how in regard to mystics, the world
+errs on preconceived ideas, on the old string. Phrenologists declare
+that mystics have pointed skulls; now here that their form is more
+visible than elsewhere, because they are all hairless and shaven, there
+are no more heads like eggs than anywhere else. I looked this morning at
+the shape of their heads, no two are alike. Some are oval and depressed,
+others like a pear and straight, some have lumps on them, and some have
+none; and it is just the same with faces; when they are not transfigured
+by prayer they are ordinary. If they did not wear the habit of their
+order, no one could recognize in these Trappists predestined beings
+living out of modern society, in the full Middle Ages, in absolute
+dependence on a God. If they have souls which are not like those of
+other people, they have, after all, faces and bodies like those of the
+first comer."
+
+"All is within," said the oblate. "Why should elect souls be enclosed in
+fleshly prisons different to others?"
+
+This conversation, which continued on different points of Trappist life,
+ended by turning on death in a monastery, and M. Bruno revealed some
+details.
+
+"When death is near," he said, "the Father abbot traces on the ground a
+cross in blessed ashes covered with straw, and the dying man is placed
+on it wrapped in serge cloth.
+
+"The brothers recite near him the prayers of the dying, and at the
+moment of his death the response 'Subvenite Sancti Dei' is chanted in
+choir. The Father abbot incenses the body, which is washed while the
+monks sing the Office of the Dead in another room.
+
+"Then his regular habit is put on the dead monk, and he is borne in
+procession to the church, where he lies on a stretcher with his face
+uncovered, until the hour destined for the funeral.
+
+"Then on the way to the cemetery the community intones no longer the
+chant of the dead, the psalms of grief, and the sequences of regret, but
+rather 'In exitu Israel de AEgypto,' which is the psalm of deliverance,
+the free song of joy.
+
+"And the Trappist is buried without a coffin, in his robe of stuff, his
+head covered with his hood.
+
+"Lastly, during thirty days, his place remains empty in the refectory,
+his portion is served as usual, but the brother porter distributes it to
+the poor.
+
+"Ah! the happiness to die thus," said the oblate, as he ended, "for if
+one dies after having honestly fulfilled one's task in the order, one is
+assured of eternal happiness, according to the promises made by our Lord
+to Saint Benedict and to Saint Bernard!"
+
+"The rain is over," said Durtal; "I should like to visit to-day that
+little chapel at the end of the park of which you spoke to me the other
+day. Which is the shortest way to reach it?"
+
+M. Bruno told him the way, and Durtal went off, rolling a cigarette, to
+gain the great pond, thence he struck a path to the left and mounted a
+lane of trees.
+
+He slipped on the wet ground, and got on with difficulty. At last,
+however, he gained a clump of chestnuts, which he skirted. Behind these
+rose a dwarf tower topped by a very small dome, pierced by a door. To
+the left and right of this door, on sockets where ornaments of the
+Romanesque epoch still were seen under the velvety crust of moss, two
+stone angels were still standing.
+
+They belonged, evidently, to the Burgundian school, with their big round
+heads, their hair puffed and divided into waves, their fat faces with
+turned-up noses, their solid draperies with hard folds. They also came
+from the ruins of the old cloister, but the interior of the chapel was
+unfortunately thoroughly modern; it was so small that the feet of him
+who knelt at the altar almost touched the wall at the entrance.
+
+In a niche veiled by white gauze a Virgin smiled with extended hands.
+She had blue plaster eyes and apple-shaped cheeks. She was wearisome in
+her insignificance, but her sanctuary retained the warmth of places
+always shut up. The walls, hung with red calico, were dusted, the floor
+was swept, and the holy water basins full; superb tea roses flourished
+in pots between the candelabra. Durtal then understood why he had so
+often seen M. Bruno walking in this direction with flowers in his hand;
+he was going to pray in this place, which he loved no doubt because it
+was isolated in the profound solitude of this Trappist monastery.
+
+"Excellent man!" cried Durtal, thinking over the affectionate services,
+the fraternal care the oblate had had for him; and he added, "He is a
+happy man too, for he is self-contained, and lives so placidly here.
+
+"And, indeed," he went on, "where is the good of striving, if not
+against oneself? to agitate oneself for money, for glory, to conduct
+oneself so as to keep others down, and gain adulation from them, how
+vain a task!
+
+"Only the Church, in decking the temporary altars of the liturgical
+year, in forcing the seasons to follow step by step the life of Christ,
+has known how to trace for us a plan of necessary occupations, of useful
+ends. She has given us the means of walking always side by side with
+Jesus, to live day by day with the Gospels; for Christians she has made
+time the messenger of sorrows and the herald of joys; she has entrusted
+to the year the part of servant of the New Testament, the zealous
+emissary of worship."
+
+And Durtal reflected on the cycle of the liturgy which begins on the
+first day of the religious year, with Advent, then turns with an
+insensible movement on itself till it returns again to its
+starting-point, to the time when the Church prepares by penitence and
+prayer to celebrate Christmas.
+
+And turning over his prayer-book, seeing the extraordinary circle of
+offices, he thought of that prodigious jewel, that crown of King
+Recceswinthe preserved in the Museum of Cluny.
+
+The liturgical year was, like it, studded with crystals and jewels by
+its admirable canticles and its fervent hymns set in the very gold of
+Benedictions and Vespers.
+
+It seemed that the Church had substituted for that crown of thorns with
+which the Jews had surrounded the temples of the Saviour, the truly
+royal crown of the Proper of the Seasons, the only one which was
+chiselled in a metal precious enough, with art pure enough to dare to
+place itself on the brow of a God.
+
+And the grand Lapidary had begun his work by incrusting, in this diadem
+of offices, the hymn of Saint Ambrose, and the invocation taken from the
+Old Testament, the "Rorate Coeli," that melodious chant of expectation
+and regret, that obscure gem violet-coloured; the lustre declares itself
+then, when after each of its stanzas rises the solemn prayer of the
+patriarchs, calling for the longed-for presence of Christ.
+
+And the four Sundays of Advent disappeared with the turned pages of the
+prayer-book; the night of the Nativity was come. After the "Jesu
+Redemptor" of Vespers, the old Portuguese chant, the "Adeste Fideles,"
+arose at Benediction from every lip. It was a sequence of a truly
+charming simplicity, an old carving wherein defiled the shepherds and
+the kings to a popular air appropriate to great marches, apt to charm,
+to aid by the somewhat military rhythm of its steps, the long lines of
+the faithful quitting their cottages to go to the distant churches in
+the towns.
+
+And imperceptibly, like the year in an invisible rotation, the circle
+turned, and stopped at the Feast of the Holy Innocents, where there
+flourished out, like a flower from a slaughter-house, on a shoot culled
+from a soil irrigated by the blood of lambs, this sequence, red, and
+smelling of roses, the "Salvate Flores Martyrum" of Prudentius; the
+crown moved again, and the hymn of the Epiphany, the "Crudelis Herodes"
+of Sedudius, appeared in its turn.
+
+Now the Sundays grew heavy, the violet Sundays when the "Gloria in
+Excelsis" is no more heard, when the "Audi Benigne" of Saint Ambrose is
+chanted, and the "Miserere," that cinder-coloured psalm, which is
+perhaps the most perfect masterpiece which the Church has ever drawn
+from her store-houses of plain chants.
+
+It was Lent, when the amethysts fade in the moist grey of onyxes, in the
+embrowned white of quartz, and the magnificent invocation, "Attende
+Domine," rose beneath the arches. Sprung like the "Rorate Coeli" from
+the sequences of the Old Testament, this humble and contrite chant,
+enumerating the deserved punishments of sins, became, if not more
+sorrowful, at all events more grave and more pressing when it
+confirmed, when it resumed in the initial stanza of its burthen, the
+avowal of shame already confessed.
+
+And suddenly on this crown there burst out after the expiring fires of
+Lent, the flaming ruby of the Passion. On the upturned yellow of the sky
+a red cross was raised, while majestic shouts and despairing cries
+proclaimed the blood-stained fruit of the tree; and the "Vexilla Regis"
+was again repeated the following Sunday at the Feast of Palms, which
+joined to that Sequence of Fortunatus the green hymn which it
+accompanied with a silky noise of palms, the "Gloria laus et honor" of
+Theodulph.
+
+Then the fires of precious stones grew grey and died. To the glowing
+coals of gems succeeded the dead cinders of obsidians, black stones
+scarcely swelling, without a gleam above the tarnished gold of their
+mountings; one entered no Holy Week, everywhere the "Pange Lingua" and
+the "Stabat Mater" wailed under the arches, and then came the "Tenebrae,"
+the lamentations, and the psalms, whose knell shook the flame of the
+brown waxen tapers, and after each halt, at the end of each of the
+psalms, one of the tapers expired, and its column of blue smoke
+evaporated still under the lighted circumference of the arches, while
+the choir recommenced the interrupted series of complaints.
+
+And the crown turned once more; the beads of this musical rosary still
+ran on, and all changed. Jesus had risen, and songs of joy issued from
+the organs. The "Victimae Paschali Laudes" exulted before the gospel of
+the masses, and at the Benediction the "O Filii et Filiae," created
+indeed to be intoned by the wild jubilations of crowds, ran and sported
+in the joyous hurricane of the organs, which uprooted the pillars and
+unroofed the naves.
+
+And the feasts rung in with bells followed at longer intervals. At
+Ascension the heavy and clear crystals of Saint Ambrose filled with
+their luminous water the tiny basin of the catkins; the fire of rubies
+and garnets lighted up again with the crimson hymn and scarlet sequence
+of Pentecost the "Veni Creator" and "Veni Spiritus." The Feast of the
+Trinity passed, signalized by the stanzas of Gregory the Great; and for
+the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, the liturgy could exhibit the most
+marvellous jewel case of its dower, the Office of Saint Thomas, the
+"Pange Lingua," the "Adore Te," the "Sacris Solemniis," the "Verbum
+Supernum," and above all the "Lauda Sion," that pure masterpiece of
+Latin poetry and scholasticism, that hymn so precise, so lucid in its
+abstraction, so firm in its rhymed words, round which is rolled the
+melody perhaps the most enthusiastic, the most supple in plain chant.
+
+The circle displaced itself again, showing on its different faces the
+twenty-three to twenty-eight Sundays which defile after Pentecost, the
+green weeks of the time of Pilgrimage, and stopped at the last feast, at
+the Sunday after the Octave of All Saints, at the Dedication of Churches
+which the "Coelestis Urbs" incensed, old stanzas of which the ruins were
+badly consolidated by the architects of Urban VIII., old jewels, on
+which the troubled water slept and was reanimated only in rare lights.
+
+The juncture of the religious crown, of the liturgical year, was then
+made at the masses, in which the gospel of the last Sunday after
+Pentecost, the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, repeats, as well as
+the Gospel according to Saint Luke, recited on the first Sunday in
+Advent, the terrible predictions of Christ on the desolation of the
+time, on the end of the world.
+
+"This is not all," Durtal continued, who was interested in this run
+through his prayer-book. "In this crown of the Proper of the Seasons are
+inserted, like smaller stones, the sequences of the Proper of Saints
+which fill the empty places, and finish the round of the circle.
+
+"First the pearls and gems of the Blessed Virgin, the limpid jewels, the
+blue sapphires and rose rubies of her antiphons; then the aquamarine, so
+lucid and pure, of the 'Ave Maris Stella,' the topaz, pale as tears, of
+the 'O Quot nudis Lacrymarum' on the Feast of the Seven Dolours, the
+hyacinth, colour of dried blood, of the 'Stabat;' then were told the
+feasts of the Angels and the Saints, the hymns dedicated to the Apostles
+and the Evangelists, to the Martyrs, whether solitary or in couples,
+both out of and during the Paschal season, to the Confessors, Pontiffs,
+and non-Pontiffs, to Virgins, to Holy Women, all Feasts differentiated
+by special Sequences, by special Proses of which some are very simple,
+like those stanzas made in honour of the Nativity of Saint John the
+Baptist, by Paul the Deacon.
+
+"There still remains All Saints, with the 'Placare Christe,' and the
+three blows on the alarm bell, the knell in triplets of the 'Dies Irae,'
+which resounds on the day set apart for the Commemoration of the Dead.
+
+"What an immense fund of poetry, what an incomparable estate of art the
+Church possesses!" he cried, closing his book; and many memories rose
+for him at this excursion into his prayer-book.
+
+On how many evenings had the sadness of life been dissipated in
+listening to these proses chanted in the churches!
+
+He thought over again of the suppliant voice of Advent, and recalled one
+evening, when he had wandered under a fine rain along the quays. He had
+been driven from home by ignoble visions, and at the same time had been
+harassed by the increasing disgust of his vices. He had ended by being
+brought up against his will at St. Gervais.
+
+In the chapel of the Virgin, some poor women were prostrate. He had
+knelt, tired and dazed, his soul so ill at ease, that he slumbered
+without power to wake himself. Some men and boys of the choir were
+installed in the chapel, with two or three priests; they had lighted
+candles, and the voice, light and sustained, of a child, had in the dark
+of the church chanted the long antiphons of the "Rorate."
+
+In the state of overwhelming sadness in which he was stagnant, Durtal
+felt himself open and bleeding to the bottom of his soul; then a voice
+older and less trembling, which understood the words it said, narrated
+ingenuously, almost without confusion, to the Just One, "Peccavimus et
+facti sumus tanquam immundus nos."
+
+And Durtal took up these words, and spelt them over in terror, thinking,
+"Ah! yes, we have sinned and become like the leprous, O Lord!" And the
+chant continued, and in His turn, the Most High borrowed that same
+innocent organ of childhood, to declare to man His pity, and to confirm
+to him the pardon assured by the coming of the Son.
+
+And the evening had ended by the Benediction in plain chant, in the
+midst of the silence and prostration of unhappy women.
+
+Durtal remembered how he left the church refreshed, freed from his
+hauntings, and he had gone away in the drizzling rain, surprised that
+the way was so short, humming the "Rorate," of which the air had taken
+possession of him, ending by seeing in it the personal touch of a kindly
+unknown.
+
+And there were other evenings ... the Octave of the Feast of All Souls
+at St. Sulpice and at St. Thomas Aquinas, where, after the Vespers of
+the Dead, they brought out again the old Sequence which has disappeared
+from the Roman Breviary, the "Lanquentilus in Purgatorio."
+
+This church was the only one in Paris which had retained these pages of
+the Gallican hymnal, and had them sung by two basses without a choir;
+but these singers, so poor as a rule, no doubt were fond of this air,
+for if they did not sing it with art, at least they put a little soul
+into its delivery.
+
+And this invocation to the Madonna, in which she was adjured to save the
+souls in Purgatory, was as sorrowful as the souls themselves, and so
+melancholy, so languid, that the surroundings were forgotten, the
+ugliness of that sanctuary of which the choir was a theatre scene,
+surrounded by closed dressing-rooms and garnished with lustres, one
+might think oneself for a few moments far from Paris, far from that
+population of devout women and servant girls, which attend that place in
+the evening.
+
+"Ah! the Church," he said to himself, as he descended the path which led
+to the great pond, "what a mother of art is she!" and suddenly the noise
+of a body falling into the water interrupted his reflections.
+
+He looked behind the hedge of reeds and saw nothing but great circles
+running on the water, and all at once in one of these rings a small
+dog-like head appeared holding a fish in its mouth; the beast raised
+itself a little out of the water, showed a thin body covered with fur,
+and gazed on Durtal quietly with its little black eyes.
+
+Then in a flash it passed the distance which separated it from the bank,
+and disappeared under the grasses.
+
+"It is the otter," he said to himself, remembering the discussion at
+table between the stranger priest and the oblate.
+
+And he went to gain the other pond, when he encountered Father Etienne.
+
+He told him his adventure.
+
+"Impossible!" cried the monk, "no one has ever seen the otter; you must
+have mistaken it for a water rat, or some other animal, for that beast,
+for which we have watched for years, is invisible."
+
+Durtal gave him a description of it.
+
+"It is certainly the otter," admitted the guest-master, surprised.
+
+It was evident that this otter lived in the pond in a legendary state.
+In monotonous lives, in days like those in a cloister, it took the
+proportions of a fabulous subject, of an event whereof the mystery would
+occupy intervals seized between prayers and offices.
+
+"We must point out to M. Bruno the exact spot where you remarked it, for
+he will begin to hunt it again," said Father Etienne after a silence.
+
+"But how can it trouble you in eating your fish, since you do not angle
+for them?"
+
+"I beg your pardon; we fish for them to send them to the Archbishop,"
+answered the monk, who went on: "Still, it is very strange that you saw
+the beast!"
+
+"When I leave this," thought Durtal, "they will certainly speak of me as
+the gentleman who saw the otter."
+
+While talking, they had arrived at the cross pond.
+
+"Look," said the father, pointing out the swan, who rose in a fury, beat
+his wings, and hissed.
+
+"What is the matter with him?"
+
+"The matter is that the white hue of my habit infuriates him."
+
+"Ah! and why?"
+
+"I do not know; perhaps he wants to be the only one who is white here;
+he spares the lay brothers, while as for a father ... wait, you will
+see."
+
+And the guest-master walked quietly towards the swan.
+
+"Come," he said to the angry creature, who splashed him with water; and
+he held out his hand which the swan snapped.
+
+"See," said the monk, showing the mark of a red pinch printed on the
+flesh.
+
+And he smiled, holding his hand, and quitted Durtal, who asked himself
+whether, in acting thus, the Trappist were not wishing to inflict on
+himself some corporal punishment to atone for some distraction the
+evening before; some peccadillo.
+
+"That stroke of the beak must have pinched him horribly, for the tears
+came into his eyes. How could he expose himself with joy to such a
+bite?"
+
+And he remembered that one day at the office of None, one of the young
+monks made a mistake in the tone of an antiphon; at the moment that the
+office ended, he knelt before the altar, then he lay his whole length on
+the tiles on his face, his mouth pressed on the ground, till the stroke
+of the prior's bell gave him the order to get up.
+
+This was a voluntary punishment for a negligence committed, a
+forgetfulness. Who knows whether Father Etienne did not in his turn
+punish himself for a thought he deemed to border on sin, in getting
+himself thus pinched?
+
+He consulted the oblate on the point in the evening, but M. Bruno
+contented himself with a smile, without answering.
+
+And when Durtal spoke to him of his speedy departure for Paris, the old
+man shook his head.
+
+"Considering," he said, "the fear and the discomfort that Communion
+caused you, you would act wisely if you approach the Holy Table
+immediately on your return."
+
+And seeing that Durtal did not reply, but hung his head,
+
+"Believe a man who has known these trials; if you do not force yourself
+while you are still under the warm impression of La Trappe, you will
+float between desire and regret without advancing; you will be ingenious
+in discovering excuses for not making your confession; you will try to
+think it impossible to find in Paris an abbe who understands you. Now
+allow me to assure you nothing is more false. If you desire an expert
+and easy confidant, go to the Jesuits; if you wish above all a
+zealous-souled priest, go to St. Sulpice.
+
+"You will find there honest and intelligent ecclesiastics, excellent
+hearts. In Paris, where the clergy of the parishes are so mixed, they
+are at the top of the basket of the priesthood, and, as may be imagined,
+they form a community, live in cells, do not dine out; and as the
+Sulpician rule forbids them to aspire to honours, or places, they do not
+run the chance of becoming bad priests by ambition. Do you know them?"
+
+"No; but to resolve that question, which in fact constantly troubles me,
+I count on a priest whom I often see, on the very man who, in fact, sent
+me into this Trappist monastery.
+
+"And that," he went on, "makes me remember," and he rose to go to
+Compline, "that I have as yet forgotten to write to him. It is true that
+now it is too late, I should arrive at his house almost as soon as my
+letter. It is strange, but by force of walking in one's own, by force of
+living to oneself, the days run by, and there is no time to do anything
+here!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+He had hoped for his last day at La Trappe a morning of quiet, when his
+mind might lounge, a mixture of spiritual siesta and of working, charmed
+by a round of offices, and not at all that the idea persistent and
+obstinate that he must quit the monastery next day, would spoil all the
+pleasures he had promised himself.
+
+Now that he had no longer to cleanse himself, and pass under the
+winnowing of confession, to present himself for the Communion in the
+morning, he remained irresolute, not knowing any longer how to occupy
+his time, terrified by the recommencement of that life of the world
+which would upset all the barriers of forgetfulness, and would get at
+him at once above all the broken defences of the cloister.
+
+Like a captured animal, he began to rub against the bars of his cage,
+made the tour of the enclosure, filling his sight with those places
+where he had tasted hours so kindly and so cruel.
+
+He felt in himself a shaking of the ground, a disturbance of soul, an
+absolute discouragement before the prospect of re-entering into his
+habitual existence, of mixing himself anew with the coming and going of
+men, and he experienced at the same time a great fatigue of brain.
+
+He dragged himself along the walks in a state of complete discomfort, in
+one of those attacks of religious spleen which determine, while they
+last during years, the "taedium vitae" of the cloisters. He had a horror
+of any life but this, and the soul overwrought by prayers was failing in
+a body insufficiently rested and ill-nourished; it had no further
+desire, asked only to be let alone, to sleep, to fall into one of those
+states of torpor in which everything becomes indifferent, in which one
+ends by losing consciousness gently, by being stifled without
+suffering.
+
+He might well, to re-act on him as a consolation, promise himself to
+assist in Paris at the offices of the Benedictine nuns, that he would
+keep himself on the outskirts of society, to himself; and he was at once
+obliged to answer that these subterfuges are impossible, that the very
+movement of the town is against all decoys, that isolation in a chamber
+is in no degree like the solitude of a cell, that masses celebrated in a
+chapel open to the public cannot be likened to the private Offices of
+the Trappists.
+
+Then what is the good of trying to misunderstand? It is with the soul as
+with the body, which is better on the sea shore, or in the mountains,
+than shut up in a town. There is a better spiritual air even at Paris,
+in certain religious quarters of the left bank, than in the districts
+situated on the other bank, more lively in certain churches, more pure,
+for example, at Notre Dame des Victoires than in churches such as La
+Trinite and the Madeleine.
+
+But the monastery was, as it were, the true shore and high plateau of
+the soul. There the atmosphere was balsamic, strength returned, lost
+appetite for God was there recovered, there was health succeeding
+weakness, a regimen, fortified and sustained, instead of languor and the
+restricted exercises of the towns.
+
+The conviction that no trickery was possible to him at Paris brought him
+to the ground. He wandered from cell to chapel, from chapel to woods,
+awaiting the dinner hour with impatience, in order to be able to speak
+to someone, for in his disorder a new need arose. For more than a week
+he had spent the whole afternoon without opening his lips; he did not
+suffer from it, was even satisfied with his silence, but since he was
+pressed by this idea of departure he could not keep silence any longer,
+thought aloud in the walks to assuage the sensations of his swelling
+heart, that stifled him.
+
+M. Bruno was too sagacious not to guess the uneasiness of his companion,
+who became by turns taciturn and over talkative during the meal. He
+made, however, as though he saw nothing, but after he had said grace he
+disappeared, and Durtal, who was strolling near the great pond, was
+surprised to see him coming in his direction with Father Etienne.
+
+They greeted him, and the Trappist with a smile proposed to him, if he
+had made no other plan, to pass his time in visiting the convent, and
+especially the library, which the Father prior would be delighted to
+show him.
+
+"If convenient to me! I shall be delighted!" cried Durtal.
+
+All three returned towards the abbey; the monk lifted the latch of a
+little door fashioned in a wall near the church, and Durtal entered a
+minute cemetery, planted with wooden crosses on grass graves.
+
+There was no inscription, no flower in this enclosure which they
+traversed; the monk pushed another door, which opened on a long corridor
+smelling of rats. At the end of this gallery, Durtal recognized the
+staircase he had ascended one morning for his confession in the prior's
+room. They left it on their right, turned into another gallery, and the
+guest-master led them into an immense hall, pierced by high windows,
+decorated with eighteenth century pier-glasses, and _grisailles_; it was
+furnished only with benches and stalls, above which was a single chair
+sculptured and painted with abbatial arms, which marked the place of Dom
+Anselm.
+
+"Oh! this chapter-house has nothing monastic," said Father Etienne,
+designating the profane pictures on the walls; "we have kept just as it
+was the drawing-room of this old chateau, but I beg you to believe that
+this decoration hardly pleases us."
+
+"And what takes place in this hall?"
+
+"Well, we meet here after mass; the chapter opens by reading the
+martyrology, followed by the concluding prayers of Prime. Then we read a
+passage from the rule, and the Father abbot comments on it. Lastly, we
+practise the exercise of humility, that is to say, that whoever among us
+has committed any fault against the rule, prostrates himself, and avows
+it before his brethren."
+
+They went thence to the refectory. This room had also a high ceiling,
+but was smaller, and garnished with tables in form of a horse-shoe. A
+kind of large cruets, each containing two half-bottles of wine and
+water, separated by a water bottle, and before them, instead of glasses,
+cups of brown earthenware, with two handles, were placed at equal
+distances. The monk explained that these sham cruets with three branches
+indicated the place of two covers, each monk having a right to his half
+bottle of drink, and partaking with his neighbour the water in the
+bottle.
+
+"This pulpit," said Father Etienne, pointing out a large wooden box
+fixed against the wall, "is destined for the reader of the week, the
+father who reads during the meal."
+
+"How long does the meal last?"
+
+"Just half an hour."
+
+"Yes; and the cookery which we eat is delicate in comparison with that
+which is served to the monks," said the oblate.
+
+"I should lie if I were to affirm that we make good cheer," answered the
+guest-master. "Do you know that the hardest thing to bear, in the
+earlier time especially, is the want of seasoning in our dishes. Pepper
+and spices are forbidden by our rule, and as no salt-cellar has place on
+our table, we swallow our food just as it is, and it is for the most
+part scarcely salted.
+
+"On certain days in summer, when one sweats in big drops, this becomes
+almost impossible, the gorge rises. Yet one must begin upon this warm
+paste, and at least swallow a sufficient quantity not to give out before
+the next day; we look at each other discouraged, unable to get any
+further; there is not another word to define our dinner in the month of
+August, it is a punishment."
+
+"And all, the Father abbot, the prior, the fathers, the brethren, have
+the same food?"
+
+"All. Now come and see the dormitory."
+
+They ascended to the first floor. An immense corridor, furnished like a
+stable with wooden boxes, extended before them, closed at each end by a
+door.
+
+"This is our lodging," said the monk, as he stopped before one of these
+cases. Cards were placed on them, affixing the name of each monk, and
+the first bore a ticket with this inscription: "The Father Abbot."
+
+Durtal felt the bed against one of the two walls.
+
+It was as rough as a carding comb, and as biting as a file. It was
+composed of a simple quilted paillasse extended on a plank; no sheets,
+but a prison coverlet of grey wool, a sack of straw instead of pillows.
+
+"God! it is very hard," said Durtal, and the monk laughed.
+
+"Our habits soften the roughness of this straw mattress," he said; "for
+our rule does not allow us to undress, we may only take off our shoes,
+therefore we sleep entirely clad, our head wrapped in our hood."
+
+"And it must be cold in this corridor swept by all the winds," added
+Durtal.
+
+"No doubt the winter is rough here, but it is not that season which
+alarms us; we live pretty well, even without fire in time of frost, but
+the summer--! If you knew what it is to wake in habits still steeped in
+sweat, not dried since the evening before, it is terrible!
+
+"Then, though because of the great heat we have often hardly slept, we
+must before dawn jump out of bed, and begin at once the great night
+office, the Vigils, which last at least two hours. Even after twenty
+years of Trappist life, one cannot but suffer at that getting up; in
+chapel you fight against sleep which crushes you, you sleep while you
+hear a verse chanted, you strive to keep awake, in order to be able to
+chant another, and fall asleep again.
+
+"One ought to be able to turn the key on thought, and one is incapable
+of it.
+
+"Truly, I assure you that even beyond the corporal fatigue which
+explains that state in the morning, there is then an aggression of the
+demon, an incessant temptation to make us recite the office badly."
+
+"And you all undergo this strife?"
+
+"All; and this does not hinder," concluded the monk, whose face was
+radiant, "this does not hinder us from being very happy here.
+
+"Because all these trials are nothing beside the deep and intimate joys
+which our good God gives us. Ah! He is a generous Master; he pays us a
+hundred-fold for our poor sorrows."
+
+As they spoke, they had passed through the corridor and had arrived at
+its other end.
+
+The monk opened the door, and Durtal was astounded to find himself in a
+vestibule just opposite his own cell.
+
+"I did not think," he said, "that I was living so near you."
+
+"This house is a regular labyrinth--but M. Bruno will take you to the
+library where the Father prior is waiting for you; for I must go to my
+business. We shall meet presently," he said, with a smile.
+
+The library was situated on the other side of the staircase by which
+Durtal reached his chamber. It was large, furnished with shelves from
+top to bottom, occupied in the middle by a sort of counter table on
+which also were spread rows of books.
+
+Father Maximin said to Durtal,
+
+"We are not very rich, but at any rate we possess tools for work fairly
+complete on theology and the monography of the cloisters."
+
+"You have superb volumes," cried Durtal, who looked at magnificent
+folios in splendid bindings with armorial bearings.
+
+"Wait; here are the works of Saint Bernard in a fine edition," and the
+monk presented to Durtal enormous volumes, printed in heavy letters on
+crackling paper.
+
+"When I think that I promised myself to make acquaintance with Saint
+Bernard in this very abbey which he founded, and here I am on the eve of
+my departure, and have read nothing!"
+
+"You do not know his works?"
+
+"Yes; scattered fragments of his sermons and of his letters. I have run
+through some _selectae mediocres_ of his works, but that is all."
+
+"He is our chief master here; but he is not the only one of our
+ancestors in Saint Benedict whom the convent possesses," said the monk
+with a certain pride. "See," and he pointed out on the shelves some
+heavy folios, "here: 'Saint Gregory the Great,' 'Venerable Bede,' 'Saint
+Peter Damian,' 'Saint Anselm.' ... And your friends are there," he said,
+following Durtal with a glance as he read the titles of the volumes,
+"'Saint Teresa,' 'Saint John of the Cross,' 'Saint Magdalen of Pazzi,'
+'Saint Angela,' 'Tauler,' ... and she who like Sister Emmerich dictated
+her conversations with Jesus during her ecstasy." And the prior took
+from the range of books in octavo, "The Dialogues of Saint Catherine of
+Siena."
+
+"That Dominican nun is terrible for the priests of her time," the monk
+went on. "She insists on their misdeeds, reproaches them roundly with
+selling the Holy Spirit, with practising sortilege, and with using the
+Sacrament to compose evil charms."
+
+"And there are besides the disorderly vices of which she accuses them
+in the series concerning the sin of the flesh," added the oblate.
+
+"Certainly, she does not mince her words, but she had the right to take
+up that tone, and menace in the name of the Lord, for she was truly
+inspired by Him. Her doctrine was drawn from divine sources. 'Doctrina
+ejus infusa non acquisita,' says the Church in the bull of her
+canonization. Her Dialogues are admirable; the pages in which God
+exposes the holy frauds which He sometimes uses to recall men to good,
+the passages in which she treats of the monastic life, of that barque
+which possesses three ropes: chastity, obedience, and poverty, and which
+faces the tempest under the conduct of the Holy Spirit, are delightful.
+She reveals herself in her work the pupil of the well-beloved disciple
+and of Saint Thomas Aquinas. One might believe that one heard the Angel
+of the School paraphrasing the last of the Evangelists."
+
+"Yes," said the oblate, striking in, "if Saint Catherine of Siena does
+not give herself to the high speculations of Mysticism; if she does not
+analyze like Saint Teresa the mysteries of divine love, nor trace the
+itinerary of souls destined to the perfect life, she reflects directly
+at least the conversations of Heaven. She calls, she loves! You have
+read, sir, her treatises on Discretion and Prayer?"
+
+"No. I have read Saint Catherine of Genoa, but the books of Saint
+Catherine of Siena have never fallen into my hands."
+
+"And what do you think of this collection?"
+
+Durtal looked at the title, and made a face.
+
+"I see that Suso hardly delights you."
+
+"I should tell a lie if I assured you that the dissertations of this
+Dominican pleased me. First, however illuminated the man may be, he does
+not attract me. Without speaking of the frenzy of his penances, what
+scrupulousness of devotion and narrowness of piety was his! Think that
+he could not decide on drinking till he had first, as a preliminary,
+divided his beverage into five parts. He thought thus to honour the five
+wounds of the Saviour, and, moreover, he swallowed his last mouthful in
+two gulps to call up before himself the water and the blood which flowed
+from the side of the Word.
+
+"No! these sort of things would never enter into my head; I would never
+admit that such practices would glorify Christ.
+
+"And remark well that this love of pounding things small, this passion
+for small blessings, is found in all his work. His God is so difficult
+to content, so scrupulous, so meddling, that no one would ever get to
+heaven if they believed what he said. This God of his is the
+fault-finder of eternity, the miser of paradise.
+
+"On the whole, Suso expands himself in impetuous discourses on trifles;
+then what with his insipid allegories, his morose 'Colloquy on the Nine
+Rocks' knocks me down."
+
+"You will, however, admit that his study on the Union of the Soul is
+substantial, and that the 'Office of the Eternal Wisdom' which he
+composed is worth reading?"
+
+"I cannot say, Father, I do not now remember that Office; but I
+recollect tolerably well the treatise on 'Union with God,' it seems to
+me more interesting than the rest, but you will admit that it is very
+short ... and then Saint Teresa has also elucidated that question of
+human renunciation and divine fruition; and, hang it then...!"
+
+"Come," said the oblate, with a smile, "I give up the attempt to make
+you a fervent reader of the good Suso."
+
+"For us," said Father Maximin, "if we had a little time to work, this
+ought to be the leaven of our meditations, the subject of our reading;"
+and he took down a folio which contained the works of Saint Hildegarde,
+abbess of the Convent of Rupertsberg.
+
+"She, you see, is the great prophetess of the New Testament. Never,
+since the visions of Saint John at Patmos, has the Holy Spirit
+communicated to an earthly being with such fulness and light. In her
+'Heptachronon' she predicts Protestantism and the captivity of the
+Vatican; in her 'Scivias, or Knowledge of the Ways of the Lord,' which
+was edited, according to her recital, by a monk of the Convent of Saint
+Desibode, she interprets the symbols of the Scriptures, and even the
+nature of the elements. She also wrote a diligent commentary on our
+rules and enthusiastic pages on sacred music, on literature, on art,
+which she defines admirably; a reminiscence, half-effaced, of a
+primitive condition from which we have fallen since Eden. Unfortunately,
+to understand her, it is necessary to give oneself to minute researches
+and patient studies. Her apocalyptic style has something retractile,
+which retreats and shuts itself up all the more when one will open it."
+
+"I am well aware that I am losing my little Latin," said M. Bruno. "What
+a pity there is not a translation of her works, with glosses to help."
+
+"They are untranslatable," said the father, who went on,
+
+"Saint Hildegarde is, with Saint Bernard, one of the purest glories of
+the family of Saint Benedict. How predestinate was that virgin, who was
+inundated with interior light at the age of three, and died at
+eighty-two, having lived all her life in the cloister!"
+
+"And add that she was as a permanent state, prophetical!" cried the
+oblate. "She is like no other woman saint; all in her is astonishing,
+even the way in which God addresses her, for He forgets that she is a
+woman, and calls her 'man.'
+
+"And she," added the prior, "employs, when she wishes to designate
+herself, the singular expression, 'the paltry form.' But here is another
+writer who is dear to us," and he showed Durtal the two volumes of Saint
+Gertrude. "She is again one of our great nuns, an abbess truly
+Benedictine, in the exact sense of the word, for she caused the Holy
+Scriptures to be explained to her nuns, wished that the piety of her
+daughters should be based on science, that this faith should be
+sustained by liturgical food, if I may say so."
+
+"I know nothing of her but her 'Exercises,'" observed Durtal, "and they
+have left with me the memory of echoed words, of things said again from
+the sacred books. So far as one may judge from simple extracts, she does
+not appear to have original expression, and to be far below Saint Teresa
+or Saint Angela."
+
+"No doubt," answered the monk. "But she comes near Saint Angela by the
+gift of familiarity when she converses with Christ, and also by the
+loving vehemence of what she says; only all this is transformed on
+leaving its proper source; she thinks liturgically; and this is so true,
+that the least of her reflections at once presents itself to her clothed
+in the language of the Gospels and the Psalms.
+
+"Her 'Revelations,' her 'Insinuations,' her 'Herald of Divine Love,' are
+marvellous from this point of view; and then her prayer to the Blessed
+Virgin is exquisite which opens with this phrase: 'Hail, O white lily
+of the Trinity, resplendent, and always at rest....'
+
+"As a continuation of her works, the Benedictine Fathers of Solesmes
+have edited also the 'Revelations' of Saint Mechtilde, her book on
+'Special Grace,' and her 'Light of the Divinity'; they are there on that
+shelf...."
+
+"Let me show you," said in his turn M. Bruno, "guides wisely marked out
+for the soul which escapes from itself, and will attempt to climb the
+eternal mountains," and he handed to Durtal the "Lucerna Mystica" of
+Lopez Ezquerra, the quartos of Scaramelli, the volumes of Schram, the
+"Christian Asceticism" of Ribet, the "Principles of Mystic Theology" of
+Father Seraphin.
+
+"And do you know this?" continued the oblate; the volume he offered was
+called "On Prayer," was anonymous, and bore at the bottom of its first
+page "Solesmes, printed at the Abbey of Saint Cecilia," and above the
+printed date, 1886, Durtal made out the word written in ink,
+"Confidential."
+
+"I have never seen this little book, which seems moreover to have never
+been brought into the market. Who is the author?"
+
+"The most extraordinary nun of our time, the abbess of the Benedictine
+nuns at Solesmes. I regret only that you are going so soon, for I should
+have been happy to let you read it.
+
+"As far as the document is concerned, it is of a most extraordinary
+science, and it contains admirable quotations from Saint Hildegarde and
+Cassien: as far as Mysticism is concerned, Mother Saint Cecilia
+evidently only reproduces the works of her predecessors, and she tells
+us nothing very new. Nevertheless, I remember a passage which seems to
+me more special, more personal. Wait...."
+
+And the oblate turned over a few pages. "Here it is:
+
+"'The spiritualized soul does not appear exposed to temptation properly
+so-called, but by a divine permission it is called upon to conflict with
+the Demon, spirit against spirit.... The contact with the Demon is then
+perceived on the surface of the soul, under the form of a burn at once
+spiritual and sensible.... If the soul hold good in its union with God,
+if it be strong, the pain, however sharp, is bearable; but if the soul
+commit any slight imperfection, even inwardly, the Demon makes just so
+much way, and carries his horrible burning more forward, until by
+generous acts the soul can repulse him further."
+
+"This touch of Satan, which produces an almost material effect on the
+most intangible parts of our being, is, you will admit, at least
+curious," concluded the oblate, as he closed the volume.
+
+"Mother Saint Cecilia is a remarkable strategist of the soul," said the
+prior, "but ... but ... this work, which she edited for the daughters of
+her abbey, contains, I think, some rash propositions which have not been
+read without displeasure at Rome."
+
+"To have done with our poor treasures," he continued, "we have only on
+this side," and he pointed out a portion of the book-cases which covered
+the room, "long-winded works, the 'Cistercian Menology,' 'Migne's
+Patrology,' dictionaries of the lives of the saints, manuals of sacred
+interpretation, canon law, Christian apology, Biblical exegesis, the
+complete works of Saint Thomas, tools of work which we rarely employ,
+for as you know we are a branch of the Benedictine trunk vowed to a life
+of bodily labour and penance; we are men of sorrow for God, above all
+things. Here is M. Bruno, who uses these books; so do I at times, for I
+have special charge of spiritual matters in this monastery," added the
+monk with a smile.
+
+Durtal looked at him; he handled the volumes with caressing hands,
+brooded over them with the blue lustre of his eye, laughed with the joy
+of a child as he turned their pages.
+
+"What a difference between this monk who evidently adores his books, and
+the prior with his imperious profile and silent lips who heard his
+confession the second day;" then thinking of all these Trappists, the
+severity of their countenances, the joy of their eyes, Durtal said to
+himself that these Cistercians were not at all as the world believed,
+solemn and funereal people, but that, quite the contrary, they were the
+gayest of men.
+
+"Now," said Father Maximin, "the reverend Father abbot has charged me
+with a commission; knowing that you will leave us to-morrow, he is
+anxious, now that he is better, to pass at least some minutes with you.
+He will be free this evening: will it trouble you to join him after
+Compline?"
+
+"Not at all; I shall be glad to talk with Dom Anselm."
+
+"That is understood, then."
+
+They went downstairs. Durtal thanked the prior, who re-entered the
+enclosure of the corridors, and the oblate, who went up to his cell. He
+trifled about, and in spite of the torment of his departure, which
+haunted him, reached the evening without too much trouble.
+
+The "Salve Regina," which he heard perhaps for the last time thus sung
+by male voices; that airy chapel built of sound, and evaporating with
+the close of the antiphon, in the smoke of the tapers, stirred him to
+the bottom of his soul; the Trappist monastery showed itself truly
+charming this evening. After the office, they said the Rosary, not as at
+Paris, where they recite a Pater, ten Aves, and a Gloria, and so over
+again; here they said in Latin a Pater, an Ave, a Gloria, and began
+again till in that manner they had finished several decades.
+
+This rosary was said on their knees, half by the prior, half by all the
+monks. It went at so rapid a pace that it was scarcely possible to
+distinguish the words, but as soon as it was ended, at a signal there
+was a great silence, and each one prayed with his head in his hands.
+
+And Durtal took notice of the ingenious system of conventual prayers:
+after the prayers purely vocal like these, came mental prayer, personal
+petitions, stimulated and set a-going by the very machine of
+paternosters.
+
+"Nothing is left to chance in religion; every exercise which seems at
+first useless has a reason for its being," he said to himself, as he
+went out into the court. "And the fact is, that the rosary, which seems
+to be only a humming-top of sounds, fulfils an end. It reposes the soul
+wearied with the supplications which it has recited, applying itself to
+them, thinking of them; it hinders it from babbling and reciting to God
+always the same petitions, the same complaints; it allows it to take
+breath, to take rest, in prayers in which it can dispense with
+reflection, and, in fact, the rosary occupies in prayer, those hours of
+fatigue in which one would not pray.... Ah! here is the Father abbot."
+
+The Trappist expressed to him his regret at visiting him only thus for a
+few moments; then after he had answered Durtal, who inquired after the
+state of his health, which he hoped was at last re-established, he
+proposed to him to walk in the garden, and begged him not to
+inconvenience himself by not smoking cigarettes if he had a mind to do
+so.
+
+And the conversation turned on Paris. Dom Anselm asked for some
+information, and ended by saying with a smile, "I see by scraps of
+newspapers which come to me, that society just now is infected with
+socialism. Everyone wishes to solve the famous social question. How does
+that get on?"
+
+"How does that get on? Why, not at all! Unless you can change the souls
+of workmen and masters, and make them disinterested and charitable
+between to-day and to-morrow, in what can you expect these systems to
+end?"
+
+"Well," said the monk, enwrapping the monastery with a gesture, "the
+question is solved here.
+
+"As wages do not exist, all sources of conflicts are suppressed.
+
+"As every task is according to aptitudes and powers, the fathers who are
+not strong-shouldered and big-armed fold the packages of chocolate, or
+make out the bills, and those who are robust dig the ground.
+
+"I add that the equality in our cloisters is such that the prior and the
+abbot have no advantage over the other monks. At table the portions, and
+in the dormitory the paillasses, are identical. The sole profits of the
+abbot consist on the whole in the inevitable cares arising from the
+moral conduct and the temporal administration of an abbey. There is
+therefore no reason why the workmen of a convent should go on strike,"
+concluded the abbot with a smile.
+
+"Yes, but you are minimists, you suppress the family and woman, you live
+on nothing, and expect the only real recompense for your labours after
+death. How can you make the people in the towns understand that?"
+
+"The social system may thus be summed up, as I think: the masters wish
+to profit by the workmen, who in their turn desire to be paid as much as
+possible for as little work as possible. Well, then, there is no way out
+of that."
+
+"Exactly, and there is the sad part of it, for socialism in fact arises
+from kindly ideas, just ideas, and will always run up against egotism
+and gain, against the inevitable breakers of the sins of man.
+
+"And your little chocolate factory gives you at least some income?"
+
+"Yes; that saves us."
+
+The abbot was silent for a second; then he went on,
+
+"You know, sir, how a convent is founded. I take for example our Order.
+A domain and the lands about it are offered the Order on condition that
+it peoples them. The Order takes a handful of its monks, and settles
+them as a swarm on the soil given to it. There its task stops. The grain
+must spring up of itself, or to put it differently, the Trappists,
+severed from their mother-house, must gain their livelihood, and suffice
+for themselves.
+
+"So when we took possession of these buildings we were so poor, that
+from bread to shoes everything was lacking; but we had no anxiety for
+the future, for there is no example in monastic history that Providence
+has not succoured abbeys who trusted in it. Little by little we drew our
+food from the estate, and we learnt useful trades; now we make our
+habits and our shoes; we reap our wheat and make our bread; our material
+existence is therefore assured, but the taxes crush us; therefore we
+have founded this factory, of which the report becomes better from year
+to year.
+
+"In a year or two the building which shelters us, and for want of money
+we have been unable to repair, will tumble down, but if God then allows
+generous souls to come to our aid, perhaps we shall be in a condition to
+build a monastery, which is the wish of all of us; for indeed this hovel
+with its rooms in confusion, and its rotunda-chapel, is painful to us."
+
+The abbot was silent again, then after a pause he said in a low voice,
+speaking to himself,
+
+"It cannot be denied, a convent which has not the look of a cloister is
+an obstacle to vocations; the postulant has need--and this is quite
+natural--to mould himself in surroundings which please him, to encourage
+himself in a church which wraps him round, in a somewhat sombre chapel;
+and to obtain that result you want the Romanesque or Gothic style."
+
+"Ah, yes, indeed. And have you many novices?"
+
+"We have especially many subjects who desire to feel the life of
+Trappists, but the greater part do not succeed in supporting our way of
+life. Beside even the question of knowing whether the vocation of the
+beginners is imaginary or real, we are from the physical point of view
+clearly fixed after a fortnight's trial."
+
+"Eating vegetables only must crush the most robust constitutions; I do
+not even understand how, leading an active life, you can bear it."
+
+"The truth is that bodies obey where souls are resolute. Our ancestors
+endured the life of the Trappists very well. We want souls at the
+present day. I remember that when I made my probation in a Cistercian
+cloister I had no health, and yet had it been necessary I would have
+eaten stones!
+
+"Moreover, the rule will soon be softened," pursued the abbot; "but in
+any case there is a country which, if there should be scarcity, assures
+us a good number of recruits, Holland."
+
+And seeing Durtal's look of astonishment, the father said,
+
+"Yes, in that Protestant country mystic vegetation is flourishing.
+Catholicism is all the more fervent that it is, if not persecuted, at
+least despised, drowned in the mass of Calvinists. Perhaps this belongs
+also to the nature of the soil, to its solitary plains, its silent
+canals, to the very taste of the Dutch for a regular and peaceable life;
+but in that little knot of Catholics the Cistercian vocation is always
+very common."
+
+Durtal looked at the Trappist as he walked majestic and quiet, his head
+buried in his hood, his hands passed under his cincture.
+
+From time to time his eyes grew bright inside his hood, and the amethyst
+which he wore on his finger sparkled in brief flames.
+
+No sound was heard; at this hour the monastery was asleep. Durtal and
+the abbot were walking on the banks of the great pond, where the water
+was alive, it alone wakeful in the slumber of the woods, for the moon,
+which shone in a cloudless sky, sowed a myriad of goldfish, and this
+luminous spawn, fallen from the planet, mounted, descended, sparkled in
+a thousand little points of fire, of which the wind as it blew increased
+the brightness.
+
+The abbot spoke no longer, and Durtal, who was thinking, intoxicated by
+the sweetness of the night, groaned suddenly. He had just considered
+that at this same hour the next day he would be at Paris, and seeing the
+monastery, whose pale front appeared at the end of a walk as at the end
+of a dark tunnel, he cried, thinking of all the monks who inhabited it,
+
+"Ah! they are happy!"
+
+And the abbot answered, "Too happy."
+
+Then gently, in a low voice,
+
+"Yes, it is true we enter here to do penance, to mortify ourselves, and
+we have hardly begun to suffer when God consoles us. He is so good that
+He Himself wishes to deceive Himself about our merits. If at certain
+moments He allows the Demon to persecute us, He gives us in exchange so
+much happiness that there is no proportion preserved between the
+recompense and the sorrow. Sometimes when I think of it, I ask myself
+how there still subsists that equilibrium that nuns and monks are
+charged to maintain, since neither of us suffer enough to neutralize the
+repeated sins of towns?"
+
+The abbot stopped, and then went on pensively,
+
+"The world does not even conceive that the austerity of the abbeys can
+profit it. The doctrine of mystical compensation escapes it entirely. It
+cannot represent to itself that the substitution of the innocent for the
+guilty is necessary when to suffer merited punishment is concerned. Nor
+does it explain to itself any more that in wishing to suffer for others,
+monks turn aside the wrath of heaven, and establish a solidarity in the
+good which is a counter-weight against the federation of evil. God
+knows, moreover, with what cataclysms the unconscious world would be
+menaced, if in consequence of a sudden disappearance of all the
+cloisters, the equilibrium which saves it were broken."
+
+"The case has already presented itself," said Durtal, who while
+listening to the Trappist thought of the Abbe Gevresin, and remembered
+how that priest had expressed himself on the same subject in nearly
+similar terms. "The Revolution, in fact, suppressed all convents with
+one stroke of a pen, but I think that the history of that time when so
+many hucksters were busy is still to be written. Instead of searching
+for documents on the acts, and even on the persons of the Jacobins, the
+archives of the religious orders which existed at that time should be
+ransacked.
+
+"In working thus at the side of the Revolution, in sounding its
+neighbourhood, its foundations will be exhumed. Its causes will be
+brought to the surface, and it will certainly be discovered that in
+proportion to the suppression of convents, monstrous excesses had birth.
+Who knows if the demoniacal madness of Carrier or Marat do not accord
+with the death of an abbey whose sanctity preserved France for years."
+
+"To be just," answered the abbot, "it is right to say that the
+Revolution destroyed ruins only. The rule of _in commendam_ ended by
+giving the monasteries over to Satan. It was they, alas! that by the
+relaxation of their morals, inclined the balance, and drew down the
+lightning on the land.
+
+"The Terror was only a consequence of their impiety. God, whom nothing
+longer withheld, let things take their course."
+
+"Yes; but how can you now prove the necessity of compensations to a
+world which wanders out of the way in continued accesses of gain; how
+persuade it that it is an urgent need, as a preventive against new
+crises, to shelter towns behind the sacred bulwarks of cloisters?
+
+"After the siege of 1870, Paris was wisely sheltered behind an immense
+net of impregnable forts; but is it not also indispensable to surround
+it with a cincture of prayers, to buttress its neighbourhood with
+conventual houses, to build everywhere in its suburbs convents of Poor
+Clares, Carmelites, Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament,
+monasteries which will be in some degree powerful citadels, destined to
+arrest the forward march of the armies of evil?
+
+"Certainly the towns have great need of being guaranteed against
+infernal invasions by a sanitary defence of Orders.... But come, sir, I
+must not deprive you of necessary rest, I will join you to-morrow,
+before you quit our solitude. I have now but to say that you have only
+friends here, and that you will be always welcome. I hope that on your
+side you will keep no unfavourable memory of our poor hospitality, and
+that you will prove it in coming to see us again."
+
+As they talked they had come in front of the guest-house.
+
+The father pressed Durtal's hands, and slowly ascended the stairs,
+sweeping with his robe the silver dust of the steps, as he mounted, all
+white, in a ray of the moon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+Durtal wished immediately after Mass to visit for the last time that
+wood through which he had walked, in turn so languidly and so rapidly.
+He went at first to the old lime alley, whose pale emanations were
+verily for his spirit what an infusion of their leaves is for the body,
+a sort of very weak panacea, a kindly and soothing sedative.
+
+Then he sat down in their shade on a stone bench. As he leant forward a
+little he could see through the moving spaces in the branches, the
+solemn front of the abbey, and opposite it, separated by the kitchen
+garden, the gigantic cross standing before that liquid plan of a church
+which the pond simulated.
+
+He rose, and approached the watery cross, of which the sky turned the
+marble water blue, and he contemplated the great crucifix in white
+marble, which towered above the whole monastery, and seemed to rise
+opposite to it as a permanent reminder of the vows of suffering which he
+had accepted, and reserved to himself to change at length into joys.
+
+"The fact is," said Durtal, who thought over again the contradictory
+declarations of the monks, confessing that they led at once the most
+attractive and the most atrocious life; "the fact is that the good God
+deceives them. They attain here below Paradise, while they seek hell
+there. I have myself tasted how strange is existence in this cloister,
+for I have been here, almost at the same time, very unhappy and very
+happy; and now I feel well the mirage which is already beginning: before
+two days are over the remembrance of the sorrows which then were, if I
+recall them with care, greatly above the joys, will have disappeared,
+and I shall only recall those interior emotions in the chapel, those
+delicious stolen moments in the morning in the pathways of the park.
+
+"I shall regret the open-air prison of this convent. It is curious I
+find myself attached to it by obscure bonds; when I am in my cell, there
+return to me all kinds of memories, like those of an ancient race. I
+find myself at once at home again, in a place I had never seen; I
+recognize from the first moment a very special life, of which
+nevertheless I know nothing. It seems to me that something which
+interests me, which is indeed personal to me, passed here before I was
+born. Truly, if I believed in metempsychosis I might imagine I had been
+a monk in anterior existences; a bad monk then," he said, smiling at his
+reflections, "since I should have been obliged to be reincarnate and to
+return to a cloister to expiate my sins."
+
+While thus talking with himself, he had passed across a long alley which
+led to the end of the enclosure, and, cutting across the road, and
+through the thickets, he strayed into the wood of the great pond.
+
+It was not in motion, as on certain days when the wind made hollows in
+it, and swelled it, made it flow and return on itself as soon as it
+touched its banks. It remained immovable, and was only stirred by the
+reflections of the moving clouds and of the trees. At moments a leaf
+fallen from the neighbouring poplars swam on the image of a cloud, at
+others bubbles of air came from the bottom and burst on the surface in
+the reflected blue of heaven.
+
+Durtal looked for the otter, but it did not show itself; he saw only the
+swallows which skimmed the water with their wing, the dragon-flies which
+sparkled like jewels, flashing like the blue flames of sulphur.
+
+If he had suffered near the cross-pond, before the sheet of water of the
+other pond he could only call up the memory of healing hours, which he
+had passed lying on a bed of moss, or a couch of dry reeds, and he
+looked at it tenderly, trying to fix and carry it away in his memory to
+re-live again in Paris, shutting his eyes on the bank.
+
+He pursued his walk, and stopped in an alley of chestnuts along the
+walls above the monastery; thence he went into the court in front of the
+cloister, the outbuildings, the stables, the woodsheds, even the
+pig-styes. He tried to see Brother Simeon, but he was probably engaged
+in the stables, for he did not appear. The buildings were silent, the
+pigs were shut up; only some lean cats prowled about in silence,
+scarcely looking when they met each other, going each on its own side,
+no doubt seeking some nourishing game which would console them for the
+eternal meals of vegetable soup served them at the monastery.
+
+Time was getting on; he prayed for the last time in the chapel, and went
+to his cell to get his portmanteau ready.
+
+While putting his things in order he thought of the inutility of
+decorated rooms. He had spent all his money at Paris in buying ornaments
+and books, for till now he had detested bare walls.
+
+But now, considering the blank walls of this room, he admitted to
+himself that he had done better between these four white-washed walls
+than in his room at Paris, hung with stuffs.
+
+Suddenly he recognized that La Trappe had weaned him from his
+preferences, had in a few days completely upset him. "The power of such
+an environment!" he said to himself, a little alarmed at feeling how he
+was transformed. And he thought in buckling his portmanteau, "I must
+however, go and find Father Etienne, for I must settle my account; I
+cannot be altogether a debtor to these good people."
+
+He went along the corridors, and ended by meeting the father in the
+court.
+
+He was a little confused how to open the question; at the first words
+the guest-master smiled.
+
+"The rule of Saint Benedict is formal," he said; "we must receive our
+guests as we receive our Lord Jesus Himself, that is to tell you that we
+cannot exchange our poor care for money."
+
+And when Durtal insisted, embarrassed,
+
+"If it does not suit you to have partaken of our meagre pittance without
+paying, do as you please; only the sum which you may give will be
+distributed in coins of ten or twenty sous, to the poor who come each
+morning, often from a great distance, to knock at our monastery gate."
+
+Durtal bowed and handed the money, which he had ready in his pocket, to
+the father, but he inquired if he might not have a word with Father
+Maximin before his departure.
+
+"Certainly; moreover, Father prior would not have let you go without
+shaking hands with you. I will go and make certain if he be free. Wait
+for me in the refectory." And the monk disappeared, and came back a few
+minutes afterwards, preceded by the prior.
+
+"Ah, well," said he, "then you are going to plunge again into the
+hurly-burly?"
+
+"Oh! without any pleasure, Father."
+
+"I understand that. It is so good, is it not, no longer to hear anything
+and to be silent. However, take courage; we will pray for you."
+
+And as Durtal thanked both of them for their kind attentions,
+
+"It is a pleasure to receive a retreatant such as you," cried Father
+Etienne, "nothing repulses you, and you are so exact that you are about
+before the hour: you rendered my task of overseer easy. If all were as
+little exacting and as pliable."
+
+And he admitted that he had given lodging to priests sent by their
+bishops as a penance, ecclesiastics of ill-repute whose complaints about
+food, lodging, the need of rising early in the morning, never ceased.
+
+"If, again," said the prior, "one could hope to recall them to good, to
+send them back healed to their parishes; but no, they go away still more
+rebellious than before, the Devil does not let them alone."
+
+During this conversation a lay brother brought in some dishes covered
+with plates and placed them on the table.
+
+"We have changed the hour of your dinner, because of the train," said
+Father Etienne.
+
+"Good appetite, adieu, and may the Lord bless you," said the prior.
+
+He raised his hand, and enwrapped Durtal, with a great sign of the
+cross, who knelt surprised at the sudden emotion in the monk's tone. But
+Father Maximin recovered himself at once, and he bowed to him as M.
+Bruno entered.
+
+The meal was silent; the oblate was visibly distressed at the departure
+of the companion whom he loved, and Durtal looked with a swelling heart
+at the old man, who had so charitably come out of his solitude to give
+him aid.
+
+"Will you not come some day to see me in Paris?" he said.
+
+"No. I have quitted life without any mind to return to it. I am dead to
+the world. I do not wish to see Paris again. I have no wish to live
+again.
+
+"But if God lend me still a few years of existence I hope to see you
+here again, for it is not in vain that one has crossed the threshold of
+mystic asceticism, to verify by one's own experience the reality of the
+requirements which our Lord brings about. Now, as God does not proceed
+by chance, He will certainly finish His work by sifting you as wheat. I
+venture to recommend you to try not to give way, and attempt to die in
+some measure to yourself, in order not to run counter to His plans."
+
+"I know well," said Durtal, "that all is displaced in me, that I am no
+longer the same, but what frightens me is that I am now sure that the
+works of the Teresan school are exact ... then, then ... if one must
+pass-through the cylinders of the rolling mill which Saint John of the
+Cross describes...."
+
+The noise of a carriage in the court interrupted him. M. Bruno went to
+the window and looked out.
+
+"Your luggage is down."
+
+"Yes."
+
+They looked at each other.
+
+"Listen! I would wish indeed to say to you...."
+
+"No, no, do not thank me," cried the oblate. "See, I have never so
+thoroughly understood the misery of my being. Ah! if I had been another
+man, I might, by praying better, have aided you more."
+
+The door opened and Father Etienne declared,
+
+"You have not a minute to lose, if you do not wish to miss the train."
+
+Thus hurried, Durtal had only time to press the hand of his friend, who
+accompanied him to the court. He found waiting a sort of open wagon
+driven by a Trappist, who, below a bald head, and cheeks streaked with
+rose threads, had a great black beard.
+
+Durtal pressed the hands of the guest-master and the oblate for the last
+time, when the Father abbot came in his turn to wish him a safe journey;
+and at the end of the court Durtal perceived two eyes fixed on him,
+those of Brother Anacletus, who, at a distance, said adieu by a slight
+bow, but without other gesture.
+
+Even this poor man, whose eloquent look told of a truly touching
+affection, had a saint's pity for the stranger whom he had seen so
+tumultuous and so sad in the desolate solitude of the wood!
+
+Certainly the stiffness of the rule forbade all show of feeling to these
+monks, but Durtal felt thoroughly that for him they had gone to the
+limit of concessions allowed, and his affliction was great as he cast
+them in parting a last expression of thanks.
+
+And the door of the monastery closed; that door at which he had trembled
+in arriving, and at which he now looked with tears in his eyes.
+
+"We must get on fast," said the procurator, "for we are late," and the
+horse went at a great speed along the lanes.
+
+Durtal recognized his companion, as having seen him in the chapel,
+singing in the choir during the Office.
+
+He had an air at once good-natured and firm, and his little grey eye
+smiled as it glanced behind his branched spectacles.
+
+"Well," said he, "how have you borne our regimen?"
+
+"I have had every chance; I came herewith my stomach out of order, my
+body ill, and the simple Trappist meals have cured me."
+
+And when Durtal narrated briefly the stages of soul he had undergone,
+the monk murmured,
+
+"That is nothing in regard to demoniacal attacks; we have had here true
+cases of possession."
+
+"And Brother Simeon discovered them!"
+
+"Ah! you know that...." And he replied quite simply to Durtal, who spoke
+to him of his admiration for the poor lay brothers,
+
+"You are right, sir; if you could talk with these peasants and
+illiterate men, you would be surprised at the often profound answers
+which these people give you; then they alone at the monastery are really
+courageous; we, the Fathers, when we think ourselves too weak, accept
+willingly the authorized addition of an egg; they never; they pray more,
+and it must be admitted that our Lord listens to them, since they get
+well again, and indeed are never ill."
+
+And to a question of Durtal who asked him in what consisted the
+functions of procurator, the monk answered,
+
+"They consist in keeping the accounts, in being the commercial agent, in
+travelling, in managing, alas! everything which does not concern the
+life of the cloister; but we are so few in number at Notre Dame de
+l'Atre, that we become necessarily Jacks-of-all-trades. For instance,
+Father Etienne is cellarer of the Abbey and guest-master, he is also
+sacristan and bell-ringer. I too, am first cantor and professor of plain
+song."
+
+And while the carriage rolled along, shaken by the ruts, the procurator
+declared to Durtal, who told him how much the offices chanted at the
+monastery had delighted him,
+
+"It is not with us that you ought to hear them; our choirs are too
+restricted, too weak to be able to raise the giant mass of those chants.
+You ought to go to the black monks of Solesmes or Liguge if you wish to
+find the Gregorian melodies executed as they were in the Middle Ages. By
+the way, do you know in Paris, the Benedictine nuns in the Rue
+Monsieur?"
+
+"Yes; but do you not think they coo a little?"
+
+"I cannot say; all the same their collection of tunes is authentic, but
+at the little seminary at Versailles, you have better still, since they
+chant there exactly as at Solesmes; note this well, moreover, at Paris,
+when the churches decline to repudiate liturgical music, they use for
+the most part the false notation printed and spread in abundance in all
+the dioceses in France by the house of Pustet of Ratisbon."
+
+"But the errors and frauds with which those editions abound are well
+known."
+
+"The legend on which its partisans rely is incorrect. To assert, as they
+do, that this version is no other than that of Palestrina who was
+charged by Pope Paul V. to revive the musical liturgy of the Church, is
+an argument destitute of truth and void of force, for everyone knows
+that when Palestrina died, he had hardly begun the correction of the
+Gradual.
+
+"I will add that even if that musician had finished his work, that would
+not prove that his interpretation ought to be preferred to that which
+has been recently constituted after patient researches by the Abbey of
+Solesmes, for the Benedictine texts are based on the copy preserved at
+the monastery of St. Gall of the antiphonary of Saint Gregory, which
+represents the most ancient and the most certain monument which the
+Church preserves of the true plain chant.
+
+"This manuscript, of which photographic facsimiles exist, is the code of
+Gregorian melodies, and it ought to be, if I may use the expression, the
+neumatic Bible of choirs.
+
+"The disciples of Saint Benedict are then absolutely right when they
+declare that their version alone is faithful, alone correct."
+
+"How then comes it that so many churches get their music from Ratisbon?"
+
+"Alas, how comes it that Pustet has so long acquired the monopoly of
+liturgical books, and ... but no, better hold one's peace ... take this
+only for certain, that the German volumes are the absolute negation of
+the Gregorian tradition, the most complete heresy of plain chant."
+
+"By the way, what time is it? We must make haste," said the procurator,
+looking at the watch which Durtal held up to him. "Come up, my beauty,"
+and he whipped up the mare.
+
+"You drive with spirit," cried Durtal.
+
+"It is true; I forgot to say to you, that over and above my other
+functions, I also have, if need be, that of coachman."
+
+Durtal thought all the same that these people were extraordinary who
+lived an interior life in God. As soon as they consented to redescend on
+earth they revealed themselves as the most sagacious and the boldest of
+business men. An abbot founded a factory with the few pence he succeeded
+in gathering; he discerned the employment which suited each of his
+monks, and with them he improvised artisans, writing clerks, transformed
+a professor of plain chant into an agent, plunged into the tumult of
+purchases and sales, and little by little the house which scarcely was
+raised above the soil, grew, put forth shoots, and ended by nourishing
+with its fruit the abbey which had planted it.
+
+Transported into another environment these people would have as easily
+created great manufactories and started banks. And it was the same with
+the women. When one thinks of the practical qualities of a man of
+business, and the coolness of an old diplomatist which a mother abbess
+ought to possess in order to rule her community, one is obliged to admit
+that the only women, truly intelligent, truly remarkable are, outside of
+drawing-rooms, outside of the world, at the head of cloisters.
+
+And as he expressed his wonder aloud, that monks were so expert at
+setting up business.
+
+"It must be so," sighed the father, "but if you believe that we do not
+regret the time necessarily spent in digging the ground! then our spirit
+at least was free, then we could sanctify ourselves in silence which to
+a monk is as necessary as bread, for it is thanks to it, that he stifles
+vanity as it rises, that he represses disobedience as it murmurs, that
+he turns all his aspirations, all his thoughts towards God, and becomes
+at last attentive to His presence.
+
+"Instead of that ... but here we are at the station; do not trouble
+yourself about your portmanteau, but go and take your ticket, for I hear
+the whistle of the train."
+
+And in fact Durtal had only time to shake hands with the father, who put
+his luggage into the carriage.
+
+There, when he was alone, seated, looking at the monk as he departed, he
+felt his heart swell, ready to break.
+
+And in the clatter of the rails the train started.
+
+Sharply, clearly, in a minute, Durtal took stock of the frightful
+disorder into which he had thrown the monastery.
+
+"Ah! and outside it, all is the same to me, and nothing matters to me,"
+he cried. And he groaned, knowing that he should never more succeed in
+interesting himself in all that makes the joy of men. The uselessness of
+caring about any other thing than Mysticism and the liturgy, of thinking
+about aught else save God, implanted itself in him so firmly that he
+asked himself what would become of him at Paris with such ideas.
+
+He saw himself submitting to the confusion of controversies, the
+cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of
+proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of
+everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute or hold
+his tongue?
+
+In any case peace was for ever lost. How in fact was he to rally and
+recover when he was obliged to dwell in a place of passage, in a soul
+open to all winds, visited by a crowd of public thoughts?
+
+His contempt for relations, his disgust for acquaintances grew on him.
+"No, everything rather than mix myself again with society," he declared
+to himself, and then he was silent in despair, for he was not ignorant
+that he could not, apart from the monastic zone, live in isolation.
+After a short time would come weariness and a void, therefore why had
+he reserved nothing for himself, why had he trusted all to the cloister?
+He had not even known how to arrange the pleasure of entering into
+himself, he had discovered how to lose the amusement of bric-a-brac, how
+to extirpate that last satisfaction in the white nakedness of a cell! he
+no longer held to anything, but lay dismantled, saying, "I have
+renounced almost all the happiness which might fall to me, and what am I
+going to put in its place?"
+
+And terrified, he perceived the disquiet of a conscience ready to
+torment itself, the permanent reproaches of an acquired lukewarmness,
+the apprehensions of doubts against Faith, fear of furious clamours of
+the senses stirred by chance meetings.
+
+And he repeated to himself that the most difficult thing would not be to
+master the emotions of his flesh, but indeed to live Christianly, to
+confess, to communicate at Paris, in a church. He never could get so far
+as that, and he imagined discussions with the Abbe Gevresin, his gaining
+time, his refusal, foreseeing that their friendship would come to an end
+in these disputes.
+
+Then where should he fly? At the very recollection of the Trappist
+monastery the theatrical representations of St. Sulpice made him jump.
+St. Severin seemed to him distracted and worn. How could he live among
+stupid people like the devout, how listen without gnashing his teeth to
+the affected chants of the choirs? How, lastly, could he seek again in
+the chapel of the Benedictine nuns, and even at Notre Dame des
+Victoires, that dull heat radiating from the souls of the monks, and
+thawing little by little the ice of his poor being?
+
+And then it was not even that. What was truly crushing, truly dreadful,
+was to think that doubtless he would never again feel that admirable joy
+which lifts you from the ground, carries you, you know not where, nor
+how, above sense.
+
+Ah, those paths at the monastery wandered in at daybreak, those paths
+where one day after a communion, God had dilated his soul in such a
+fashion that it seemed no longer his own, so much had Christ plunged him
+in the sea of His divine infinity, swallowed him in the heavenly
+firmament of His person.
+
+How renew that state of grace without communion and outside a cloister?
+"No; it is all over," he concluded.
+
+And he was seized with such an access of sadness, such an outburst of
+despair, that he thought of getting out at the first station, and
+returning to the monastery; and he had to shrug his shoulders, for his
+character was not patient enough nor his will firm enough, nor his body
+strong enough to support the terrible trials of a noviciate. Moreover,
+the prospect of having no cell to himself, of sleeping dressed
+higgledy-piggledy in a dormitory, alarmed him.
+
+But what then? And sadly he took stock of himself.
+
+"Ah!" he thought, "I have lived twenty years in ten days in that
+convent, and I leave it, my brain relaxed, my heart in rags; I am done
+for, for ever. Paris and Notre Dame de l'Atre have rejected me each in
+their turn like a waif, and here I am condemned to live apart, for I am
+still too much a man of letters to become a monk, and yet I am already
+too much a monk to remain among men of letters."
+
+He leapt up and was silent, dazzled by jets of electric light which
+flooded him as the train stopped.
+
+He had returned to Paris.
+
+"If they," he said, thinking of those writers whom it would no doubt be
+difficult not to see again, "if they knew how inferior they are to the
+lowest of the lay brothers! if they could imagine how the divine
+intoxication of a Trappist swine-herd interests me more than all their
+conversations and all their books! Ah! Lord, that I might live, live in
+the shadow of the prayers of humble Brother Simeon!"
+
+
+
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