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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.
"There are worse than those," said Durtal. "Read the life of Marie Alacoque. You will see that she, to mortify herself, licked up with her tongue the dejections of one sick person and sucked an abscess from the toe of another." "I know, but I must admit that I am less touched than revolted by these tales." "I prefer Saint Lucius the martyr," said Mme. Chantelouve.
"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."
"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
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.
In front of the tabernacle the chalice, covered with a pall, was placed. Durtal recognized beneath the red robe the "fairy" who had guarded the chapel entrance, and he understood the rôle reserved for this man, whose sacrilegious nastiness was substituted for the purity of childhood acceptable to the Church. Then another choir boy, more hideous yet, exhibited himself.
I'd better try and find out whom he has been seeing recently. But as a physician he meets scores of people! And then, how can I explain to him? Tell him the story? He will burst into a roar and disillusion me before I have got halfway through the narrative." And Durtal became irritated, for within him a really incomprehensible phenomenon was taking place. He was burning for this unknown woman.
"No," answered Durtal, stretching. "As a matter of fact I wish it might never be finished. What will become of me when it is? I'll have to look around for another subject, and, when I find one, do all the drudgery of planning and then getting the introductory chapter written the mean part of any literary work is getting started. I shall pass mortal hours doing nothing.
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.
They symbolized the loving tenderness of orisons; they became more trusting, more playful, more daring in the sight of God. "Each and all seemed to smile, as soon as they gave up their dismal skeleton and strove upwards. "The Romanesque, I fancy, must have been born old," Durtal went on after a pause. "At any rate it has always remained gloomy and timid.
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