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"'All my old ties are broken, he said, as he parted from me. He was so sad that I had not the heart to question him further." There was a silence. Carhaix went up to his tower to ring a peal. His wife removed the dessert dishes and the cloth. Des Hermies prepared the coffee. Durtal, pensive, rolled his cigarette.
And when, his arguments exhausted, after a vehement diatribe against provincial life, Durtal ended by saying, "Then at Paris there are the quays, Saint Séverin, Notre Dame; there are delightful convents " "You would find equally good things at Chartres," answered the Abbé.
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.
The same excuse, which had done duty through the ages, served in masking the perfect ignorance of the cheap occultists of the present day. "As a matter of fact, the 'great work' is simple," said Durtal to himself, folding up the manuscript of Nicolas Flamel.
"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,
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.
"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.
And he was not humble and pitiable, like his neighbour, the Spanish Deacon, but upright and imperious, with his hand uplifted, in the attitude rather of admonishing the faithful than of blessing them, and Durtal stood lost in thought before this writer, whose brief book holds so important a place in the series of mystical writings.
Even when the devotee most strenuously renounces this world and all its works, when St. Anthony flees into the desert or the pious Durtal wrestles in his cell, when the pale nun prays in vigil and the hermit mounts his pillar, it is Celibacy, that great denial of life, that sings through all their struggle, it is this business of births as the central fact of life they still have most in mind.
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?"
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