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Rather vexed at being left here, away from the centre of activity, Durtal noticed that there were many women and few men present, but his efforts to discover their features were unavailing. As here and there a lamp swayed, he occasionally caught sight of a Junonian brunette, then of a smooth-shaven, melancholy man. He observed that the women were not chattering to each other.
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.
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."
In 1811 one Abbé Denis revived it at Azérables in la Creuse, and since then it has struggled on for better for worse, scattered through about fifteen houses, one of these at Texas in the New World. "There is no doubt of it," Durtal concluded; "we are far enough from the strong sap which Saint Theresa and Saint Clare could infuse into the centennial growth of their mighty trees!
"But," said Durtal, somewhat disappointed, "it isn't what shall I say? very profound." The door opened. "Why, how are you!" said Carhaix, shaking hands with Gévingey, and then introducing him to Durtal. While the bell-ringer's wife finished setting the table, Durtal examined the newcomer.
And though that meat had a taste of flannel, Durtal had nodded a sketchy affirmative, knowing full well that if he ventured on the least comment he would have to endure an incoherent harangue on all the butchers in the town.
One divined in his look the cool, unscrupulous man of affairs, capable, for all his honeyed ways, of doing one a bad turn. "He must be aching to throw me into the street," said Durtal to himself, "because he certainly knows all about his wife's goings-on." But if Chantelouve wished to be rid of his guest he did not show it.
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.
"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.
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.
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