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It was regularly striped with waving lines of ebony, its paws were encircled by black bracelets and its eyes lengthened by two great zigzags of ink. "In spite of your kill-joy character and your single track mind you testy, old bachelor, you are a very nice cat," said Durtal, in an insinuating, wheedling tone. "Then too, for many years now, I have told you what one tells no man.
The cat, rising suddenly, galloped across the counterpane and rolled itself up into the warm covers, without waiting an instant longer. "How cold it is!" and Durtal slipped on a knit jacket and went into the other room to start a fire. "I shall freeze!" he murmured. Fortunately his apartment was easy to heat.
That morning, in the dawn of a rainy autumn day, lashed by a bitter north wind, Durtal, shivering and ill at ease, left the terrace and took refuge in the more sheltered walks, going down presently into a garden-slope where the brushwood afforded some little protection from the wind; these shrubberies wandered at random down the hill, and an inextricable tangle of blackberries clung with the cat's-claws of their long shoots to the saplings that were scattered about.
"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?"
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.
"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.
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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