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Updated: May 24, 2025
Last of all, the still dark side, the late side, to Durtal's right hand and further south, till now wrapped in the half-dispelled morning haze, was lighted up; the shield opposite to that on the north caught the blaze, and below it, against the polished metal of the broad blade facing that which presented the negress queen, appeared a woman of somewhat olive hue, in raiment like the others, of myrtle-green and brown, holding a sceptre, and with her, too, there was a child.
"But the rain has not ceased, and I must nevertheless be gone, for I have a penitent waiting for me," exclaimed the Abbé, looking at his watch. "Will you come the day after to-morrow at about two o'clock? We will hope it may be fine enough to examine the outside of the Cathedral." "And if it still rains?" "Come all the same. But I must fly." He pressed Durtal's hand and was gone.
"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,
He emitted a howl of rage, for he felt her haunches move. He understood now or thought he understood! She wanted a miserly pleasure, a sort of solitary vice.... He pushed her away. She remained there, quite pale, choking, her eyes closed, her hands outstretched like those of a frightened child. Then Durtal's wrath vanished.
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?"
To a sensitively artistic temperament such as Durtal's, the indications of the Church's "style," revealed in her influence upon art, in her creations, in her selections and refusals, would be eloquent of her whole character and ethos; it would be to him what the very tone of Christ's voice was to the Baptist, or what His glance was to Peter, or what His silence was to Pilate.
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?"
"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.
And above that it rose in hermit-like sobriety, unadorned, Cyclopean, with the colossal eye of its dull rose-window between the two towers, one full of windows and richly wrought like the doorway, the other as bare as the façade above the porch. But after all, what absorbed and possessed Durtal's mind was still those statues of queens.
He gave the bell stirrup a last yank with his foot and with a heave of his loins regained his equilibrium. He mopped his brow and smiled down at Des Hermies. "Well! well!" he said, "you here." He descended, and when he learned Durtal's name his face brightened and the two shook hands cordially. "We have been expecting you a long time, monsieur.
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