The cotton curtains at the two windows were so thick that the room lay in a pale, chalky dimness like the half-light of a convent cell. It was a very large room, with a lofty ceiling, and a quiet, neat wall-paper of a faded yellow. Mouret ventured forward, advancing with short steps over the tiled floor, which was as smooth and shiny as a mirror, and so cold that he seemed to feel a chill through the soles of his boots. He glanced furtively around him and examined the curtainless iron bedstead, the sheets of which were so straightly stretched that it looked like a block of white stone lying in the corner. The chest of drawers, stowed away at the other end of the room, a little table in the middle, and two chairs, one before each window, completed the furniture. There was not a single paper on the table, not an article of any kind on the chest of drawers, not a garment hanging against the walls. Everything was perfectly bare except that over the chest of drawers there was suspended a big black wooden crucifix, looking like a dark splotch amidst the bare greyness of the room.
'Come this way, sir, will you?' said the Abbé. 'It is in this corner that the ceiling is stained.'
But Mouret did not hurry, he was enjoying himself. Although he saw none of the extraordinary things that he had vaguely expected to see, there seemed to him to be a peculiar odour about the room. It smelt of a priest, he thought; of a man with different ways from other men. But it vexed him that he could see nothing on which he might base some hypothesis carelessly left on any of the pieces of furniture or in any corner of the apartment. The room was just like its provoking occupant, silent, cold, and inscrutable. He was extremely surprised, too, not to find any appearance of poverty as he had expected. On the contrary, the room produced upon him much the same impression as he had felt when he had once entered the richly furnished drawing-room of the prefect of Marseilles. The big crucifix seemed to fill it with its black arms.
Mouret felt, however, that he must go and look at the corner which Abbé Faujas was inviting him to inspect.
'You see the stain, don't you?' asked the priest. 'It has faded a little since yesterday.'
Mouret rose upon tip-toes and strained his eyes, but at first he could see nothing. When the Abbé had drawn back the curtains, he was able to distinguish a slight damp-stain.
'It's nothing very serious,' he said.
'Oh, no! but I thought it would be better to tell you of it. The wet must have soaked through near the edge of the roof.'