Croniamantal accepted joyfully, saying:
"I shall be very glad to come, for aren't you brothers to me, who am a poet."
They began to laugh. The oldest, who wore a gold-framed lorgnon and whose belly puffed out of his fashionable waistcoat, raised his arms and cried:
"A poet! Is it possible!"
And the two others, who were thinner, choked with laughter, bending down and holding their bellies as if they had the colic.
"Let us be serious," said the monk with the lorgnon, "we are going to pass through a street inhabited by the Jews."
In the streets, at every step, old women standing like pines in a forest, called them, making signals.
"Let us flee from this stench," said the fat monk, who was a Czech and who was called Father Karel by his companions.
Croniamantal and the monks stopped at last before a great convent door. At the sound of the bell the porter came to let them in. The two thin monks said good-bye to Croniamantal, who remained alone with Father Karel in a parlor that was richly furnished.
"My child," said Father Karel, "you are in a unique convent. The monks who inhabit it are all very proper people. We have old archdukes, and even former architects, soldiers, scientists, poets, inventors, a few monks expelled from France, and some lay guests of good breeding. All of them are saints. I, myself, such as you see me, with my lorgnon and my pot-belly, am a saint. I shall show you your room, where you may stay until nine o'clock; then you will hear the bell ring and I shall come to look for you."