Durtal left the church, worn out with these long services, but his temptations to unbelief were gone; he had no further doubt; it seemed to him that at St. Sulpice, grace mixed with the eloquent splendours of the liturgies, and that in the dim sorrow of the voices there had been appeals to him; and he therefore felt filial gratitude to that church where he had lived through hours so sweet and sad.
Yet, in ordinary weeks he did not go there; it seemed to him too great and too cold, and it was so ugly. He preferred warmer and smaller sanctuaries, in which there were still traces of the Middle Ages.
Thus on idle days when he came out of the Louvre, where he had strayed for a long time before the canvases of the Early Painters, he was wont to take refuge in the old church of St. Severin, hidden away in a corner of the poorer part of Paris.
He carried with him the visions of the canvases he had admired at the Louvre, and contemplated them again, in this surrounding where they were thoroughly at home.
Then he spent delightful moments, in which he was carried away in the clouds of harmony, divided by the white splendour of a child's voice flashing out from the rolling thunder of the organ.
There, without even praying, he felt a plaintive languor, a vague uneasiness steal over him; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth of his senses, to weave together the regret and the terror of his soul.
He often went there, especially on Sunday mornings to High Mass at ten o'clock.
He was wont to place himself behind the high altar, in that melancholy and delicate apse, planted like a winter garden with rare and somewhat fantastic trees. It might have been called a petrified arbour of very old trunks in flower, but stripped of leaf, forests of pillars, squared or cut in broad panels, carved with regular notches near the base, hollowed through their whole length like rhubarb stalks, channelled like celery.
No vegetation expanded at the summit of those trunks which bent their naked boughs along the vaulting, joined and met and gathered at their junction, and thin, engrafted knots, extravagant bunches of heraldic roses, armorial flowers with open tracery; and for more than four hundred years no sap had run, no bud had formed in these trees. The shafts bent for ever remained untouched, the white bark of these pillars was scarcely worn, but the greater part of the flowers were withered, the heraldic petals were wanting, some keystones of the arches had only stratified calices, open like nests, with holes like sponges, in rags like handfuls of russet lace.
And among this mystic flora, amid these petrified trees, there was one, strange and charming, which suggested the fanciful idea, that the blue smoke of the rolling incense had condensed, and, as it coagulated, had grown pale with age, to form, in twisting, the spiral of a column which was inverted on itself, and ended broadening out into a sheaf, whereof the broken stems fell from above the arches.