Durtal looked on in transport. He desired to cry aloud his enthusiasm and his Faith to the landscape; he felt a joy in living. The horror of existence counted for nothing when there were such moments, as no earthly happiness can give. God alone had the power of thus filling a soul, of making it overflow, and rush in floods of joy; and He alone could also fill the basin of sorrows, as no event in this world could do. Durtal had just tried it; his spiritual sufferings and joys attained under the divine imprint an acuteness, which people most humanly happy or unhappy cannot even suspect.
This idea brought him back to the terrible distresses of the evening before. He endeavoured to sum up what he had been able to observe of himself in this Trappist monastery.
First, the clear distinction between body and soul; then the action of the demon, insinuating and obstinate, almost visible, while the heavenly action remained, on the contrary, dull and veiled, appeared only at certain moments, and seemed at others to vanish for ever.
And all this, when felt and understood, had an appearance simple in itself, but scarcely explaining itself. The body appearing to throw itself forward to the rescue of the soul, and no doubt borrowing from it its will, to help it when it fainted, was unintelligible. How a body could itself react obscurely, and yet show, all at once, so strong a decision that it pressed its companion into a vice, and prevented its flight—
"It is as mysterious as the rest," thought Durtal, and as in a dream he continued,
"The secret action of Jesus in His Sacrament is not less strange. If I may judge by what has happened to me; a first communion exasperates the action of the devil, while a second represses it.
"Ah, and how I put myself in line with all my calculations! In taking shelter here I thought myself pretty sure of my soul, and that my body would trouble me; whereas just the contrary has been the case.
"My stomach has grown vigorous and shown itself fit to support an effort of which I should never have thought it capable, and my soul has been below everything, vacillating and dry, so fragile, so feeble!
"But we will let all that alone."
He walked about, lifted from earth by a confused joy. He grew vaporized in a sort of intoxication, in a vague etherization, in which arose, without his even thinking of formulating words, acts of thanksgiving; it was an effort of thanks of his soul, of his body, of his whole being, to that God whom he felt living in him, and diffused in that kneeling landscape which also seemed to expand in mute hymns of gratitude.