"Listen, since you are so well broken in to the life at La Trappe, stay here two days more. The Father procurator must go to settle a dispute at Saint Landry. He will take you to the station in our carriage. So you will avoid some expense, and the journey hence to the railroad will seem to you less long, since there will be two of you."
Durtal accepted, and as it rained, he went up to his room. "It is strange," he said, as he sat down, "how impossible one finds it in a cloister to read a book; one wants nothing, one thinks of God by Himself, and not by the volumes which speak about Him."
Mechanically he had taken up from a heap of books one in octavo, which he had found on his table the day he took possession of his cell; it bore the title "Manresa," or the "Spiritual Exercises" of Ignatius of Loyola.
He had already run through the work at Paris, and the pages which he turned over afresh did not change the harsh, almost hostile, opinion which he had retained of this book.
The fact is that these exercises leave no initiative to the soul; they consider it as a soft paste good to run into a mould; they show it no horizon, no sky. Instead of trying to stretch it, and make it greater, they make it smaller deliberately; they put it back into the cases of their wafer box, nourish it only on faded trifles, on dry nothings.
This Japanese culture of deformed toes which remain dwarf; this Chinese deformation of children planted in pots, horrified Durtal, who closed the volume.
He opened another, the "Introduction to the Devout Life," by Saint Francis de Sales.
Certainly he found no need to read it again, in spite of its affectations, and its good nature, at first charming, but which ends by making you sick, by making the soul sticky with sweets with liqueurs in them, and lollypops; in a word, that work so much praised by Catholics was a julep scented with bergamot and ambergris. It was like a fine handkerchief shaken in a church in which a musty smell of incense remained.
But the man himself, the Bishop Saint Francis de Sales, was suggestive; with his name was called up the whole mystical history of the seventeenth century.
And Durtal recalled the memories he had kept of the religious life of that time. There were then in the Church two currents: