It was monstrous, and it must really be that these curés have lost, not the sense of art, for that they never had, but the most elementary sense of the liturgy, to accept such heresies, and tolerate such outrages in their churches.
These thoughts enraged Durtal, but he returned little by little to Notre Dame des Victoires and grew calmer. It was well he should examine it under all aspects, but it remained none the less mysterious nor the less unique in Paris.
At La Salette, at Lourdes, there have been apparitions. "Whether these have been authentic or controverted matters little," he thought. "For even supposing Our Lady were not there at the moment her coming was announced, she was attracted there, and dwells there now, retained there by the tide of prayer and the emanations cast up by the faith of crowds. Miracles have happened there; it is therefore not astonishing that pious crowds flock thither. But here at Notre Dame des Victoires has been no apparition; no Mélanie, no Bernadette, have seen and described the luminous appearance of a 'beautiful Lady.' There are no piscinas, no medical staff, no public cures, no mountain top, no grotto, nothing. One fine day in 1836 the curé of the parish, the Abbé Dufriche Des Genettes, declared that while he was celebrating mass Our Lady manifested to him her desire that the sanctuary should be specially consecrated to her, and that alone was enough. The church, then a desert, has never since been empty, and thousands of ex votos declare the graces which since that day the Madonna has accorded to the visitors."
"Yes, but in fact," concluded Durtal, "all these suppliants are not specially extraordinary souls, for indeed the most part of them are like me, they come in their own interests, for themselves and not for Her."
And he remembered the answer of the Abbé Gévresin, to whom he had already made the observation.
"You must be singularly far advanced on the road to perfection if you go there for Her only."
Suddenly, after so many hours spent in the chapels, there was a reaction; the flesh extinguished under the cinders of prayers took fire, and the conflagration, springing up from below, became terrible.
Florence seemed present, to Durtal's imagination, at his lodgings, in the churches, in the street, everywhere, and he was constantly on the watch against her recurrent attractions.
The weather was mixed up with it all; the heaven broke up, a stormy summer raged, shattering the nerves, enfeebling the will, letting the awakened troop of vices loose in their gloomy moisture. Durtal blenched before the dread of long evenings and the abominable melancholy of days that never ended. At eight o'clock in the evening the sun had not set, and at three in the morning it seemed to wake again; the week was only one uninterrupted day, and life was never arrested.
Oppressed by the ignominy of this angry sunshine and these blue skies, disgusted at bathing in Niles of sweat, and feeling Niagaras run from his hat, he did not stir from home, and then, in his solitude, foul thoughts assailed him.