"How good it smells!" said Durtal, drinking in the incisive tang of the herring. "Do you know what this perfume suggests? A basket funnelled fireplace, twigs of juniper snapping in it, in a ground-floor room opening on to a great harbour. It seems to me there is a sort of salt water halo around these little rings of gold and rusted iron.—Exquisite," he said as he tasted the salad.
"We'll make it again for you, Monsieur Durtal," said Mme. Carhaix, "you are not hard to please."
"Alas!" said her husband, "his palate isn't, but his soul is. When I think of his despairing aphorisms of the other night! However, we are praying God to enlighten him. I'll tell you," he said to his wife, "we will invoke Saint Nolasque and Saint Theodulus, who are always represented with bells. They sort of belong to the family, and they will certainly be glad to intercede for people who revere them and their emblems."
"It would take a stunning miracle to convince Durtal," said Des Hermies.
"Bells have been known to perform them," said the astrologer. "I remember to have read, though I forget where, that angels tolled the knell when Saint Isidro of Madrid was dying."
"And there are many other cases," said Carhaix. "Of
their own accord the bells chimed when Saint Sigisbert chanted the De Profundis over the corpse of the martyr Placidus, and when the body of Saint Ennemond, Bishop of Lyons, was thrown by his murderers into a boat without oars or sails, the bells rang out, though nobody set them in motion, as the boat passed down the Saône."
"Do you know what I think?" asked Des Hermies, looking at Carhaix. "I think you ought to prepare a compendium of hagiography or a really informative work on heraldry."
"What makes you think that?"
"Well, you are, thank God, remote from this epoch and fond of things which it knows nothing about or execrates, and a work of that kind would take you still further away. My good friend, you are the man forever unintelligible to the coming generations. To ring bells because you love them, to give yourself over to the abandoned study of feudal art or monasticism would make you complete—take you clear out of Paris, out of the world, back into the Middle Ages."