There he could laugh and not be ashamed. The forecourt was packed full of priests. All the superiors of the different Archdeaconries—Chartres, Châteaudun, Nogent le Rotrou, and Dreux—had left there, within the great gate, their following of parish priests and curés, who were pacing round and round the green circus of a grass plot.
The big-wigs of the town, not at all less ridiculous than the pensioners of the Little Sisters of the Poor, crowded in, driving the ecclesiastics into the garden walks. Teratology seemed to have emptied out its specimen bottles; it was a seething swarm of human larvæ, of strange heads—bullet-shaped, egg-shaped, faces as seen through a bottle or in a distorting mirror, or escaped from one of Redon's grotesque albums; a perfect museum of monsters on the move. The stagnation of monotonous toil, handed down for generations from father to son in a city of the dead, was stamped on every face, and the Sunday-best festivity of the day added a touch of the absurd to hereditary ugliness.
Every black coat in Chartres had come out to take the air. Some dated from the days of the Directory, swallowed up the wearer's neck, climbed up high behind the nape, muffled the ears and padded the shoulders; others had shrunk by lying in the drawer, and their sleeves, much too short, cut the wearer round the armholes so that he dared not move.
A miasma of benzine and camphor exhaled from these groups. The clothes, only that morning taken out of pickle to be aired by the good wife, were pestilential. The stove-pipe hats were to match. Left to themselves on wardrobe shelves, they had surely grown taller; they towered immense, displaying on their mill-board column a thin covering of hairs.
This assembly of worthies admired and congratulated each other; clasped hands encased in white gloves—gloves scoured with paraffin, cleaned with indiarubber or breadcrumb. Presently a retiring wave cleared a space in the crowd of priests and laymen, who shrank back hat in hand to make way for an old hearse of a landau, drawn by a consumptive horse and driven by a sort of Moudjik, a coachman with a puffy face behind a thicket of hair sprouting on his cheeks and his mouth, in his ears and nose. This
vehicle came to an anchor before the front steps, and out of it stepped a fat man, blown out like a bladder and buttoned up in an uniform with silver lace; after him came a thinner personage in a coat with facings of dark and light blue, and everybody bowed to the Préfet attended by one of his three Councillors.
They had lifted their plumed cocked hats, distributed a dole of hand-shaking, and vanished into the vestibule when the army made its appearance, represented by a Colonel of Cuirassiers, some officers of the Artillery and the Commissariat, a few subalterns of Infantry, and one gendarme.
This was all.
Within an hour of this reception the exhausted town was asleep again, not having energy enough even to remove the poles; Lazarus had gone back to his sepulchre, the resuscitated antiquities had relapsed into death; the streets were empty; reaction had ensued; Chartres would be exhausted for months by this outbreak.
"What a sty it is! What a hole!" cried Durtal to himself.