On certain days, tired of spending his afternoons shut up with his books or of attending service in the cathedral, hearing the canons languidly playing rackets from side to side of the choir with the Psalms, of which they tossed the verses to and fro in a mumbling tone, he would go down after dinner and smoke cigarettes in the little Place. At Chartres, eight o'clock in the evening was as three in the morning in any other town; every light was out, every house closed.
The priesthood, eager for bed, had shut up shop. No prayers to the Virgin, no Benediction, nothing in this cathedral! At such an hour, kneeling in the dark, you feel as if the Mother were more immediately present, nearer, more intimately your own; but these moments of confidence, when it is easier to tell Her all your trivial woes, were unknown at Notre Dame. No one was worn out by midnight prayer in that church!
But though he could not go in, Durtal could prowl round and about it. And then, scarcely seen by the light of the poverty-stricken lamps standing here and there on the square, the cathedral assumed strange aspects. The portals yawned as caverns full of blackness, and the outer
shape of the body of the building, from the towers to the apse, with its abutments and buttresses merely guessed at in the dark, stood up like a cliff worn away by invisible waves. It might have been a mountain, its summit jagged by storms, eaten into deep caverns at the foot by a vanished ocean; and on going nearer he could in the gloom imagine ill-defined paths steeply running up the cliff, or winding on shelves at the edge of a rock; and, occasionally, midway on one of these dark paths, some white statue of a Bishop would start forth under a moonbeam, like a ghost haunting the ruins, and blessing all comers with uplifted fingers of stone.
These wanderings in the precincts of the cathedral, which by daylight was so light and slender, and in the dark seemed so ponderous and threatening, were ill-adapted to cure Durtal of his melancholy.
This illusion of rocks riven by the lightning, of caverns deserted by the waves, plunged him into fresh reveries, and at last threw him back on himself, ending, after many divagations of mind, in the contemplation of the ruin within him. Then once more he sounded his soul, and tried to reduce his thoughts to some sort of order.
"I am simply bored to death," said he to himself, "and why?" And by dint of analyzing his condition he came to this conclusion: "My state of boredom is not simple but two-fold; or, if it is indeed all of a piece, it may be divided into two very distinct phases: I am bored by myself, independently of place, of home, of books; and I am also bored by provincial life—the special form of boredom inherent in Chartres.
"Bored by myself—ah, yes, most heartily! How tired I am of watching myself, of trying to detect the secret of my disgust and contentiousness. When I contemplate my life I could sum it up thus: the past has been horrible; the present seems to me feeble and desolate; the future—is appalling."
He paused, and then went on,—
"During my first days here I was happy in the dream suggested by this cathedral. I believed it would re-act on my life, that it would people the solitude I felt within me, that it would, in a word, be a help to me in this provincial atmosphere. But I beguiled myself. In fact, it still weighs