Durtal, amazed, seemed to breathe the melancholy that weighed on this naked sanctuary.
He was in a building of the end of the eighteenth century; in the middle, raised on eight steps, stood an altar of wax-polished wood in the shape of a tomb; above it was a shrine covered with a curtain of white brocade and surmounted by
a picture of the Annunciation, a washy painting mounted in a gilt frame. To the right and left were two medallions in relief, on one side Saint Joseph and on the other Saint Theresa, and above the picture, close to the ceiling, were the arms of the Carmelites, also in relief: a shield with a cross and stars beneath a marquis's coronet, from which an arm emerges wielding a sword. This was held up by fat little angels, the swollen infants of the sculptors of that period, and floating in the air was a scroll bearing the motto of the order: "Zelo, zelatus sum, pro Domino Deo Exercituum."
Finally, to the right of the altar, the iron grating of the nunnery was seen in an arch in the wall; and on the steps of the altar, inside the railing for the communicants, an annoying statue was emerging from under a gilt canopy—the Infant Christ holding a globe in one hand, and raising the other as if to command attention; a statue of painted plaster as of some precocious mountebank, with homage offered in this deserted chapel, of two pots of hydrangea and a floating wick in a crimson glass.
"How cold and dismal is such rococo!" thought Durtal. He knelt down on a chair, and by degrees his impressions underwent a change. This holy place, saturated with prayer, seemed to let its ice melt and grow balmy. It was as though visions percolated through the gate of the cloister and shed warm puffs of air in the place. A sense of warmth of soul stole over him, of being at home in this solitude.
The only astonishing thing was to hear, in such remote seclusion, the whistling of trains and the rumbling of engines.
Durtal went out before Madame Bavoil had finished the rosary. Standing in the doorway, he saw, just opposite, the cathedral in profile, but with only one spire, the old belfry being hidden by the new. Under a cloudy sky it stood massively solid, green and grey, with its roof of oxidized copper, and the pumice-stone hue of the tower.
"It is stupendous!" said Durtal to himself, recalling the various aspects it could assume according to the season and the hour, as the colour of its complexion varied. "The whole effect under a clear sky is silvery grey, and if the sun lights it up it turns pale golden yellow; seen from near, its skin is like a nibbled biscuit, a siliceous limestone eaten into holes; at other times, when the sun is setting, it turns crimson and appears like some vast and exquisite shrine, all rose
colour and green; and in the twilight it is blue, and seems to evaporate into violet.
"And those porches!" he went on. "That of the royal front is the least variable; it remains of a cinnamon-brown half-way up, of a dull pumice-grey as it rises; that on the south side, more eaten into by lichens, is wearing green, while the arches on the north, with their stones like concrete full of shells, suggest to the fancy a sea-grotto left high and dry."