and already revealing, the Mother's indulgent smile.
"But then," said Durtal, suddenly, to himself, "if my theories are correct, the architecture which could, by itself alone, symbolize Catholicism as a whole, and represent the complete Bible in both Testaments, must be either Romanesque with the pointed arch, or a transition style, half Romanesque and half Gothic.
"The deuce!" thought he, thus led to an unforeseen conclusion. "To be sure, it is not necessary perhaps that the church itself should offer so complete a parallel, or that the Old and New Testaments should be bound up in one volume; here, indeed, at Chartres the work, though integral, is in two separate volumes, since the crypt on which the Gothic church rests is Romanesque. Nay, it is thus even more symbolical, and it emphasizes the idea of the windows in which the prophets bear on their shoulders the four Evangelists; once more the Old Testament appears as the base, the foundation of the New.
"What a fulcrum for dreams is this Romanesque!" Durtal went on. "Is it not also the smoke-stained shrine, the gloomy retreat, constructed for black Virgins? This seems all the less doubtful because all the Mauresque Virgins are thick-set and heavy; they are not sylphs, like the fair Virgins of Gothic art. The Byzantine School conceived of Mary as swarthy, 'of the hue of polished brown ebony,' as the old historians say; only, in opposition to the text in Canticles, it painted or carved Her as black, indeed, but not comely. Thus figured, She is truly a gloomy Virgin, eternally sorrowing, in harmony with the Romanesque catacombs. Her presence naturally beseems the crypt of Chartres; but in the Cathedral itself, on the pillar where She stands to this day, does She not appear strange? For She is not in Her true home under the soaring white vault."
"Well, our friend, you are dreaming!"
Durtal started like a man roused from sleep.
"Ah! It is you, Madame Bavoil?"
"To be sure. I am going home from market, and from your lodgings."
"From my lodgings?"
"Yes, to invite you to breakfast. The Abbé Plomb's housekeeper is to be out this afternoon, so he is coming to take his morning meal with us; and the Father thought it would be a good opportunity to make you acquainted."
"I am much obliged to him; but I must go home and tell Mother Mesurat, that she may not cook my cutlet."
"You need not do that, as I have just come from her; not finding you, I left word and told Madame Mesurat. Are you still satisfied with her?"
"Once upon a time," said he, laughing, "I had, to manage my house in Paris, one Sieur Rateau, a drunkard of the first class, who turned everything upside down, and led the furniture a life! Now I have this worthy woman, who sets to work on a different system, but the results are identically the same. She works by persuasion and gentle means; she does not overthrow the furniture, or bellow as she turns the mattress, or rush at the wall with a broom as if she were charging with fixed bayonet; no, she quietly collects the dust and stirs it round and ends by piling it in little heaps that she hides in the corners of the rooms; she does not rummage the bed, but restricts herself to patting it with the tip of her fingers, stroking the creases out of the sheets, puffing up the pillows and coaxing them out of their hollows. The man turned everything topsy-turvy; she moves nothing."
"Well, well; but she is a good woman!"
"Yes, and in spite of it all, I am glad to have her."
As they talked they had reached the entrance to the Bishop's residence. They went through a little gate by the lodge into a large forecourt strewn with small river pebbles, in front of a vast building of the seventeenth century. There were no flowers of stone-work, no sculpture, no decorative doorways—nothing but a frontage of shabby brick and stone, a bare, uninviting structure evidently neglected, with tall windows, behind which the shutters could be seen, painted grey. The entrance was on the level of the first floor; double outside steps led up to the door, and under the landing, in the arch below, there was a glass door, through which, framed in the square, could be seen the trunks of trees beyond.
This courtyard was bordered with tall poplars, which the late Bishop, who had frequented the Tuileries, used to speak of with a smile as his hundred guards.
Madame Bavoil and Durtal crossed this forecourt, sloping to the left towards a wing of the building, roofed with slate.
There, on the first floor, with only a loft above lighted by round dormers, lived the Abbé Gévresin.
They went up a narrow staircase with a rusty iron balustrade. The walls were trickling with damp, they secreted drops, distilled spots like black coffee; the steps were worn hollow, and thin at the ends like spoons; they led up to a door smeared yellow, with a cast-iron knob as black as ink. A copper ring swung in the wind at the end of a bell-rope, knocking the chipped plaster of the wall. An indescribable smell of stale apples and stagnant water came up the middle of the staircase from the little outer hall below, which was paved with rows of bricks set on edge, eaten into patterns like madrepores, while the ceiling looked like a map, furrowed with seas that were traced in yellow by the soaking through of the rain.
And the Abbé's little apartment, lately "done up" with a vile red-checked paper, reeked of the tomb. It was evident that under the shadow of the Cathedral that overhung this wing no sunshine ever dried the walls, of which the skirting boards were rotting into powder like brown sugar, crumbling slowly, on the icy cold polish of the floor.
"How sad to see an old man, a victim to rheumatism, housed here!" thought Durtal.
When he went into the Abbé's room, he found the chill somewhat taken off by a large coke fire; the priest was reading his breviary, wrapped in a wadded gown, close to the window, of which he had drawn back the blind to see a little better.
This room was furnished with a small iron bedstead hung with white cotton curtains looped back by bands of red cretonne; opposite the bed were a table covered with a cloth, and on it a desk, and a prie-dieu below a Crucifix nailed to the wall; the remainder of the room was fitted with bookshelves up to the ceiling. Three arm-chairs, such as are nowhere to be seen nowadays but in religious houses or seminaries, made of walnut wood with straw bottoms like church chairs, were set round the table, and two more, with round rush mats for the feet, stood one on each side of the fireplace. On the chimney-shelf was an Empire clock between two vases, and from these rose the faded stems of some dried grasses stuck upright into sand.
"Come to the fire," said the Abbé, "for in spite of the brazier it is fearfully cold."
And in answer to Durtal, who spoke of his rheumatism, he resignedly shrugged his shoulders.
"All the residence is the same," said he. "Monseigneur, who is almost a cripple, could not find a single dry room in the whole palace. Heaven forgive me, but I believe his rooms are even damper than mine. In point of fact there ought to be hot-air pipes all over the place, and it will never be done for lack of money."
"But at any rate Monseigneur might have stoves put into the rooms, here and there."
"He!" cried the Abbé, laughing, "but he has no private means whatever. He draws a stipend of ten thousand francs a year and not another penny; for there is no endowment at Chartres, and the revenue from the fees on the ecclesiastical Acts is nothing. In this rich, but irreligious town he can hope for no assistance; the gardener and porter are paid by him; he is obliged for economy's sake to employ Sisters from a convent as cook and linen-keeper. Add to that his inability to keep a carriage, so that he has to hire a conveyance for his pastoral rounds. And how much then do you suppose he has left to live on, if you deduct his charities? Why, he is poorer than you or I!"
"But then Chartres is the fag end of Church preferment, a mere raft for the shipwrecked and starving."
"Thou hast said! Bishop, canons, priests, everybody here is poverty-stricken."
The bell rang, and Madame Bavoil showed in the Abbé Plomb. Durtal recognized him. He looked even more scared than usual; he bowed, backing away, and did not know what to do with his hands, which he buried in his sleeves.
By the end of half an hour, when he was more at his ease,