oul and
unites the truths there lying dispersed." He never felt the need of
mortification and of prayer, without which no conversion in possible,
if one is to believe the majority of priests. He had no desire to
implore a God whose forgiveness seemed most improbable. Yet the
sympathy he felt for his old teachers lent him an interest in their
works and doctrines. Those inimitable accents of conviction, those
ardent voices of men of indubitably superior intelligence returned to
him and led him to doubt his own mind and strength. Amid the solitude
in which he lived, without new nourishment, without any fresh
experiences, without any renovation of thought, without that exchange
of sensations common to society, in this unnatural confinement in
which he persisted, all the questionings forgotten during his stay in
Paris were revived as active irritants. The reading of his beloved
Latin works, almost all of them written by bishops and monks, had
doubtless contributed to this crisis. Enveloped in a convent-like
atmosphere, in a heady perfume of incense, his nervous brain had grown
excitable. And by an association of ideas, these books had driven back
the memories of his life as a young man, revealing in full light the
years spent with the Fathers.

"There is no doubt about it," Des Esseintes mused, as he reasoned the
matter and followed the progress of this introduction of the Jesuitic
spirit into Fontenay. "Since my childhood, although unaware of it, I
have had this leaven which has never fermented. The weakness I have
always borne for religious subjects is perhaps a positive proof of
it." But he sought to persuade himself to the contrary, disturbed at
no longer being his own master. He searched for motives; it had
required a struggle for him to abandon things sacerdotal, since the
Church alone had treasured objects of art--the lost forms of past
ages. Even in its wretched modern reproductions, she had preserved the
contours of the gold and silver ornaments, the charm of chalices
curving like petunias, and the charm of pyxes with their chaste sides;
even in aluminum and imitation enamels and colored glasses, she had
preserved the grace of vanished modes. In short, most of the precious
objects now to be found in the Cluny museum, which have miraculously
escaped the crude barbarism of the philistines, come from the ancient
French abbeys. And just as the Church had preserved philosophy and
history and letters from barbarism in th