ole of the oubliettes, in the middle of the field which was formerly
the courtyard of the cloister, and on the banks of the Thil, four stone
dungeons, half under ground, half under the water. They were in pace.
Each of these dungeons has the remains of an iron door, a vault, and a
grated opening which, on the outside, is two feet above the level of the
river, and on the inside, six feet above the level of the ground. Four
feet of river flow past along the outside wall. The ground is always
soaked. The occupant of the in pace had this wet soil for his bed. In
one of these dungeons, there is a fragment of an iron necklet riveted to
the wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of four slabs
of granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low for him to
stand upright in. A human being was put inside, with a coverlid of stone
on top. This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace,
these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole
on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid
of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here
was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those
oozing walls,--what declaimers!

CHAPTER III--ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST

Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists in
Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization. It stops life short. It
simply depopulates. Claustration, castration. It has been the scourge
of Europe. Add to this the violence so often done to the conscience, the
forced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the cloister, the right of
the first-born pouring the excess of the family into monasticism, the
ferocities of which we have just spoken, the in pace, the closed mouths,
the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate minds placed in the dungeon
of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, the interment of living souls.
Add individual tortures to national degradations, and, whoever you
may be, you will shudder before the frock and the veil,--those two
winding-sheets of human devising. Nevertheless, at certain points and in
certain places, in spite of philosophy, in spite of progress, the spirit
of the cloister persists in the midst of the nineteenth century, and
a singular ascetic recrudescence is, at this moment, astonishing
the civilized world. The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in
perpetuating themselves resembles