sky. The earth's very breathing
will softly lull us to rest there. Oh! come! come! and let us love one
another amidst that universal loving!'

But he pushed her from him. He had returned to the Chapel of the
Dead and stood in front of the painted papier-mache Christ, big as a
ten-year-old boy, that writhed in such horridly realistic agony. There
were real iron nails driven into the figure's limbs, and the wounds
gaped in the torn and bleeding flesh.

'O Jesus, Who hast died for us!' cried the priest, 'convince her of our
nothingness! Tell her that we are but dust, rottenness, and damnation!
Ah! suffer that I may hide my head in a hair-cloth and rest it against
Thy feet and stay there, motionless, until I rot away in death. The
earth will no longer exist for me. The sun will no longer shine. I
shall see nothing more, feel nothing, hear nothing. Nought of all this
wretched world will come to turn my soul from its adoration of Thee.'

He was gradually becoming more and more excited, and he stepped towards
Albine with upraised hands.

'You said rightly. It is Death that is present here; Death that is
before my eyes; Death that delivers and saves one from all rottenness.
Hear me! I renounce, I deny life, I wholly refuse it, I spit upon it.
Those flowers of yours stink; your sun dazzles and blinds; your
grass makes lepers of those that lie upon it; your garden is but
a charnel-place where all rots and putrefies. The earth reeks with
abomination. You lie when you talk of love and light and gladsome life
in the depths of your palace of greenery. There is nought but darkness
there. Those trees of yours exhale a poison which transforms men into
beasts; your thickets are charged with the venom of vipers; your streams
carry pestilence in their blue waters. If I could snatch away from that
world of nature, which you extol, its kirtle of sunshine and its girdle
of greenery, you would see it hideous like a very fury, a skeleton,
rotting away with disease and vice.

'And even if you spoke the truth, even if your hands were really filled
with pleasures, even if you should carry me to a couch of roses and
offer me the dreams of Paradise, I would defend myself yet the more
desperately from your embraces. There is war between us; war eternal and
implacable. See! the church is very small; it is poverty-stricken; it is
ugly; its confessional-box and pulpit are made of common deal, its font
is merely of plaster, its altars are formed of