, without a
statue, rose amid a flight of buttresses flung out like huge ribs,
inflated as it were by the breath of incessant prayer within; shade and
damp always clung round the spot; in this funereal Close, where the
trees were green only in proportion as they were distant from the
church, lay two microscopic ponds like the mouths of two wells; one
covered to the brim with yellow-green duck-weed, the other full of
brackish water of inky blackness, in which three goldfish lay as in
pickle.

Durtal was fond of this neglected spot, with its reek of the grave and
the salt marsh, and the mouldy smell, that earthy scent that comes up
from a rotting soil of wet leaves.

He paced the alleys, where the Bishop never came, and where the children
of the household, rushing about at play, destroyed the fragments of
grass-plots spared by the Cathedral. Slates cracked underfoot, flung
down from the roofs by the wind, and the jackdaws croaked in answer to
each other across the silent park.

Durtal came out on a terrace overlooking the city, and he rested his
elbows on a parapet of grey time-eaten stone, as dry as pumice and
patterned with orange and sulphur-coloured lichens.

Beneath him spread a valley crowded with smoking chimneys and roofs,
veiling this upper part of the town in a tangle of blue. Further down
all was still and lifeless; the houses were asleep, not so far awake
even as to show the transient flash of glass when a window is thrown
open, nor was there such a spot of red as is often seen in a country
street when an eider-down quilt hangs out to air across the bar of a
balcony; everything was closed and dull and soundless; there was not
even the hive-like hum that hangs over inhabited places. But for the
distant rumble of a cart, the crack of a whip, the bark of a dog, all
was still: it was a town asleep, a land of the dead.

And beyond the valley, on the further bank, the scene was still more
sullen and silent; the plains of La Beauce stretched away as far as the
eye could reach, mute and melancholy, without a smile, under a heartless
sky divided by an ignoble barrack facing the Cathedral.

The dreariness of these plains, an endless level without a mound,
without a tree! And you felt that even beyond the horizon they still
stretched away as flat as ever; only the monotony of the landscape was
emphasized by the raging fury of the tempestuous winds, sweeping the
hillside, levelling the tree-tops, and wreaking thems