iling impression--a briny atmosphere full of strings holding the
sky and earth together as if tacked with long stitches, but they would
not hold; a gust of wind snapped all these endless threads, which were
whirled in every direction.

"My arrangement to meet the Abbe Plomb to go over the Cathedral is
evidently at an end," said Durtal to himself. "The Abbe will certainly
not turn out in such weather."

He went into his study; this was his usual place of refuge. He had his
divan there, his pictures, the old furniture he had brought from Paris;
and against the walls, shelves, painted black, held thousands of books.
There he lived, looking out on the towers, hearing nothing but the
cawing of the rooks and the strokes of the hours as they fell one by one
on the silence of the deserted square. He had placed his table in front
of a window, and there he sat dreaming, praying, meditating, making
notes.

The balance of his personal account was struck by internal damage and
mental disputations; if the soul was bruised and ice-bound, the mind was
no less afflicted, no less fagged. It seemed to have grown dull since
his residence at Chartres. The biographies of Saints which Durtal had
intended to write, remained in the stage of charcoal sketches; they blew
off before he could fix them. In reality he had ceased to care for
anything but the Cathedral; it had taken possession of him.

And besides, the lives of the Saints as they were written by the
inferior Bollandists were enough to disgust anybody with saintliness.
Offered to publisher after publisher, carted from the Paris libraries to
the provincial workshops, this barrow of books had at first been hauled
by a single nag, Father Giry; then a second horse had been added, the
Abbe Guerin, and, harnessed to the same shafts, these two men pulled
their heavy truck over the broken road of souls.

He had only to open a bale of this prosy dulness, taking down a volume
at random, to light on sentences of this quality:

"Such an one was born of parents not less remarkable for their rank than
for their piety;" or, on the other hand, "His parents were not of
illustrious birth, but in them might be seen the distinction of all the
virtues which are so far above rank."

And then the dreadful style of the Pont Neuf: "His historian does not
hesitate to say he would have been mistaken for an angel if the maladies
with which God afflicted him had not shown that he was a man."--"The
Devil, no