es could show the finest glass windows in the world; and
each century had left its noblest stamp on its sanctuaries: the twelfth,
thirteenth, and even the fifteenth, on the cathedral; the fourteenth on
Saint Pierre; and a few examples--unfortunately broken up and used in a
medley mosaic--of painted glass of the sixteenth century in Saint
Aignan, another church where the vaulted roof had been washed of the
colour of gingerbread speckled with anise-seed, by painters of our own
day.

Durtal got through a few afternoons in these churches; then the charm of
this prolonged study was at an end, and gloom took possession of him,
even worse than before.

The Abbe Plomb, to divert his mind, took him for walks in the country,
but La Beauce was so flat, so monotonous, that any variety of landscape
was impossible to find. Then the Abbe took him through other parts of
the town. Some of the buildings claimed their attention, as, for
instance, the House of Detention, in the Rue-Sainte-Therese near the
Palais de Justice. The edifices themselves were not, indeed, very
impressive, but the history of their origin made them available as the
fulcrum for old dreams. There was something in the prison walls, in
their height and austerity, in their look of order and precision, which
made the cloister wall of a Carmel look small. They had, in fact, of
old, sheltered a Sisterhood of that Order, and a few steps further on,
in a blind alley, was the entrance to the ancient convent of the
Jacobins, the Mother-House of the great Sisterhood of Chartres: the
Nursing Sisters of Saint Paul.

The Abbe Plomb took him to visit this house, and he retained a cheerful
impression of the walk in the fresh air on the old ramparts. The Sisters
had kept up the sentry's walk, which followed a long and narrow avenue
with a statue of the Virgin at each end, one representing the Immaculate
Conception, the other the Virgin Mother. And this walk, strewn with
river-pebbles and edged with flowers, shut in on one side by the Abbey
and the novices' schools, on the left overlooked a precipice down to the
Butte des Charbonniers, and below that again, the Rue de la Couronne;
while beyond lay the grass lawns of the Clos Saint Jean, the line of the
railroad, labourers' hovels, and convent buildings.

"There you see," said the Abbe, "behind the embankment of the Western
Railway stands the Convent of the Sisters of Our Lady and of the
Carmelites; here, nearer to the town on this