the
Abbot's permission, or to have or hold anything as his own--absolutely
nothing, neither book, nor tablets, nor pointer--in a word, nothing
whatever, inasmuch as they are not allowed to call even their body or
their will their own.'

"This is a terrible sentence of abnegation and obedience," he sighed,
"only, is this law, which is binding on the Fathers and the Serving
Brothers, equally strict for the Oblates, the aegrotant members of the
Benedictine army, who are not mentioned in the text? This remains to be
seen. It will be well too to ascertain how far it is applied, for the
rule is on the whole so skilful, so elastic, so broad that it can be
made at option very austere or very mild.

"With the Trappists the ordinances are so closely drawn that they are
stifling; with the Benedictines, on the contrary, they would be light
and airy enough to allow the soul to breathe easily. One Fraternity
clings scrupulously to the letter; the other, on the contrary, draws
inspiration from the Spirit of the Saint.

"Before goading myself along this road I must consult the Abbe Plomb,"
was Durtal's conclusion. He went to call on the priest; but he was
absent for some days.

As a precaution against indolence, a measure of spiritual discipline, he
threw himself on the cathedral once more, and tried, now that he was
less overpowered by speculation, to read its meaning.

The stone text which he was bent on understanding was puzzling, if not
difficult to decipher, in consequence of the interpolated passages,
repetitions, and parts eliminated or abridged; in fact, to say the
truth, as the result of a certain incoherence, accounted for no doubt by
the circumstance that the work had been carried on, altered or extended
by successive artists during a lapse of two hundred years.

The image-makers of the thirteenth century had not always taken into
account the ideas expressed by their precursors; they had repeated them,
expressing them from their own point of view in their personal tongue;
thus, for instance, they had introduced a second version of the signs of
the seasons and of the zodiac. The sculptors of the twelfth century had
made a calendar in stone on the western front; those of the thirteenth
did the same in the right-hand doorway of the north porch, justifying
this reduplication of the subject on the same church by the fact that
the zodiac and the seasons may in symbolism have several
interpretations.

According to Tertulli