quite bare, without a single
painting or any kind of decoration; the nave being still half-barred by
the scaffoldings which blocked up the unfinished dome. At that early hour
the masses of entreaty had already been said at several altars, under the
grey light falling from the high and narrow windows, and the tapers of
entreaty were burning in the depths of the apse. So Pierre made haste to
go to the sacristy, there to assume his vestments in order that he might
say his mass in the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul.

But the floodgates of memory had been opened, and he had no thought but
for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites
and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years
previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on
man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a
first experiment: he had gone to Lourdes, there to seek the innocent
belief of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young
nations bending beneath the terror born of ignorance; but he had rebelled
yet more than ever in presence of what he had witnessed at Lourdes: that
glorification of the absurd, that collapse of common sense; and was
convinced that salvation, the peace of men and nations nowadays, could
not lie in that puerile relinquishment of reason. And afterwards, again
yielding to the need of loving whilst yet allowing reason, so hard to
satisfy, her share in his intellect, he had staked his final peace on a
second experiment, and had gone to Rome to see if Catholicism could there
be renewed, could revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity and
become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world,
upheaving and in danger of death, was awaiting in order to calm down and
live. And he had found there naught but ruins, the rotted trunk of a tree
that could never put forth another springtide; and he had heard there
naught but the supreme rending of the old social edifice, near to its
fall. Then it was, that, relapsing into boundless doubt, total negation,
he had been recalled to Paris by Abbe Rose, in the name of their poor,
and had returned thither that he might forget and immolate himself and
believe in them--the poor--since they and their frightful sufferings
alone remained certain. And then it was too, that for three years he came
into contact with that collapse, that very bankruptcy of goodness itself:
charity a