again for the rest of the day.

In order to have pieces of furniture in good style, Bouvard and Pecuchet
went scouring the country. What they brought back was not suitable; but
they had come across a heap of curious things. Their first passion was a
taste for articles of _virtu_; then came the love of the Middle Ages.

To begin with, they visited cathedrals; and the lofty naves mirroring
themselves in the holy-water fonts, the glass ornaments dazzling as
hangings of precious stones, the tombs in the recesses of the chapels,
the uncertain light of crypts--everything, even to the coolness of the
walls, thrilled them with a shudder of joy, a religious emotion.

They were soon able to distinguish the epochs, and, disdainful of
sacristans, they would say: "Ha! a Romanesque apsis!" "That's of the
twelfth century!" "Here we are falling back again into the flamboyant!"

They strove to interpret the sculptured symbols on the capitals, such as
the two griffins of Marigny pecking at a tree in blossom; Pecuchet read
a satire in the singers with grotesque jaws which terminate the
mouldings at Feugerolles; and as for the exuberance of the man that
covers one of the mullions at Herouville, that was a proof, according to
Bouvard, of our ancestors' love of broad jokes.

They ended by not tolerating the least symptom of decadence. All was
decadence, and they deplored vandalism, and thundered against badigeon.

But the style of a monument does not always agree with its supposed
date. The semicircular arch of the thirteenth century still holds sway
in Provence. The ogive is, perhaps, very ancient; and authors dispute as
to the anteriority of the Romanesque to the Gothic. This want of
certainty disappointed them.

After the churches they studied fortresses--those of Domfront and
Falaise. They admired under the gate the grooves of the portcullis, and,
having reached the top, they first saw all the country around them, then
the roofs of the houses in the town, the streets intersecting one
another, the carts on the square, the women at the washhouse. The wall
descended perpendicularly as far as the palisade; and they grew pale as
they thought that men had mounted there, hanging to ladders. They would
have ventured into the subterranean passages but that Bouvard found an
obstacle in his stomach and Pecuchet in his horror of vipers.

They desired to make the acquaintance of the old manor-houses--Curcy,
Bully, Fontenay, Lemarmion, Argonge.