a chair. The fetidness of the room
nauseated him. Then, too--he was not absolutely convinced of
Transubstantiation--he did not believe very firmly that the Saviour
resided in that soiled bread--but--In spite of himself, the sacrilege he
had involuntarily participated in saddened him.

"Suppose it were true," he said to himself, "that the Presence were
real, as Hyacinthe and that miserable priest attest--No, decidedly, I
have had enough. I am through. The occasion is timely for me to break
with this creature whom from our very first interview I have only
tolerated, and I'm going to seize the opportunity."

Below, in the dive, he had to face the knowing smiles of the labourers.
He paid, and without waiting for his change, he fled. They reached the
rue de Vaugirard and he hailed a cab.

As they were whirled along they sat lost in their thoughts, not looking
at each other.

"Soon?" asked Mme. Chantelouve, in an almost timid tone when he left her
at her door.

"No," he answered. "We have nothing in common. You wish everything and I
wish nothing. Better break. We might drag out our relation, but it would
finally terminate in recrimination and bitterness. Oh, and then--after
what happened this evening, no! Understand me? No!"

And he gave the cabman his address and huddled himself into the furthest
corner of the fiacre.

CHAPTER XX

"He doesn't lead a humdrum life, that canon!" said Des Hermies, when
Durtal had related to him the details of the Black Mass. "It's a
veritable seraglio of hystero-epileptics and erotomaniacs that he has
formed for himself. But his vices lack warmth. Certainly, in the matter
of contumelious blasphemies, of sacrilegious atrocities, and sensual
excitation, this priest may seem to have exceeded the limits, to be
almost unique. But the bloody and investuous side of the old sabbats is
wanting. Docre is, we must admit, greatly inferior to Gilles de Rais.
His works are incomplete, insipid; weak, if I may say so."

"I like that. You know it isn't easy to procure children whom one may
disembowel with impunity. The parents would raise a row and the police
would interfere."

"Yes, and it is to difficulties of this sort that we must evidently
attribute the bloodless celebration of the Black Mass. But I am thinking
just now of the women you described, the ones that put their heads over
the chafing-dishes to drink in the smoke of the burning resin. They
employ the procedure of the Aissaouas,