He was the poorest in all the Claverias; he had no appointment, and mended the giants without any remuneration in the hopes of succeeding to the first vacant place, feeling very grateful to those gentlemen of the Chapter who gave him his house rent free, on account of his wife being the daughter of a former old servant of the church.  The smell of the paste and of the damp floor infected his house with the rank atmosphere of poverty.  A hopeless fecundity aggravated this poverty; his sad, placid wife with her big yellow eyes appeared every year with a new baby tugging at her flabby breast, and several children crept along the cloister walls, dull and inert with hunger, with enormous heads and thin necks, always sickly, though none of them managed to die; afflicted by all the pains of anaemia, by boils that arose and vanished on their faces, and watery eruptions covering their hands.  The shoemaker worked for the shops in the town, without, however, earning much money.  From the rising of the sun one could hear the sound of his hammer in the cloister.  This sole evidence of profane work attracted all the unoccupied to the miserable and evil-smelling dwelling.  Mariano, the Tato, and a verger who also lived in the cloister, were those who most frequently met Gabriel, seated on the shoemaker’s ragged and broken chairs, so low that one could touch the floor of red and dusty bricks with one’s hands.

Often the bell-ringer would run to his tower to ring the usual bells, but his vacant place would be immediately occupied by an old organ-blower, or some of the servants from the sacristy, all attracted by what they heard of these meetings of the lower servants of the Primacy.  The object of the assembly was to listen to Gabriel.  The revolutionary wished to keep silence, and listened absently to their grumblings at the daily round of worship; but his friends longed to hear about those countries in which he had travelled, with all the curiosity of people who lived confined and isolated; listening to his descriptions of the beauties of Paris and the grandeur of London they would open their eyes like children listening to a fairy tale.

The shoemaker with his head bent, never ceasing his work, listened attentively to the recital of such marvels; when Gabriel was silent they all agreed on one point, those cities must be far more beautiful than Madrid; and just think how beautiful Madrid was!  Even the shoemaker’s wife, standing in the corner forgetful of her sickly children, would listen to Luna with wonder, her face enlivened by a feeble smile, which showed the woman through the animal resigned to misery, when Luna described the luxury of the women in foreign parts.

All these servants of the church felt their narrowed and dulled minds stirred by these descriptions of a distant world that they were never likely to see; the splendours of modern civilisation touched them much more nearly than the beauties of heaven as described in the sermons, and in the pungent and dusty atmosphere of the dirty little house they would see unrolled before their mind’s eye beautiful and fantastic cities, and they would ask questions in all innocence as to the food and habits of those distant people, as though they believed them beings of a different species.