“What,” I said to myself, “those shapeless and putrifying masses have lived!  They have thought, they have loved!  And, who would believe it from the horror and disgust that they inspire, they have been loved, cherished, perhaps adored!  Ah! if, as some think, the soul is not immortal, if so many aspirations, so many schemes, so many hopes are to end here—­what is man?”

But yet more lamentable food for thought was reserved for me:  the spectacle of a ruin yet more profound than those which my eyes could scarce endure, was to appear before me in all its hideousness.

In fact, there reigns in these gloomy halls where no tear has ever fallen, no prayer has ever been heard and no ray of hope has ever pierced—­there reigns something yet colder than death, something more unwholesome, more nauseous, more deleterious than the putrid miasmas that infect the air, something more sad to see than the nameless fragments of extinct life, something more loathsome than those filthy and disgusting remnants, something more repulsive than those noses eaten by worms and those empty eyeballs devoured by rats.  I mean the cynicism of the dwellers in that place; I mean their insensibility, their indifference and calm heedlessness in the presence of such grave subjects for thought.  I mean that lack of perception, that spirit of negation and revolt of which those wretched men make a boast and which they obstinately oppose to all religious sentiment, all principle of tradition or revealed authority.  I mean the atheism and ceaseless mockery with which they invariably meet any generous impulse aroused in an honest soul by a healthy faith.

This struck me even more sensibly than the spectacle of death and dissolution which I have striven to describe.  Thus the apparently living men who haunt this spot are more truly dead than the corpses upon which they exercise their pretended science.  They seemed to me ruins far more terrible than those of the body, ruins which repelled all hope, being born of doubt and leading to negation.

If the mutilated and half-devoured bodies that lay before me, filled me with horror and disgust, they, at least, left within me a faint lingering hope surviving death; but the state of blindness of those souls who have lost consciousness of their being and even the feeling of their existence, the shadowy abyss into which they allow themselves complaisantly to glide, the nullity which they adorn with the title of science,—­all this filled me with fright, for I felt the doubt and despair into which contact with it would inevitably have plunged me, if, by a special favor, the tone and mimetics, alike self-sufficient and mocking, of these free-thinkers, as they are now styled, had not, from the first, inspired me with aversion for them and a salutary hatred of their doctrine.

And yet, amidst so many repulsive objects, the faculty of observation to which I already owed such fruitful remarks was not dormant in me:  I had already asked myself by what evident sign one could recognize a recent corpse.