Des Esseintes took note of this system which had been so fruitlessly expended on him.  His stubborn, captious and inquisitive character, disposed to controversies, had prevented him from being modelled by their discipline or subdued by their lessons.  His scepticism had increased after he left the precincts of the college.  His association with a legitimist, intolerant and shallow society, his conversations with unintelligent church wardens and abbots, whose blunders tore away the veil so subtly woven by the Jesuits, had still more fortified his spirit of independence and increased his scorn for any faith whatever.

He had deemed himself free of all bonds and constraints.  Unlike most graduates of lycees or private schools, he had preserved a vivid memory of his college and of his masters.  And now, as he considered these matters, he asked himself if the seeds sown until now on barren soil were not beginning to take root.

For several days, in fact, his soul had been strangely perturbed.  At moments, he felt himself veering towards religion.  Then, at the slightest approach of reason, his faith would dissolve.  Yet he remained deeply troubled.

Analyzing himself, he was well aware that he would never possess a truly Christian spirit of humility and penitence.  He knew without a doubt that he would never experience that moment of grace mentioned by Lacordaire, “when the last shaft of light penetrates the soul and unites the truths there lying dispersed.”  He never felt the need of mortification and of prayer, without which no conversion in possible, if one is to believe the majority of priests.  He had no desire to implore a God whose forgiveness seemed most improbable.  Yet the sympathy he felt for his old teachers lent him an interest in their works and doctrines.  Those inimitable accents of conviction, those ardent voices of men of indubitably superior intelligence returned to him and led him to doubt his own mind and strength.  Amid the solitude in which he lived, without new nourishment, without any fresh experiences, without any renovation of thought, without that exchange of sensations common to society, in this unnatural confinement in which he persisted, all the questionings forgotten during his stay in Paris were revived as active irritants.  The reading of his beloved Latin works, almost all of them written by bishops and monks, had doubtless contributed to this crisis.  Enveloped in a convent-like atmosphere, in a heady perfume of incense, his nervous brain had grown excitable.  And by an association of ideas, these books had driven back the memories of his life as a young man, revealing in full light the years spent with the Fathers.