She shrugged her shoulders and opened a door.  They were in a chapel with a low ceiling crossed by beams gaudily painted with coal-tar pigment.  The windows were hidden by great curtains.  The walls were cracked and dingy.  Durtal recoiled after a few steps.  Gusts of humid, mouldy air and of that indescribable new-stove acridity poured out of the registers to mingle with an irritating odour of alkali, resin, and burnt herbs.  He was choking, his temples throbbing.

He advanced groping, attempting to accustom his eyes to the half-darkness.  The chapel was vaguely lighted by sanctuary lamps suspended from chandeliers of gilded bronze with pink glass pendants.  Hyacinthe made him a sign to sit down, then she went over to a group of people sitting on divans in a dark corner.  Rather vexed at being left here, away from the centre of activity, Durtal noticed that there were many women and few men present, but his efforts to discover their features were unavailing.  As here and there a lamp swayed, he occasionally caught sight of a Junonian brunette, then of a smooth-shaven, melancholy man.  He observed that the women were not chattering to each other.  Their conversation seemed awed and grave.  Not a laugh, not a raised voice, was heard, but an irresolute, furtive whispering, unaccompanied by gesture.

“Hmm,” he said to himself.  “It doesn’t look as if Satan made his faithful happy.”

A choir boy, clad in red, advanced to the end of the chapel and lighted a stand of candles.  Then the altar became visible.  It was an ordinary church altar on a tabernacle above which stood an infamous, derisive Christ.  The head had been raised and the neck lengthened, and wrinkles, painted in the cheeks, transformed the grieving face to a bestial one twisted into a mean laugh.  He was naked, and where the loincloth should have been, there was a virile member projecting from a bush of horsehair.  In front of the tabernacle the chalice, covered with a pall, was placed.  The choir boy folded the altar cloth, wiggled his haunches, stood tiptoe on one foot and flipped his arms as if to fly away like a cherub, on pretext of reaching up to light the black tapers whose odour of coal tar and pitch was now added to the pestilential smell of the stuffy room.

Durtal recognized beneath the red robe the “fairy” who had guarded the chapel entrance, and he understood the role reserved for this man, whose sacrilegious nastiness was substituted for the purity of childhood acceptable to the Church.

Then another choir boy, more hideous yet, exhibited himself.  Hollow chested, racked by coughs, withered, made up with white grease paint and vivid carmine, he hobbled about humming.  He approached the tripods flanking the altar, stirred the smouldering incense pots and threw in leaves and chunks of resin.

Durtal was beginning to feel uncomfortable when Hyacinthe rejoined him.  She excused herself for having left him by himself so long, invited him to change his place, and conducted him to a seat far in the rear, behind all the rows of chairs.