“Remain the costumes to be restored,” said Durtal to himself, and he imagined Gilles and his friends, not in their damaskeened field harness, but in their indoor costumes, their robes of peace.  He visualized them in harmony with the luxury of their surroundings.  They wore glittering vestments, pleated jackets, bellying out in a little flounced skirt at the waist.  The legs were encased in dark skin-tight hose.  On their heads were the artichoke chaperon hats like that of Charles VII in his portrait in the Louvre.  The torso was enveloped in silver-threaded damask, which was crusted with jewelleries and bordered with marten.

He thought of the costume of the women of the time, robes of precious tentered stuffs, with tight sleeves, great collars thrown back over the shoulders, cramping bodices, long trains lined with fur.  And as he thus dressed an imaginary manikin, hanging ropes of heavy stones, purplish or milky crystals, cloudy uncut gems, over the slashed corsage, a woman slipped in, filled the robe, swelled the bodice, and thrust her head under the two-horned steeple-headdress.  From behind the pendent lace smiled the composite features of the unknown and of Mme. Chantelouve.  Delighted, he gazed at the apparition without ever perceiving whom he had evoked, when his cat, jumping into his lap, distracted his thoughts and brought him back to his room.

“Well, well, she won’t let me alone,” and in spite of himself he began to laugh at the thought of the unknown following him even to the chateau de Tiffauges.  “It’s foolish to let my thoughts wander this way,” he said, drawing himself up, “but daydream is the only good thing in life.  Everything else is vulgar and empty.

“No doubt about it, that was a singular epoch, the Middle Epoch of ignorance and darkness, the history professors and Ages,” he went on, lighting a cigarette.  “For some it’s all white and for others utterly black.  No intermediate shade, atheists reiterate.  Dolorous and exquisite epoch, say the artists and the religious savants.

“What is certain is that the immutable classes, the nobility, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the people, had loftier souls at that time.  You can prove it:  society has done nothing but deteriorate in the four centuries separating us from the Middle Ages.

“True, a baron then was usually a formidable brute.  He was a drunken and lecherous bandit, a sanguinary and boisterous tyrant, but he was a child in mind and spirit.  The Church bullied him, and to deliver the Holy Sepulchre he sacrificed his wealth, abandoned home, wife, and children, and accepted unconscionable fatigues, extraordinary sufferings, unheard-of dangers.

“By pious heroism he redeemed the baseness of his morals.  The race has since become moderate.  It has reduced, sometimes even done away with, its instincts of carnage and rape, but it has replaced them by the monomania of business, the passion for lucre.  It has done worse.  It has sunk to such a state of abjectness as to be attracted by the doings of the lowest of the low.  The aristocracy disguises itself as a mountebank, puts on tights and spangles, gives public trapeze performances, jumps through hoops, and does weight-lifting stunts in the trampled tan-bark ring!