Although the cathedral crushed everything near it, Saint-Pierre, the ancient Abbey church of a Benedictine monastery, now used as barracks, deserved a lingering visit for the sake of its splendid windows, the dwelling-place of Abbots and Bishops who look down with stern eyes, holding up their croziers.  And these windows, damaged by time, were very singular.  Upright, in each lancet-shaped setting of white glass, rose a sword-blade bereft of its point; and in these square-tipped blades Saint Benedict and Saint Maur stood lost in thought, with Apostles and Popes, Prelates and Saints, standing out in robes of flame against the luminous whiteness of the borders.

Certainly Chartres could show the finest glass windows in the world; and each century had left its noblest stamp on its sanctuaries:  the twelfth, thirteenth, and even the fifteenth, on the cathedral; the fourteenth on Saint Pierre; and a few examples—­unfortunately broken up and used in a medley mosaic—­of painted glass of the sixteenth century in Saint Aignan, another church where the vaulted roof had been washed of the colour of gingerbread speckled with anise-seed, by painters of our own day.

Durtal got through a few afternoons in these churches; then the charm of this prolonged study was at an end, and gloom took possession of him, even worse than before.

The Abbe Plomb, to divert his mind, took him for walks in the country, but La Beauce was so flat, so monotonous, that any variety of landscape was impossible to find.  Then the Abbe took him through other parts of the town.  Some of the buildings claimed their attention, as, for instance, the House of Detention, in the Rue-Sainte-Therese near the Palais de Justice.  The edifices themselves were not, indeed, very impressive, but the history of their origin made them available as the fulcrum for old dreams.  There was something in the prison walls, in their height and austerity, in their look of order and precision, which made the cloister wall of a Carmel look small.  They had, in fact, of old, sheltered a Sisterhood of that Order, and a few steps further on, in a blind alley, was the entrance to the ancient convent of the Jacobins, the Mother-House of the great Sisterhood of Chartres:  the Nursing Sisters of Saint Paul.

The Abbe Plomb took him to visit this house, and he retained a cheerful impression of the walk in the fresh air on the old ramparts.  The Sisters had kept up the sentry’s walk, which followed a long and narrow avenue with a statue of the Virgin at each end, one representing the Immaculate Conception, the other the Virgin Mother.  And this walk, strewn with river-pebbles and edged with flowers, shut in on one side by the Abbey and the novices’ schools, on the left overlooked a precipice down to the Butte des Charbonniers, and below that again, the Rue de la Couronne; while beyond lay the grass lawns of the Clos Saint Jean, the line of the railroad, labourers’ hovels, and convent buildings.