A miasma of benzine and camphor exhaled from these groups.  The clothes, only that morning taken out of pickle to be aired by the good wife, were pestilential.  The stove-pipe hats were to match.  Left to themselves on wardrobe shelves, they had surely grown taller; they towered immense, displaying on their mill-board column a thin covering of hairs.

This assembly of worthies admired and congratulated each other; clasped hands encased in white gloves—­gloves scoured with paraffin, cleaned with indiarubber or breadcrumb.  Presently a retiring wave cleared a space in the crowd of priests and laymen, who shrank back hat in hand to make way for an old hearse of a landau, drawn by a consumptive horse and driven by a sort of Moudjik, a coachman with a puffy face behind a thicket of hair sprouting on his cheeks and his mouth, in his ears and nose.  This vehicle came to an anchor before the front steps, and out of it stepped a fat man, blown out like a bladder and buttoned up in an uniform with silver lace; after him came a thinner personage in a coat with facings of dark and light blue, and everybody bowed to the Prefet attended by one of his three Councillors.

They had lifted their plumed cocked hats, distributed a dole of hand-shaking, and vanished into the vestibule when the army made its appearance, represented by a Colonel of Cuirassiers, some officers of the Artillery and the Commissariat, a few subalterns of Infantry, and one gendarme.

This was all.

Within an hour of this reception the exhausted town was asleep again, not having energy enough even to remove the poles; Lazarus had gone back to his sepulchre, the resuscitated antiquities had relapsed into death; the streets were empty; reaction had ensued; Chartres would be exhausted for months by this outbreak.

“What a sty it is!  What a hole!” cried Durtal to himself.

On certain days, tired of spending his afternoons shut up with his books or of attending service in the cathedral, hearing the canons languidly playing rackets from side to side of the choir with the Psalms, of which they tossed the verses to and fro in a mumbling tone, he would go down after dinner and smoke cigarettes in the little Place.  At Chartres, eight o’clock in the evening was as three in the morning in any other town; every light was out, every house closed.

The priesthood, eager for bed, had shut up shop.  No prayers to the Virgin, no Benediction, nothing in this cathedral!  At such an hour, kneeling in the dark, you feel as if the Mother were more immediately present, nearer, more intimately your own; but these moments of confidence, when it is easier to tell Her all your trivial woes, were unknown at Notre Dame.  No one was worn out by midnight prayer in that church!