The voices, especially the trebles, were not first-rate; but the priest, being a skilled musician, had contrived to train and soften them, and had, in fact, succeeded in getting the Benedictine art accepted in his church.

Unfortunately it was so ugly, so painfully adorned with images, that only by shutting his eyes could Durtal endure to remain in Notre Dame de la Breche.

In the midst of this surge of reflections on his soul, on Paris, on the Eucharist, on music, on Chartres, Durtal was at last quite bewildered, not knowing where he was.  Now and then, however, he recovered some tranquillity, and then he was astonished at himself, he could not understand himself.

“Why regret Paris—­why, indeed?” he would ask himself.  “Was the life I led there unlike that I lead here?  Were not the churches there—­Notre Dame de Paris, to name but one—­just as much to be execrated for sacrilegious bravuras as Notre Dame de Chartres?  On the other hand, I never went out there to lounge in the tiresome streets; I saw nobody but the Abbe Gevresin and Madame Bavoil, and I see them still, and oftener, in this town.  I have even gained a friend by the move, a learned and agreeable companion, in the Abbe Plomb.  So why?”

And then one morning, unexpectedly, every thing was plain to him.  He saw quite clearly that he was on the wrong track, and without even seeking for it he found the right one.

To discover the unknown source of his flaccid longing for he knew not what, and his inexplicable dissatisfaction, he had only to look back a little way and pause at La Trappe.  He saw now everything had begun there.  Having reached that culminating point of his retrospect, he could, as it were, stand on a height and command a view of the declining years since he had left the monastery; and now, gazing at that descending panorama of his life, he discerned this:—­

That from the time of his return to Paris a craving for the cloister had been incessantly permeating his being; he had unremittingly cherished the dream of retiring from the world, of living peacefully as a recluse near to God.

He had, to be sure, only thought of it definitely in the form of impossible longings and regrets, for he knew full well that neither was his body strong enough nor his soul staunch enough for him to bury himself as a Trappist.  Still, once started from that spring-board, his imagination flew off at a tangent, overleaped every obstacle, floated in discursive reveries where he saw himself as a Friar in some easy-going convent under the rule of a merciful Order, devoted to liturgies and adoring art.

He could but shrug his shoulders, indeed, when he came back to himself, and smile at these dreams of the future which he indulged in hours of vacuous idleness; but this self-contempt of a man who catches himself in the very act of flagrant nonsense was nevertheless succeeded by the hope of not losing all the advantages of an honest delusion; and he could remount on a chimera which he thought less wild, as leading to a via media, a compromise, fancying that by moderating his ideal he should find it more attainable.