“Oh, oh!” cried Madame Bavoil.  “But you cannot know much about it, since you have never been to the place.”

“Let him be!” said the Abbe, laughing.  “He will get over his prejudices.”  And he went on,—­

“Just explain this inconsistency:  here is a Parisian who likes his city so little that he seeks out the most deserted nook to live in, the quietest, the least frequented, the spot that is most like a provincial retreat.  He has a horror of the Boulevards, of public promenades, and of theatres; he buries himself in a hole, and stops his ears that he may not hear the noises around him; but, when he has a chance of improving on this scheme of existence, of ripening in real silence far from the crowd, when he can invert the conditions of life, and, instead of being a provincial Parisian, can become a Parisian of the provinces, he shies and kicks!”

“It is a fact,” Durtal admitted when he was alone, “a positive fact that the capital is unprofitable to me.  I never see anybody now, and shall be reduced to still more utter solitude when these friends are gone.  I shall, for all purposes, be quite as well off at Chartres; I can study at my ease amid peaceful surroundings, within reach of a cathedral of far greater interest than Notre Dame de Paris.  And besides—­besides—­there is another question of which the Abbe Gevresin says nothing, but which disturbs me greatly.  If I remain here, alone, I shall have to find a new confessor, to wander through the churches, just as I wander through work-a-day life in search of dining-places and tables d’hote.  No, no; I have had enough at last of this day-by-day diet, spiritual and material!  I have found a boarding-house for my soul where it is content, and it may stay there!

“And there is yet another argument.  I can live more inexpensively at Chartres, and, without spending more than I spend here, I can settle myself once for all, dine with my feet on my own fender, and be waited on!”

So he had ended by deciding to follow his two friends, and had secured fairly spacious rooms facing the Cathedral; and then he, who had always lived cramped in tiny apartments, at last understood the provincial comfort of vast spaces and books ranged against the walls, with ample elbow-room.

Madame Bavoil had found him a servant, familiar and voluble indeed, but a good and pious woman.  And he had begun his new existence lost in constant amazement at that wonderful Cathedral, the only one he had never before seen, probably because it was so near Paris, and, like all Parisians, he never took the trouble to set out on any but longer journeys.  The town itself seemed to him devoid of interest, having but one secluded walk, a little embankment where, below the suburbs and near the old Guillaume Gate, washerwomen sang while they soaped the linen in a stream that blossomed, as they rubbed, with flecks of iridescent bubbles.

Hence he determined to walk out only very early in the morning or in the evening; then he could dream alone in the town, which by the afternoon was already half dead.