“He!” cried the Abbe, laughing, “but he has no private means whatever.  He draws a stipend of ten thousand francs a year and not another penny; for there is no endowment at Chartres, and the revenue from the fees on the ecclesiastical Acts is nothing.  In this rich, but irreligious town he can hope for no assistance; the gardener and porter are paid by him; he is obliged for economy’s sake to employ Sisters from a convent as cook and linen-keeper.  Add to that his inability to keep a carriage, so that he has to hire a conveyance for his pastoral rounds.  And how much then do you suppose he has left to live on, if you deduct his charities?  Why, he is poorer than you or I!”

“But then Chartres is the fag end of Church preferment, a mere raft for the shipwrecked and starving.”

“Thou hast said!  Bishop, canons, priests, everybody here is poverty-stricken.”

The bell rang, and Madame Bavoil showed in the Abbe Plomb.  Durtal recognized him.  He looked even more scared than usual; he bowed, backing away, and did not know what to do with his hands, which he buried in his sleeves.

By the end of half an hour, when he was more at his ease, he expanded into smiles, and at last he talked; Durtal, much surprised, saw that the Abbe Gevresin was right.  This priest was highly intelligent and well-informed, and what made the man even more attractive was his perfect freedom from the want of breeding, the narrow ideas, the goody nonsense which make intercourse so difficult with the ecclesiastics in literary circles.

They had settled themselves in the dining-room, as dismal a room as the rest, but warmer, for an earthenware stove was roaring and puffing hot gusts from its open ventilators.

When they had eaten their boiled eggs, the conversation, hitherto discursive as to subject, turned on the Cathedral.

“It is the fifth erection over a Druidical cave,” said the Abbe Plomb.  “It has a strange history.

“The first, built at the time of the Apostles by Bishop Aventinus, was razed to the ground.  Rebuilt by another Bishop named Castor, it was partly burnt down by Hunaldus Duke of Aquitaine, then restored by Godessaldus; again injured by fire, by Hastings, the Norman chief; repaired once more by Gislebert, and finally destroyed utterly by Richard Duke of Normandy when he sacked the city after the siege.

“We have no very authentic records of these two basilicas; at most are we certain that the Roman Governor of the land of Chartres completely destroyed the first and at the same time slaughtered a great number of Christians, among them his own daughter Modesta, throwing the corpses into a well dug near the cave, and thence known as le Puits des Saints Forts.

“A third fabric, built by Bishop Vulphardus, was burnt down in 1020, when Fulbert was Bishop, and he founded the fourth Cathedral.  This was blasted by lightning in 1194; nothing remained but the two belfries and the crypt.