The garden was perfectly still, with tomb-like avenues, pollard poplars, and trampled lawns—­half dead.  There was not a flower, for the Cathedral killed everything under its shadow.  Its vast deserted apse, without a statue, rose amid a flight of buttresses flung out like huge ribs, inflated as it were by the breath of incessant prayer within; shade and damp always clung round the spot; in this funereal Close, where the trees were green only in proportion as they were distant from the church, lay two microscopic ponds like the mouths of two wells; one covered to the brim with yellow-green duck-weed, the other full of brackish water of inky blackness, in which three goldfish lay as in pickle.

Durtal was fond of this neglected spot, with its reek of the grave and the salt marsh, and the mouldy smell, that earthy scent that comes up from a rotting soil of wet leaves.

He paced the alleys, where the Bishop never came, and where the children of the household, rushing about at play, destroyed the fragments of grass-plots spared by the Cathedral.  Slates cracked underfoot, flung down from the roofs by the wind, and the jackdaws croaked in answer to each other across the silent park.

Durtal came out on a terrace overlooking the city, and he rested his elbows on a parapet of grey time-eaten stone, as dry as pumice and patterned with orange and sulphur-coloured lichens.

Beneath him spread a valley crowded with smoking chimneys and roofs, veiling this upper part of the town in a tangle of blue.  Further down all was still and lifeless; the houses were asleep, not so far awake even as to show the transient flash of glass when a window is thrown open, nor was there such a spot of red as is often seen in a country street when an eider-down quilt hangs out to air across the bar of a balcony; everything was closed and dull and soundless; there was not even the hive-like hum that hangs over inhabited places.  But for the distant rumble of a cart, the crack of a whip, the bark of a dog, all was still:  it was a town asleep, a land of the dead.

And beyond the valley, on the further bank, the scene was still more sullen and silent; the plains of La Beauce stretched away as far as the eye could reach, mute and melancholy, without a smile, under a heartless sky divided by an ignoble barrack facing the Cathedral.

The dreariness of these plains, an endless level without a mound, without a tree!  And you felt that even beyond the horizon they still stretched away as flat as ever; only the monotony of the landscape was emphasized by the raging fury of the tempestuous winds, sweeping the hillside, levelling the tree-tops, and wreaking themselves on this basilica, which, perched on high, had for centuries defied their efforts.  To uproot it the lightning had been needed to help, firing its towers, and even the combined attacks of the hurricane and the flames had been unable to destroy the original stock, which, replanted after each disaster, had always sprouted in fresh verdure with reinvigorated growth.