The balance of his personal account was struck by internal damage and mental disputations; if the soul was bruised and ice-bound, the mind was no less afflicted, no less fagged.  It seemed to have grown dull since his residence at Chartres.  The biographies of Saints which Durtal had intended to write, remained in the stage of charcoal sketches; they blew off before he could fix them.  In reality he had ceased to care for anything but the Cathedral; it had taken possession of him.

And besides, the lives of the Saints as they were written by the inferior Bollandists were enough to disgust anybody with saintliness.  Offered to publisher after publisher, carted from the Paris libraries to the provincial workshops, this barrow of books had at first been hauled by a single nag, Father Giry; then a second horse had been added, the Abbe Guerin, and, harnessed to the same shafts, these two men pulled their heavy truck over the broken road of souls.

He had only to open a bale of this prosy dulness, taking down a volume at random, to light on sentences of this quality: 

“Such an one was born of parents not less remarkable for their rank than for their piety;” or, on the other hand, “His parents were not of illustrious birth, but in them might be seen the distinction of all the virtues which are so far above rank.”

And then the dreadful style of the Pont Neuf:  “His historian does not hesitate to say he would have been mistaken for an angel if the maladies with which God afflicted him had not shown that he was a man.”—­“The Devil, not enduring to see him advancing by rapid leaps on the way of perfection, adopted various means of hindering him in the happy progress of his career.”

And on turning over to a fresh page he came upon a passage in the life of one of the Elect who was mourning for his mother, excusing him in this solemn rigmarole:  “After granting to the feelings of nature such relief as grace cannot forbid on these occasions—­”

Or again, here and there were such pompous and ridiculous definitions as this, which occurs in the life of Cesar de Bus:  “After a visit to Paris, which is not less the throne of vice than the capital of the kingdom—­” And this went on in meagre language through twelve to fifteen volumes, ending by the erection of a row of uniform virtue, a barrack of pious idiotcy.  Now and again the two poor nags seemed to wake up and trot for a little space, though gasping for breath, when they had some detail to record which no doubt moved them to rapture; they expatiated complacently on the virtues of Catherine of Sweden or Robert de la Chaise-Dieu, who as soon as they were born cried for sinless wet-nurses, and would suck none but pious breasts; or they spoke with ravishment of the chastity of Jean the Taciturn, who never took a bath, that he might not shock “his modest eyes,” as the text says, by seeing himself; and the bashful purity of San Luis de Gonzagua, who had such a terror of women that he dared not look at his mother for fear of evil thoughts!