‘O Jesus, Who hast died for us!’ cried the priest, ’convince her of our nothingness!  Tell her that we are but dust, rottenness, and damnation!  Ah! suffer that I may hide my head in a hair-cloth and rest it against Thy feet and stay there, motionless, until I rot away in death.  The earth will no longer exist for me.  The sun will no longer shine.  I shall see nothing more, feel nothing, hear nothing.  Nought of all this wretched world will come to turn my soul from its adoration of Thee.’

He was gradually becoming more and more excited, and he stepped towards Albine with upraised hands.

’You said rightly.  It is Death that is present here; Death that is before my eyes; Death that delivers and saves one from all rottenness.  Hear me!  I renounce, I deny life, I wholly refuse it, I spit upon it.  Those flowers of yours stink; your sun dazzles and blinds; your grass makes lepers of those that lie upon it; your garden is but a charnel-place where all rots and putrefies.  The earth reeks with abomination.  You lie when you talk of love and light and gladsome life in the depths of your palace of greenery.  There is nought but darkness there.  Those trees of yours exhale a poison which transforms men into beasts; your thickets are charged with the venom of vipers; your streams carry pestilence in their blue waters.  If I could snatch away from that world of nature, which you extol, its kirtle of sunshine and its girdle of greenery, you would see it hideous like a very fury, a skeleton, rotting away with disease and vice.

’And even if you spoke the truth, even if your hands were really filled with pleasures, even if you should carry me to a couch of roses and offer me the dreams of Paradise, I would defend myself yet the more desperately from your embraces.  There is war between us; war eternal and implacable.  See! the church is very small; it is poverty-stricken; it is ugly; its confessional-box and pulpit are made of common deal, its font is merely of plaster, its altars are formed of four boards which I have painted myself.  But what of that?  It is yet vaster than your garden, greater than the valley, greater, even, than the whole earth.  It is an impregnable fortress which nothing can ever break down.  The winds, the sun, the forests, the ocean, all that is, may combine to assault it; yet it will stand erect and unshaken for ever!

’Yes, let all the jungles tower aloft and assail the walls with their thorny arms, let all the legions of insects swarm out of their holes in the ground and gnaw at the walls; the church, ruinous though it may seem, will never fall before the invasion of life.  It is Death, Death the inexpugnable! . . .  And do you know what will one day happen?  The tiny church will grow and spread to such a colossal size, and will cast around such a mighty shadow, that all that nature, you speak of, will give up the ghost.  Ah!  Death, the Death of everything, with the skies gaping to receive our souls, above the curse-stricken ruins of the world!’