“Well, well! we build sanctuaries in another way nowadays.  When I think of the Sacred Heart in Paris, that gloomy, ponderous erection raised by men who have written their names in red on every stone!  How can God consent to dwell in a church of which the walls are blocks of vanity joined by a cement of pride; walls where you may read the names of well-known tradesmen exhibited in a good place, as if they were an advertisement?  It would have been so easy to build a less magnificent and less hideous church, and not to lodge the Redeemer in a monument of sin!  Think of the throng of good souls who so long ago dragged their load of stones, praying as they went!  It would never have occurred to them to turn their love to account and make it serve their craving for display, their hunger for lucre.”

An arm was laid on his, and Durtal recognized the Abbe Gevresin, who had come up while he stood dreaming in front of the cathedral.

“I am going on at once, they are waiting for me,” said the priest.  “I only took advantage of our meeting to tell you that I had a letter this morning from the Abbe Plomb.”

“Indeed!  And where is he?”

“At Solesmes; but he comes home the day after to-morrow.  Our friend seems greatly taken with the Benedictine life.”

And the Abbe smiled, while Durtal, a little startled, watched him turn the corner by the new belfry.

CHAPTER X.

One morning Durtal went out to seek the Abbe Plomb.  He could not find him in his own house, nor in the cathedral; but at last, directed by the beadle, he made his way to the house at the corner of the Rue de l’Acacia, where the choir-school was lodged.

He went in by a gate that stood half open, into a yard littered with broken pails and other rubbish.  The house, beyond this courtyard, was suffering from the cutaneous disease that affects plaster, eaten with leprosy and spotted with blisters, with zig-zag rifts from top to bottom, and a crackled surface like the glaze of an old jar.  The dead stock of a vine stretched its gnarled black arms along the wall.

Durtal, looking in at a window, saw a dormitory with rows of white beds, and he was amused, for never had he seen beds so tiny.

A lad was in the room, whom he called, by tapping on the pane, and asked whether the Abbe Plomb were still about the place.  The boy nodded an affirmative, and showed Durtal into a waiting-room.

This room was like the office of an exceedingly inferior and pious hotel.  The furniture consisted of a mahogany table of a sort of salmon pink colour, on which stood a pot-stand bereft of flowers; arm-chairs with circular backs fit for a gatekeeper’s room, a chimney-piece adorned with statues of saints much fly-bitten, and a chimney board covered with paper representing the Vision of Lourdes.  On the walls hung a black board with rows of numbered keys; opposite, a chromo-lithograph of Christ, displaying, with an amiable smile, an underdone heart bleeding amid streams of yellow sauce.