As he advanced up this silent road, without houses or lights, it seemed to him he was wandering amid the desolation of some lunar region.  This part of Normandy recalled to him the least cultivated parts of Brittany.  It was rustic and savage, with its dense shrubbery, tufted grass, dark valleys, and rough roads.

Some dreamers love this sweet but severe nature, even at night; they love the very things that grated most upon the pampered senses of Camors, who strode on in deep disgust, flattering himself, however, that he should soon reach the Boulevard de Madeleine.  But he found, instead, peasants’ huts scattered along the side of the road, their low, mossy roofs seeming to spring from the rich soil like an enormous fungus growth.  Two or three of the dwellers in these huts were taking the fresh evening air on their thresholds, and Camors could distinguish through the gloom their heavy figures and limbs, roughened by coarse toil in the fields, as they stood mute, motionless, and ruminating in the darkness like tired beasts.

Camors, like all men possessed by a dominant idea, had, ever since he adopted the religion of his father as his rule of life, taken the pains to analyze every impression and every thought.  He now said to himself, that between these countrymen and a refined man like himself there was doubtless a greater difference than between them and their beasts of burden; and this reflection was as balm to the scornful aristocracy that was the cornerstone of his theory.  Wandering on to an eminence, his discouraged eye swept but a fresh horizon of apple-trees and heads of barley, and he was about to turn back when a strange sound suddenly arrested his steps.  It was a concert of voice and instruments, which in this lost solitude seemed to him like a dream, or a miracle.  The music was good-even excellent.  He recognized a prelude of Bach, arranged by Gounod.  Robinson Crusoe, on discovering the footprint in the sand, was not more astonished than Camors at finding in this desert so lively a symptom of civilization.

Filled with curiosity, and led by the melody he heard, he descended cautiously the little hill, like a king’s son in search of the enchanted princess.  The palace he found in the middle of the path, in the shape of the high back wall of a dwelling, fronting on another road.  One of the upper windows on this side, however, was open; a bright light streamed from it, and thence he doubted not the sweet sounds came.

To an accompaniment of the piano and stringed instruments rose a fresh, flexible woman’s voice, chanting the mystic words of the master with such expression and power as would have given even him delight.  Camors, himself a musician, was capable of appreciating the masterly execution of the piece; and was so much struck by it that he felt an irresistible desire to see the performers, especially the singer.  With this impulse he climbed the little hedge bordering the road, placed himself on the top, and found himself