En Route

During the first week in November, the week within the Octave of All Souls, Durtal entered St. Sulpice, at eight o'clock in the evening. He often chose to turn into that church,...

"Let us see," he said to himself, "let us try at least to consider if, however great the obscurity of such a subject, there be not common sense in it.

Before his conversion he had said like all unbelievers: "If I believed that Jesus Christ is God, and that eternal life is not a decoy, I would not hesitate to change all my habi...

Oh! that midnight mass! He had had the unfortunate idea of going to it at Christmas. He went to St. Severin, and found a young ladies' day school installed there, instead of the...

He was really comforted when the servant said that Monsieur l'Abbé was at home. He entered a little drawing-room, and waited till the priest, whom he heard speaking to someone i...

Many months passed. Durtal continued his alternation of wanton and pious ideas. Without power to resist, he saw himself slipping. "All this is far from clear," he cried, one day...

"But ... but ..." thought Durtal, "we must at any rate come to an understanding; the abbé wearies me with his quiet assumptions, his receptacle in which he must place me. He doe...

On Sunday morning, on his way to the Rue Monsieur, Durtal chewed the cud of his reflections on the Monasteries. "It is certain," he thought, "that in the accumulated filth of ag...

He experienced that painful awakening of a sick man whom a doctor deceives for months, who learns some fine morning that he is to be taken at once to an hospital to undergo an u...

"I shall make myself a prisoner in two days," sighed Durtal; "it is time to think about packing. What books shall I take to help me to live down there?"

Durtal awoke, gay and brisk, astonished at not hearing himself groan, when the moment had come in which he should set off for La Trappe; he was wonderfully reassured. He tried t...

He passed a most terrible night; it was so special, so dreadful, that he did not remember, in the whole of his existence, to have endured such anguish, undergone the like fears.

He woke with a bound at eleven o'clock, with an impression of someone looking at him in his sleep. Lighting a match, he ascertained the time, and seeing no one, fell back in bed...

When he left his cell he said to himself, "This morning I shall communicate," and these words, which should have thrilled him through and through, woke no zeal in him. He remain...

Rising, somewhat earlier than his wont, Durtal went down to the chapel. The office of Matins was over, but some lay brothers, amongst whom was Brother Simeon, were praying on th...

And while Durtal was still refusing to go before the lay brothers who were waiting their turn for confession, Father Etienne insisted: "I will stay with you, and as soon as the...

"Listen, since you are so well broken in to the life at La Trappe, stay here two days more. The Father procurator must go to settle a dispute at Saint Landry. He will take you t...

He had hoped for his last day at La Trappe a morning of quiet, when his mind might lounge, a mixture of spiritual siesta and of working, charmed by a round of offices, and not a...

Durtal wished immediately after Mass to visit for the last time that wood through which he had walked, in turn so languidly and so rapidly. He went at first to the old lime alle...