Saint-Sulpice with two or three of his schoolfellows, he would
feel an atmosphere of miracle about him; some divine interposition
_must_ be forthcoming. The lads used to tell each other strange
stories, pious legends they had read in one of their little books
of devotion. Now it was a phantom monk who had stepped out of the
grave, showing the stigmata on hands and feet and the pierced
side; now a nun, beautiful as the veiled figures in the Church
pictures, expiating in the fires of hell mysterious sins. Jean
had _his_ favourite tale. Shuddering, he would relate how St.
Francis Borgia, after the death of Queen Isabella, who was lovely
beyond compare, must have the coffin opened wherein she lay at rest
in her robe embroidered with pearls; in imagination he pictured
the dead Queen, invested her form with all the magic hues of the
unknown, traced in her lineaments the enchantments of a woman's
beauty in the dark gulf of death. And as he told the tale, he could
hear, in the twilight gloom, a murmur of soft voices sighing in
the plane trees of the Luxembourg.

The great day arrived. The bookbinder, who attended the ceremony
with his sister, thought of his wife and wept.

He was most favourably impressed by the _curé's_ homily, in which
a young man without faith was compared to an unbridled charger
that plunges over precipices. The simile struck his fancy, and
he would quote it years after with approbation. He made up his
mind to read the Bible, as he had read Voltaire, "to get the
hang of things."

Jean withdrew from the houselling cloth, wondering to be just
the same as ever and already disillusioned. He was never again