might imagine one's self to be in the skeleton of Babel.
The place is as bare as a garret and as wild as a cavern.
The wind whistles mournfully through it. Rats are at home
there. The spiders, driven from the timber by the odour
of chestnut, make their home in the stone of the basement
where the church ends and the roof begins, and
low down in the obscurity spin their webs in which you
catch your face. One respires a mysterious dust, and the
centuries seem to mingle with one's breath. The dust of
churches is not like the dust of houses; it reminds one of
the tomb, it is composed of ashes.

The flooring of these colossal garrets has crevices in it
through which one can look down into the abysm, the
church, below. In the corners that one cannot explore are
pools of shadow, as it were. Birds of prey enter through
one window and go out through the other. Lightning is
also familiar with these high, mysterious regions. Sometimes
it ventures too near, and then it causes the conflagration
of Rouen, of Chartres, or of St. Paul's, London.

My guide the beadle preceded me. He looked at the
dung on the floor, and tossed his head. He knew the bird
by its manure, and growled between his teeth:

"This is a rook; this is a hawk; this is an owl."

"You ought to study the human heart," said I.

A frightened bat flew before us.