very suspicions.

Delirium was in the air already charged with thunder, and laid hold
on Gaston too. It was as if through some unsettlement in the
atmospheric medium the objects around no longer acted upon the senses
with the normal result. Looking back afterwards, this singularly
self-possessed person had to confess that under its influence he had
lost for a while the exacter view of certain outlines, certain real
differences and oppositions of things in that hotly coloured world of
Paris (like a shaken tapestry about him) awaiting the Eve of Saint
Bartholomew. Was the "undulant" philosophy of Monsieur de Montaigne,
in collusion with this dislocating time, at work upon him, that,
following with only too entire a mobility the experience of the hour,
he found himself more than he could have thought possible the toy of
external accident? Lodged in Abelard's quarter, he all but repeats
Abelard's typical experience. His new Heloise, with capacities
doubtless, as he reflected afterwards regretfully, for a refined and
serious happiness, although actually so far only a man's plaything,
sat daintily amid her posies and painted potteries in the [125]
window of a house itself as forbidding and stern as her kinsmen, busy
Huguenot printers, well-to-do at a time not only fertile in new books
and new editions, but profuse of tracts, sheets, satiric handbills
for posting all over France. Gaston's curiosity, a kind of
fascination he finds in their dark ways, takes him among them on
occasion, to feel all the more keenly the contrast of that picture-
like prettiness in this framing of their grim company, their grim
abode. Her frivolity is redeemed by a sensitive affection for these
people who protect her, by a self-accusing respect for their
religion, for the somewhat surly goodness, the hard and unattractive
pieties into which she cannot really enter; and she yearns after her