dog came sneaking along, and I tried to get on friendly terms with them
from the window; but they, too, seemed to have renounced the world, with
all its pomps and vanities, to conform to the Trappist rule, for each of
them looked at me with pity and reproach out of the corner of the eye, and
described a wide semicircle, at the risk of getting wet, in order not to
be drawn into conversation. But the storm, at all events, had not been
silenced; the thunder growled and groaned, and every half-minute the
lightning lit up all the stones and puddles of the great farmyard, beyond
which my vision was cut off by the roofs of the outbuildings.

Notwithstanding the unpleasantness of being shut up, I felt that if the
management of the weather had been left to me I could not have arranged
things better for my first night in a Trappist monastery. Here I was in the
midst of the desolation of the Double under the same roof with men who were
driven into this shelter by the desolation of their souls. Tempest-tossed
by the conflict of the spirit and the flesh, wounded, perhaps, by secret
griefs and humiliations, strong, perchance, in the eyes of others, while
never sure of themselves from one hour to another, putting out upon the
same sea again and again only to be thrown back upon the same desert shore,
they at length settled down here, and they must have done so with the calm
conviction that they had found the medicine to suit their kind of sickness
in a life of incessant punishment of self and labour for others.

It was about eleven when I felt tired enough to lie down. I had not been in
this position long when something bit me. I thought I knew the enemy, but
I dared not whisper its name even to myself, for I was overcome by its
condescension. From a bishop to me was a fall in the social scale that
ought to have made the most voracious insect tremble on the edge of the
precipice. Maybe it did tremble before it yielded to temptation and forgot
its dignity.