he; "I believe that I am on the right road."

Then Grandidier shook hands with him and Pierre, and went off to make his
usual round through his busy, bustling works, whilst near at hand,
awaiting his return, stood the closed pavilion, where every evening he
was fated to relapse into endless, incurable anguish.

The daylight was already waning when Pierre and Thomas, after
re-ascending the height of Montmartre, walked towards the large work-shop
which Jahan, the sculptor, had set up among the many sheds whose erection
had been necessitated by the building of the Sacred Heart. There was here
a stretch of ground littered with materials, an extraordinary chaos of
building stone, beams and machinery; and pending the time when an army of
navvies would come to set the whole place in order, one could see gaping
trenches, rough flights of descending steps and fences, imperfectly
closing doorways which conducted to the substructures of the basilica.

Halting in front of Jahan's work-shop, Thomas pointed to one of these
doorways by which one could reach the foundation works. "Have you never
had an idea of visiting the foundations?" he inquired of Pierre. "There's
quite a city down there on which millions of money have been spent. They
could only find firm soil at the very base of the height, and they had to
excavate more than eighty shafts, fill them with concrete, and then rear
their church on all those subterranean columns. . . . Yes, that is so. Of
course the columns cannot be seen, but it is they who hold that insulting
edifice aloft, right over Paris!"

Having drawn near to the fence, Pierre was looking at an open doorway
beyond it, a sort of dark landing whence steps descended as if into the
bowels of the earth. And he thought of those invisible columns of