and perceiving objects only through magnifying oscillations
which rendered everything a sort of phantasmagoria to him. The fatigue
of a great grief not infrequently produces this effect on the mind.

The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the twilight
hour. The sky was white, the water of the river was white. Between these
two white expanses, the left bank of the Seine, on which his eyes were
fixed, projected its gloomy mass and, rendered ever thinner and thinner
by perspective, it plunged into the gloom of the horizon like a black
spire. It was loaded with houses, of which only the obscure outline
could be distinguished, sharply brought out in shadows against the light
background of the sky and the water. Here and there windows began to
gleam, like the holes in a brazier. That immense black obelisk thus
isolated between the two white expanses of the sky and the river,
which was very broad at this point, produced upon Dom Claude a singular
effect, comparable to that which would be experienced by a man who,
reclining on his back at the foot of the tower of Strasburg, should gaze
at the enormous spire plunging into the shadows of the twilight above
his head. Only, in this case, it was Claude who was erect and the
obelisk which was lying down; but, as the river, reflecting the sky,
prolonged the abyss below him, the immense promontory seemed to be as
boldly launched into space as any cathedral spire; and the impression
was the same. This impression had even one stronger and more profound
point about it, that it was indeed the tower of Strasbourg, but the
tower of Strasbourg two leagues in height; something unheard of,
gigantic, immeasurable; an edifice such as no human eye has ever seen;
a tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the battlements of the
walls, the faceted gables of the roofs, the spire of the Augustines,
the tower of Nesle, all these projections which broke the profile of
the colossal obelisk added to the illusion by displaying in eccentric
fashion to the eye the indentations of a luxuriant and fantastic
sculpture.

Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he found himself,
believed that he saw, that he saw with his actual eyes, the bell tower
of hell; the thousand lights scattered over the whole height of the
terrible tower seemed to him so many porches of the immense interior
furnace; the voices and noises which escaped from it seemed so many
shrieks, so many death groans. Then