to glance at the church. The front was sombre; the
sky behind was glittering with stars. The crescent of the moon, in her
flight upward from the horizon, had paused at the moment, on the summit
of the light hand tower, and seemed to have perched itself, like a
luminous bird, on the edge of the balustrade, cut out in black trefoils.

The cloister door was shut; but the archdeacon always carried with him
the key of the tower in which his laboratory was situated. He made use
of it to enter the church.

In the church he found the gloom and silence of a cavern. By the deep
shadows which fell in broad sheets from all directions, he recognized
the fact that the hangings for the ceremony of the morning had not yet
been removed. The great silver cross shone from the depths of the
gloom, powdered with some sparkling points, like the milky way of
that sepulchral night. The long windows of the choir showed the upper
extremities of their arches above the black draperies, and their painted
panes, traversed by a ray of moonlight had no longer any hues but the
doubtful colors of night, a sort of violet, white and blue, whose tint
is found only on the faces of the dead. The archdeacon, on perceiving
these wan spots all around the choir, thought he beheld the mitres of
damned bishops. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, he
thought they were a circle of pale visages gazing at him.

He started to flee across the church. Then it seemed to him that the
church also was shaking, moving, becoming endued with animation, that it
was alive; that each of the great columns was turning into an enormous
paw, which was beating the earth with its big stone spatula, and that
the gigantic cathedral was no longer anything but a sort of prodigious
elephant, which was breathing and marching with its pillars for feet,
its two towers for trunks and the immense black cloth for its housings.

This fever or madness had reached such a degree of intensity that the
external world was no longer anything more for the unhappy man than a
sort of Apocalypse,--visible, palpable, terrible.

For one moment, he was relieved. As he plunged into the side aisles, he
perceived a reddish light behind a cluster of pillars. He ran towards it
as to a star. It was the poor lamp which lighted the public breviary
of Notre-Dame night and day, beneath its iron grating. He flung himself
eagerly upon the holy book in the hope of finding some consolation, or
some encouragem