ned with rivets that could not be unscrewed, and triple
bars--inaccessible. So he restricted himself to wandering in the halls
and passages.

At Notre Dame de l'Atre he had ventured further; he had gone into the
enclosure round about the abode of Christ; he had seen in the distance
the frontiers of Mysticism, and, too weak to go on his road, he had
fallen; and now this was to be lamented, for, as Saint Theresa truly
remarks, "in the spiritual life, if we do not go forward, we go back."
He had, in fact, retraced his steps, and lay half paralyzed, no longer
even in the vestibule of his mansion, but in the outer court.

Till this time the phenomena described by the matchless Abbess had been
exactly repeated. In Durtal, the Chambers of the Soul were deserted as
after a long mourning; but in the rooms that had remained open, phantoms
of sins confessed, of buried evil-doing, wandered like the sister of the
tormented Usher.

Durtal, like Edgar Poe's unhappy sufferer, listened with horror to the
rustle of steps on the stairs, the piteous weeping behind the doors.

And yet these ghosts of departed crimes were no more than indefinite
shapes; they never consolidated nor took a definite form. The most
persistent miscreant of them all, which had tormented him so long, the
sin of the flesh, at last was silenced, and left him in peace. La Trappe
had rooted up the stock of those debaucheries. The memory of them,
indeed, haunted him still, on his most distressing, most ignoble side;
but he could see them pass, his heart in his mouth, wondering that he
could so long have been the dupe of such foul delusions, no longer
understanding the power of those mirages, the illusions of those carnal
oases as he met them in the desert of a life shut up in seclusion, in
solitude, and in books.

His imagination could still put him on the rack; still, without merit,
without a struggle, by the help of divine grace, he had escaped a fall
ever since his return from the monastery.

On the other hand, though he had, to some extent, emasculated himself,
though he was exempt from his chief torment, he discerned, flourishing
within him, another crop of tares, of which the spread had till now been
hidden behind the sturdier growth of other vices. In the first instance,
he had believed himself to be less enslaved by sin, less utterly vile;
and he was nevertheless as closely bound to evil as ever, only the
nature and character of the bonds were different, a