up, and large, flat feet with thick
ankles.

"Such a treatise would carry me too far. It is amusing to dream over,
but not to write. I should do better to seek a less panoramic, a
compacter subject. But what?--Well, I will see later," he concluded,
getting up, for Madame Mesurat jovially announced that dinner was ready.

CHAPTER XIII.

To change his weariness of the place, Durtal one sunny afternoon went to
the further end of Chartres, to visit the ancient church of Saint Martin
du Val. It dated from the tenth century, and had served as the chapel by
turns of a Benedictine House and of a Capuchin convent. Restored without
any too flagrant heresies, it was now included in the precincts of an
Asylum, and was reached by crossing a yard where blind folk in white
cotton caps sat nodding on benches in the shade of a few trees.

Its small, squat doorway and three little belfries, as if it had been
built for a village of dwarfs, attested its Romanesque origin; and, as
at Saint Radegonde at Poitiers and Notre Dame de la Couture at le Mans,
the interior opened, under an altar very much raised above the ground,
into a crypt lighted by loopholes borrowing their light from the
ambulatory of the choir. The capitals of the columns, coarsely carved,
resembled the idols of Oceania; under the pavement and in the tombs lay
many of the Bishops of Chartres, and newly-consecrated prelates were
supposed to spend the first night of their arrival at the See in prayer
before these tombs, so as to imbue themselves with the virtues of their
predecessors and enlist their support.

"The Manes of these Bishops might very well have whispered to their
present successor, Monseigneur des Mofflaines, some plan for purifying
the House of the Virgin by turning out the vile musician who degrades
the Sanctuary on Sundays to the level of a music hall!" sighed Durtal.
'But, alas! nothing disturbs the inertia of that aged, and invalid
shepherd, who is, indeed, never to be seen either in his garden, in the
cathedral, or in the town.

"Ah! But this is something better than all the vocal flourishes of the
choristers!" said Durtal to himself as he listened to the bells aroused
from silence to shed the blessed drops of sound over the city.

He called to mind the meanings ascribed to bells by the early
symbolists. Durand of Mende compares the hardness of the metal to the
power of the preacher, and thinks that the blows of the tongue against
the side,