well, she won't let me alone," and in spite of himself he began
to laugh at the thought of the unknown following him even to the chateau
de Tiffauges. "It's foolish to let my thoughts wander this way," he
said, drawing himself up, "but daydream is the only good thing in life.
Everything else is vulgar and empty.

"No doubt about it, that was a singular epoch, the Middle Epoch of
ignorance and darkness, the history professors and Ages," he went on,
lighting a cigarette. "For some it's all white and for others utterly
black. No intermediate shade, atheists reiterate. Dolorous and exquisite
epoch, say the artists and the religious savants.

"What is certain is that the immutable classes, the nobility, the
clergy, the bourgeoisie, the people, had loftier souls at that time. You
can prove it: society has done nothing but deteriorate in the four
centuries separating us from the Middle Ages.

"True, a baron then was usually a formidable brute. He was a drunken and
lecherous bandit, a sanguinary and boisterous tyrant, but he was a child
in mind and spirit. The Church bullied him, and to deliver the Holy
Sepulchre he sacrificed his wealth, abandoned home, wife, and children,
and accepted unconscionable fatigues, extraordinary sufferings,
unheard-of dangers.

"By pious heroism he redeemed the baseness of his morals. The race has
since become moderate. It has reduced, sometimes even done away with,
its instincts of carnage and rape, but it has replaced them by the
monomania of business, the passion for lucre. It has done worse. It has
sunk to such a state of abjectness as to be attracted by the doings of
the lowest of the low. The aristocracy disguises itself as a mountebank,
puts on tights and spangles, gives public trapeze performances, jumps
through hoops, and does weight-lifting stunts in the trampled tan-bark
ring!

"The clergy, then a good example--if we except a few convents ravaged by
frenzied Satanism and lechery--launched itself into superhuman
transports and attained God. Saints swarmed, miracles multiplied, and
while still omnipotent the Church was gentle with the humble, it
consoled the afflicted, defended the little ones, and mourned or
rejoiced with the people of low estate. Today it hates the poor, and
mysticism dies in a clergy which checks ardent thoughts and preaches
sobriety of mind, continence of postulation, common sense in prayer,
bourgeoisie of the soul! Yet here and there, buried in cloisters far
fr