r to a group of
people sitting on divans in a dark corner. Rather vexed at being left
here, away from the centre of activity, Durtal noticed that there were
many women and few men present, but his efforts to discover their
features were unavailing. As here and there a lamp swayed, he
occasionally caught sight of a Junonian brunette, then of a
smooth-shaven, melancholy man. He observed that the women were not
chattering to each other. Their conversation seemed awed and grave. Not
a laugh, not a raised voice, was heard, but an irresolute, furtive
whispering, unaccompanied by gesture.

"Hmm," he said to himself. "It doesn't look as if Satan made his
faithful happy."

A choir boy, clad in red, advanced to the end of the chapel and lighted
a stand of candles. Then the altar became visible. It was an ordinary
church altar on a tabernacle above which stood an infamous, derisive
Christ. The head had been raised and the neck lengthened, and wrinkles,
painted in the cheeks, transformed the grieving face to a bestial one
twisted into a mean laugh. He was naked, and where the loincloth should
have been, there was a virile member projecting from a bush of
horsehair. In front of the tabernacle the chalice, covered with a pall,
was placed. The choir boy folded the altar cloth, wiggled his haunches,
stood tiptoe on one foot and flipped his arms as if to fly away like a
cherub, on pretext of reaching up to light the black tapers whose odour
of coal tar and pitch was now added to the pestilential smell of the
stuffy room.

Durtal recognized beneath the red robe the "fairy" who had guarded the
chapel entrance, and he understood the role reserved for this man, whose
sacrilegious nastiness was substituted for the purity of childhood
acceptable to the Church.

Then another choir boy, more hideous yet, exhibited himself. Hollow
chested, racked by coughs, withered, made up with white grease paint and
vivid carmine, he hobbled about humming. He approached the tripods
flanking the altar, stirred the smouldering incense pots and threw in
leaves and chunks of resin.

Durtal was beginning to feel uncomfortable when Hyacinthe rejoined him.
She excused herself for having left him by himself so long, invited him
to change his place, and conducted him to a seat far in the rear, behind
all the rows of chairs.

"This is a real chapel, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes. This house, this church, the garden that we crossed, are the
remains of an old Ursu