"Why, you seem to be an enthusiast yourself."

"Oh, I don't know anything about it. I am simply repeating what I have heard Carhaix say. If the subject interests you, he will be only too glad to teach you the symbolism of bells. He is inexhaustible. The man is a monomaniac."

"I can understand," said Durtal dreamily. "I live in a quarter where there are a good many convents and at dawn the air is a-tingle with the vibrance of the chimes. When I was ill I used to lie awake at night awaiting the sound of the matin bells and welcoming them as a deliverance. In the grey light I felt that I was being cuddled by a distant and secret caress, that a lullaby was crooned over me, and a cool hand applied to my burning forehead. I had the assurance that the folk who were awake were praying for the others, and consequently for me. I felt less lonely. I really believe the bells are sounded for the special benefit of the sick who cannot sleep."

"The bells ring for others, notably for the trouble-makers. The rather common inscription for the side of a bell, 'Paco cruentos,' 'I pacify the bloody-minded,' is singularly apt, when you think it over."

This conversation was still haunting Durtal when he went to bed. Carhaix's phrase, "The ring of the bells is the real sacred music," took hold of him like an obsession. And drifting back through the centuries he saw in dream the slow processional of monks and the kneeling congregations responding to the call of the angelus and drinking in the balm of holy sound as if it were consecrated wine.

All the details he had ever known of the liturgies of ages came crowding into his mind. He could hear the sounding of matin invitatories; chimes telling a rosary of harmony over tortuous labyrinths of narrow streets, over cornet towers, over pepper-box pignons, over dentelated walls; the chimes chanting the canonical hours, prime and tierce, sexte and none, vespers and compline; celebrating the joy of a city with the tinkling laughter of the little bells, tolling its sorrow with the ponderous lamentation of the great ones. And there were master ringers in those times, makers of chords, who could send into the air the expression of the whole soul of a community. And the bells which they served as submissive sons and faithful deacons were as humble and as truly of the people as was the Church itself. As the priest at certain times put off his chasuble, so the bell at times had put off its sacred character and spoken to the baptized on fair day and market day, inviting them, in the event of rain, to settle their affairs inside the nave of the church and, that the sanctity of the place might not be violated by the conflicts arising from sharp bargaining, imposing upon them a probity unknown before or since.

Today bells spoke an obsolete language, incomprehensible to man. Carhaix was under no misapprehension. Living in an aërial tomb outside the human scramble, he was faithful to his art, and in consequence no longer had any reason for existing. He vegetated, superfluous and demoded, in a society which insisted that for its amusement the holy place be turned into a concert hall. He was like a creature reverted, a relic of a bygone age, and he was supremely contemptuous of the miserable fin de siècle church showmen who to draw fashionable audiences did not fear to offer the attraction of cavatinas and waltzes rendered on the cathedral organ by manufacturers of profane music, by ballet mongers and comic opera-wrights.

"Poor Carhaix!" said Durtal, as he blew out the candle. "Another who loves this epoch about as well as Des Hermies and I do. But he has the tutelage of his bells, and certainly among his wards he has his favourite. He is not to be pitied. He has his hobby, which renders life possible for him, as hobbies do."

"How is Gilles de Rais progressing?"

"I have finished the first part of his life, making just the briefest possible mention of his virtues and achievements."

"Which are of no interest," remarked Des Hermies.

"Evidently, since the name of Gilles de Rais would have perished four centuries ago but for the enormities of vice which it symbolizes. I am coming to the crimes now. The great difficulty, you see, is to explain how this man, who was a brave captain and a good Christian, all of a sudden became a sacrilegious sadist and a coward."

"Metamorphosed over night, as it were."

"Worse. As if at a touch of a fairy's wand or of a playwright's pen. That is what mystifies his biographers. Of course untraceable influences must have been at work a long time, and there must have been occasional outcropping not mentioned in the chronicles. Here is a recapitulation of our material.

"Gilles de Rais was born about 1404 on the boundary between Brittany and Anjou, in the château de Mâchecoul. We know nothing of his childhood. His father died about the end of October, 1415, and his mother almost immediately married a Sieur d'Estouville, abandoning her two sons, Gilles and René. They became the wards of their grandfather, Jean de Craon, 'a man old and ancient and of exceeding great age,' as the texts say. He seems to have allowed his two charges to run wild, and then to have got rid of Gilles by marrying him to Catherine de Thouars, November 30, 1420.

"Gilles is known to have been at the court of the Dauphin five years later. His contemporaries represent him as a robust, active man, of striking beauty and rare elegance. We have no explicit statement as to the rôle he played in this court, but one can easily imagine what sort of treatment the richest baron in France received at the hands of an impoverished king.

"For at that moment Charles VII was in extremities. He was without money, prestige, or real authority. Even the cities along the Loire scarcely obeyed him. France, decimated a few years before, by the plague, and further depopulated by massacres, was in a deplorable situation.

"England, rising from the sea like the fabled polyp the Kraken, had cast her tentacles over Brittany, Normandy, l'Ile de France, part of Picardy, the entire North, the Interior as far as Orléans, and crawling forward left in her wake towns squeezed dry and country exhausted.

"In vain Charles clamoured for subsidies, invented excuses for exactions, and pressed the imposts. The paralyzed cities and fields abandoned to the wolves could afford no succour. Remember his very claim to the throne was disputed. He became like a blind man going the rounds with a tin cup begging sous. His court at Chinon was a snarl of intrigue complicated by an occasional murder. Weary of being hunted, more or less out of harm's way behind the Loire, Charles and his partisans finally consoled themselves by flaunting in the face of inevitable disaster the devil-may-care debaucheries of the condemned making the most of the few moments left them. Forays and loans furnished them with opulent cheer and permitted them to carouse on a grand scale. The eternal qui-vive and the misfortunes of war were forgotten in the arms of courtesans.

"What more could have been expected of a used-up sleepy-headed king, the issue of an infamous mother and a mad father?"

"Oh, whatever you say about Charles VII pales beside the testimony of the portrait of him in the Louvre painted by Foucquet. That bestial face, with the eyes of a small-town ursurer and the sly psalm-singing mouth that butter wouldn't melt in, has often arrested me. Foucquet depicts a debauched priest who has a bad cold and has been drinking sour wine. Yet you can see that this monarch is of the very same type as the more refined, less salacious, more prudently cruel, more obstinate and cunning Louis XI, his son and successor. Well, Charles VII was the man who had Jean Sans Peur assassinated, and who abandoned Jeanne d'Arc. What more need be said?"