for the brawls and tumults which went on in it day and night; it was a “hydra” to the poor monks of Saint- Germain— Quod monachis Sancti Germani pratensis hydra fuit, clericis nova semper dissidionum capita suscitantibus.¹

The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water in some degree soothed the unhappy man. When the boatman had taken his departure, Claude remained on the bank in a kind of stupor, looking straight before him and seeing the surrounding objects only through a distorting mist which converted the whole scene into a kind of phantasmagoria.

The exhaustion of a violent grief will often produce this effect upon the mind.

The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the hour of twilight. The sky was pallid, the river was white. Between these two pale surfaces, the left bank of the Seine, on which his eyes were fixed, reared its dark mass, and, dwindling to a point in the perspective, pierced the mists of the horizon like a black arrow. It was covered with houses, their dim silhouettes standing out sharply against the pale background of sky and river. Here and there windows began to twinkle like holes in a brasier. The huge black obelisk thus isolated between the two white expanses of sky and river— particularly wide at this point— made a singular impression on Dom Claude, such as a man would experience lying on his back at the foot of Strassburg Cathedral and gazing up at the immense spire piercing the dim twilight of the sky above his head. Only here it was Claude who stood erect and the spire that lay at his feet; but as the river, by reflecting the sky, deepened infinitely the abyss beneath him, the vast promontory seemed springing as boldly into the void as any cathedral spire. The impression on him was therefore the same, and moreover, in this respect, stronger and more profound, in that not only was it the spire of Strassburg Cathedral, but a spire two leagues high— something unexampled, gigantic, immeasurable— an edifice such as mortal eye had never yet beheld— a Tower of Babel. The chimneys of the houses, the battlemented walls, the carved roofs and gables, the spire of the Augustines, the Tour-de-Nesle, all the projections that broke the line of the colossal obelisk heightened the illusion by their bizarre effect, presenting to the eye all the effect of a florid and fantastic sculpture.

In this condition of hallucination Claude was persuaded that with living eye he beheld the veritable steeple of hell. The myriad lights scattered over the entire height of the fearsome tower were to him so many openings into the infernal fires— the voices and sounds which rose from it the shrieks and groans of the damned. Fear fell upon him, he clapped his hands to his ears that he might hear no more, turned his back that he might not see, and with long strides fled away from the frightful vision.

But the vision was within him.

When he came into the streets again, the people passing to and fro in the light of the shop-fronts appeared to him like a moving company of spectres round about him. There were strange roarings in his ears— wild imaginings disturbed his brain. He saw not the houses, nor road, nor vehicles, neither men nor women, but a chaos of indeterminate objects merging into one another at their point of contact. At the corner of the Rule de la Barillerie he passed a chandler’s shop, over the front of which hung, according to immemorial custom, a row of tin hoops garnished with wooden candles, which swayed in the wind and clashed together like castanets. He seemed to hear the skeletons on the gibbets of Montfaucon rattling their bones together.

“Oh,” he muttered, “the night wind drives them one against another, and mingles the clank of their chains with the rattle of their bones! May-be she is there among them!”