He turned over these thoughts everywhere, in the street, at home, in the chapels. He hurried like a shuttle from one church to another, hoping to solace his fears by changing his place, but they persisted, and rendered every place intolerable.
Then in the sacred places came always that dryness of soul, the broken spring of impulse, a sudden silence within, when he desired consolation in speaking to Him. His best moments, his pauses in the hurly-burly, were a few minutes of absolute torpor, which rested like snow on the soul and he heard nothing.
But this drowsiness of thought lasted but a while, the whirlwind blew once more, and the prayers which were wont to appease it refused to leave his lips, he tried religious music, the despairing sequences of the psalms, pictures of the Crucifixion by the Early Masters, to excite him, but his prayers ran on and became confused on his lips, were divested of all sense, mere words, empty shells.
At Notre Dame des Victoires, where he dragged himself that he might thaw a little under the warmth of his neighbours' prayers, he did in fact feel less chilly, and seemed to break up a little, fell drop by drop into sorrows which he could not formulate, and were all summed up in the cry of a sick child, in which he said to Our Lady, in low tones: "My soul is sorrowful."
Thence he returned to St. Severin, sat down under those arches browned by the rust of prayers, and, haunted by his fixed idea, he pleaded for himself extenuating circumstances, exaggerated the austerities of La Trappe, tried almost to exasperate his fear to excuse his weakness in a vague appeal to Our Lady.
"But I must go and see the Abbé Gévresin," he murmured, but his courage still failed him to pronounce the "Yes" which the priest would surely require from him. He ended by discovering a reason for his visit, without thinking himself obliged to promise just yet.
"After all," he thought, "I have no precise information about this monastery; I do not even know whether it may not be necessary to take a long and expensive journey to get there; the abbé indeed declares that it is not far from Paris, but it is impossible to decide on this simple declaration; it will be useful also to know the habits of these cenobites before going to stay with them."
