I should have thought he was asleep himself, if it hadn’t been for the quivering of his fingers. His hand fluttered in mine like a captured bird.

The old pastor thought it his duty to retrace the whole of the Azaïs family history, beginning with the grandfather, with whom he had been at school in Strasbourg before the war, and who had also been a fellow-student of his later on at the faculty of theology. I thought he would never get to the end of a complicated sentence in which he tried to explain that in becoming the head of a school and devoting himself to the education of young children, his friend had, so to speak, never left the ministry. Then the next generation had its turn. He went on to speak with equal edification of the Douviers family, though he didn’t seem to know much about them. The excellence of his sentiments palliated the deficiency of his oratory and I heard several members of the congregation blowing their noses. I should have liked to know what Olivier was thinking; I reflected that as he had been brought up a Catholic, the Protestant service must be new to him and that this was probably his first visit to the chapel. The singular faculty of depersonalization which I possess and which enables me to feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own, compelled me, as it were, to enter into Olivier’s feelings—those that I imagined him to be experiencing; and though he kept his eyes shut, or perhaps for that very reason, I felt as if, like him, I were seeing for the first time the bare walls, the abstract and chilly light which fell upon the congregation, the relentless outline of the pulpit on the background of the white wall, the straightness of the lines, the rigidity of the columns which support the gallery, the whole spirit of this angular and colourless architecture and its repellent want of grace, its uncompromising inflexibility, its parsimony. It can only be because I have been accustomed to it since childhood, that I have not felt all this sooner.… I suddenly found myself thinking of my religious awakening and my first fervours; of Laura and the Sunday school where we used to meet and of which we were both monitors, of our zeal and our inability, in the ardour which consumed all that was impure in us, to distinguish the part which belonged to the other and the part that was God’s. And then I fell to regretting that Olivier had never known this early starvation of the senses which drives the soul so perilously far beyond appearances—that his memories were not like mine; but to feel him so distant from the whole thing helped me to escape from it myself. I passionately pressed the hand which he had left in mine, but which just then he withdrew abruptly. He opened his eyes to look at me, and then, with a boyish smile of roguish playfulness, which mitigated the extraordinary gravity of his brow, he leant towards me and whispered—while just at that moment the minister was reminding all Christians of their duties, and lavishing advice, precepts and pious exhortations upon the newly married couple:

“I don’t care a damn about any of it. I’m a Catholic.”

Everything about him is attractive to me—and mysterious.

At the sacristy door, I came across old La Pérouse. He said, a little sadly but without any trace of reproach: “You’ve almost forgotten me, I think.”

I mentioned some kind of occupation or other as an excuse for having been so long without going to see him and promised to go the day after to-morrow. I tried to persuade him to come back with me to the reception, which the Azaïses were giving after the ceremony and to which I was invited; but he said he was in too sombre a mood and was afraid of meeting too many people to whom he ought to speak, and would not be able to.

Pauline went away with George and left me with Olivier.

“I trust him to your care,” she said, laughing; but Olivier seemed irritated and turned away his face.

He drew me out into the street. “I didn’t know you knew the Azaïses so well.”

He was very much surprised when I told him that I had boarded with them for two years.

“How could you do that rather than live independently—anywhere else?”

“It was convenient,” I answered vaguely, for I couldn’t say that at that time Laura was filling my thoughts and that I would have put up with the worst disagreeables for the pleasure of bearing them in her company.

“And weren’t you suffocated in such a hole?” Then, as I didn’t answer: “For that matter, I can’t think how I bear it myself—nor why in the world I am there.… But I’m only a half-boarder. Even that’s too much.”

I explained to him the friendship that had existed between his grandfather and the master of the “hole,” and that his mother’s choice was no doubt guided by that.

“Oh well,” he went on, “I have no points of comparison; I dare say all these cramming places are the same, and, most likely, from what people say, the others are worse. I shouldn’t have gone there at all if I hadn’t had to make up the time I lost when I was ill. And now, for a long time past, I have only gone there for the sake of Armand.”

Then I learnt that this young brother of Laura’s was his schoolfellow. I told Olivier that I hardly knew him.

“And yet he’s the most intelligent and the most interesting of the family.”

“That’s to say the one who interests you most.”

“No, no, I assure you, he’s very unusual. If you like we’ll go and see him in his room. I hope he won’t be afraid to speak before you.”

We had reached the pension.

The Vedel-Azaïses had substituted for the traditional wedding breakfast a less costly tea. Pastor Vedel’s reception room and study had been thrown open to the guests. Only a few intimate friends were allowed into the pastoress’s minute private sitting-room; but in order to prevent it from being overrun, the door between it and the reception room had been locked—which made Armand answer, when people asked him how they could get to his mother: “Through the chimney!”

The place was crowded and the heat suffocating. Except for a few “members of the teaching body,” colleagues of Douviers’, the society was exclusively Protestant. The odour of Puritanism is peculiar to itself. In a meeting of Catholics or Jews, when they let themselves go in each other’s company, the emanation is as strong, and perhaps even more stifling; but among Catholics you find a self-appreciation, and among Jews a self-depreciation, of which Protestants seems to me very rarely capable. If Jews’ noses are too long, Protestants’ are bunged up; no doubt of it. And I myself, all the time I was plunged in their atmosphere, didn’t perceive its peculiar quality—something ineffably alpine and paradisaical and foolish.

At one end of the room was a table set out as a buffet; Rachel, Laura’s elder sister, and Sarah, her younger, were serving the tea with a few of their young lady friends to help them.…

As soon as Laura saw me, she drew me into her father’s study, where a considerable number of people had already gathered. We took refuge in the embrasure of a window, and were able to talk without being overheard.