I do not know whither my wanderings tended, or what space of time was covered by them. Sooner or later I was always back at the Abbaye, glutting my soul with assurance of its own wreck, helpless, despite my loathing of it, to resist the attraction. What horror absorbs the moth as it circles round the flame, I thought in those recurrent moments I could understand. Once, when I returned, an unwonted silence reigned about the place. A few vampire figures, restless, phantasmal, flitted hither and thither in the neighbourhood of the reeking shambles. But the slaughterers and the red ladies of St Michel were retired, during an interval in the examination, for refreshment. I heard the shrill buzz of their voices all down the Rue St Benoit and from the wine and lemonade shops opposite the very gates by which I stood. I looked into the fearful yard. My God! the dead, it seemed, were phosphorescent with the rottenness of an ancient system! Here, there, on all sides they broke the darkness with blots of light like hideous glow-worms--their hundred white faces the reflectors of as many lamps. “But it is a brave illumination!” gurgled a voice at my ear. I glanced aside in loathing. A little old woman, whose lungs barked at every breath, stood near me. She laughed as if she would shake herself into touchwood. “A brave illumination!” she wheezed--“the inspiration of the girl La Lune. She was dedicated to the Holy Mother; and her skirt! Oh, _mon Dieu_! but it was of the azure of heaven, and now it is purple as a strangled face; and it slaps on her ankles. But by-and-by she must seek purification, for she is dedicated to the holy Virgin.” “She placed these lamps?” “She led her sisters to the committee that sits there.” (She pointed a gnarled finger. To one side of the dreadful quadrangle a dull glow came melancholy through some tall windows.) “She complained that ladies who would fain enjoy the show were prevented by the darkness. Then to each dead aristocrat they put a lamp. That was a fine courtesy. It is not often one sees such goods brought to market.” A wild cloud of shapes came rushing upon us with brandished weapons and a demon skirl of voices. I thought at first that I must be the object of their fury; but they passed us by, cursing and gesticulating, and drove something amongst them up the yard, and stopped and made a ring about it on the bloody stones. What was it? I had a glimpse of two petrified faces as the little mob swept by, and a queer constriction seized my heart. Then, all in a moment, I was following, crying in my soul that here was something tangible for my abased humanity to lay hold of--some excuse to indulge a passion of self-sacrifice--some claim to a lump of ice at my feet and a lamp at my head. The dead were so calm, the living so besotted. A miserly theft, I thought, to take another’s blood when one’s own gluts one’s arteries to suffocation.