It would puzzle me to tell you how his steps were first directed to the precincts of the Church of Bourg-Fontaine (the convent where Hiraux was brought up); but at times he would relate, among his early recollections, as I am doing in these Memoirs, some good stories of the monks similar to those of Rabelais and la Fontaine. Hiraux was a living chronicle of those old claustral traditions, already so remote from the ideas of men of to-day, forty years later, that they are lost like phantasms of another world, behind the early recollections of our youth, and lost so effectually that in the generation to come after ours there will be no trace left of them at all. The monks were driven from France, then from Spain, then from Italy, till they ended by existing only in the paintings of Dominiquin, Zurbaran, and Lesueur. I do not know whether society has been the gainer, but, very certainly, art and romance have lost considerably by their disappearance. I have seen the Escurial without its monks, and it looked like a tomb. When I go to see Rome I cannot tell what effect it will produce upon me. I have stated that I could not say in what way Hiraux entered the monastery of Bourg-Fontaine, but I know well enough how he left it. Hiraux was a coward; he cannot he blamed for this; it was characteristic of him. As a matter of fact, he had the quick wittedness to boast about it, just as another man might have bragged about his courage. Now, he still lived in the happy days when _farces_ were all the rage, and all his life he had been the object of more or less comic practical jokes, several of which were nearly the death of him. As we have said before, or as we say now if we forgot to mention it previously, Hiraux combined the two offices of choir-boy and organ-blower in the monastery of Bourg-Fontaine. In virtue of this double qualification he slept in the sacristy of the monastery, and every night he had to go through the church to get to his bedroom. It was a nightly terror to him to have to walk down that vast arched nave (I have only seen the ruins of it, wherein Hiraux's son and I used to rob crows' nests): the great windows with their carved traceries through which the pallid and flickering moonlight shone upon the tombstones in the floor; the mysterious vistas where darkness reigned even in daytime; all these together, especially on a winter's night when the north wind whistled through the great gaunt trees whose dry branches rubbed against one another like the bones of a skeleton, and the wind made long-drawn moanings down the abbey corridors; all these, I say, combined to make such a funereal and gloomy effect that poor Hiraux's blood ran cold in his veins, accustomed as he was to witness the malice of men so constantly intermingle with the awe-inspiring majesty of the place.