As he walked through the streets Godefroid felt himself another man. Whoever could have looked into his being would have admired the curious phenomenon of the communication of collective power. He was no longer a mere man, he was a tenfold force, knowing himself the representative of persons whose united forces upheld his actions and walked beside him. Bearing that power in his heart, he felt within him a plenitude of life, a noble might, which uplifted him. It was, as he afterwards said, one of the finest moments of his whole existence; he was conscious of a new sense, an omnipotence more sure than that of despots. Moral power is, like thought, limitless. “To live for others,” he thought, “to act with others, all as one, and act alone as all together, to have for leader Charity, the noblest, the most living of those ideal figures Christianity has made for us, this is indeed to live!--Come, come, repress that petty joy, which father Alain laughed at. And yet, how singular it is that in seeking to set myself aside from life I have found the power I have sought so long! Yes, the world of misery will belong to me!” XII. A CASE TO INVESTIGATE Godefroid walked from the cloister of Notre-Dame to the avenue de l’Observatoire in such a state of exaltation that he never noticed the length of the way. When he reached the rue Notre-Dame des Champs at the point where it joins the rue de l’Ouest he was amazed to find (neither of these streets being paved at the time of which we write) great mud-holes in that fine open quarter. Persons walked on planks laid down beside the houses and along the marshy gardens, or on narrow paths flanked on each side by stagnant water which sometimes turned them into rivulets. By dint of searching he found the house he wanted, but he did not reach it without difficulty. It was evidently an abandoned factory. The building was narrow and the side of it was a long wall with many windows and no architectural decoration whatever. None of these windows, which were square, were on the lower floor, where there was no opening but a very miserable entrance-door. Godefroid supposed that the proprietor had turned the building into a number of small tenements to make it profitable, for a written placard above the door stated that there were “Several rooms to let.” Godefroid rang, but no one came. While he was waiting, a person who went by pointed out to him that the house had another entrance on the boulevard where he might get admittance. Godefroid followed this advice and saw at the farther end of a little garden which extended along the boulevard a second door to the house. The garden, rather ill-kept, sloped downward, for there was enough difference in level between the boulevard and the rue Notre-Dame des Champs to make it a sort of ditch. Godefroid therefore walked along one of the paths, at the end of which he saw an old woman whose dilapidated garments were in keeping with the house.