On that account,
this spirit of another age, this religious torpor from the past, makes
the cloistered city which surrounds it redolent with a savoury perfume
of peace and of faith.
And in all this mystic place, the house of the Huberts, where Angelique
was to live in the future, was the one nearest to the Cathedral,
and which clung to it as if in reality it were a part thereof. The
permission to build there, between two of the great buttresses, must
have been given by some vicar long ago, who was desirous of attaching
to himself the ancestors of this line of embroiderers, as master
chasuble-makers and furnishers for the Cathedral clergy. On the southern
side, the narrow garden was barred by the colossal building; first,
the circumference of the side chapels, whose windows overlooked the
flower-beds, and then the slender, long nave, that the flying buttresses
supported, and afterwards the high roof covered with the sheet lead.
The sun never penetrated to the lower part of this garden, where ivy and
box alone grew luxuriantly; yet the eternal shadow there was very soft
and pleasant as it fell from the gigantic brow of the apse--a religious
shadow, sepulchral and pure, which had a good odour about it.
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