No, no; I have had enough at last of this day-by-day diet, spiritual and material! I have found a boarding-house for my soul where it is content, and it may stay there! "And there is yet another argument.

I can live more inexpensively at Chartres, and, without spending more than I spend here, I can settle myself once for all, dine with my feet on my own fender, and be waited on!" So he had ended by deciding to follow his two friends, and had secured fairly spacious rooms facing the Cathedral; and then he, who had always lived cramped in tiny apartments, at last understood the provincial comfort of vast spaces and books ranged against the walls, with ample elbow-room.
Madame Bavoil had found him a servant, familiar and voluble indeed, but a good and pious woman.

And he had begun his new existence lost in constant amazement at that wonderful Cathedral, the only one he had never before seen, probably because it was so near Paris, and, like all Parisians, he never took the trouble to set out on any but longer journeys.

The town itself seemed to him devoid of interest, having but one secluded walk, a little embankment where, below the suburbs and near the old Guillaume Gate, washerwomen sang while they soaped the linen in a stream that blossomed, as they rubbed, with flecks of iridescent bubbles.
Hence he determined to walk out only very early in the morning or in the evening; then he could dream alone in the town, which by the afternoon was already half dead.
The Abbe and his housekeeper were lodged in the episcopal palace, under the shadow of the Cathedral apse.

They occupied a first floor, with nothing over it, above some empty stables; a row of cold, tiled rooms which the Bishop had had redecorated.
Some time after their arrival at Chartres the Abbe had replied to Durtal, who had remarked that he was anxious,-- "Yes, I am certainly going through a difficult time; I have had to live down certain prejudices--but indeed I was prepared for them.