The somewhat dolefully calm frame of mind in which Durtal had been living since settling at Chartres came to a sudden end.

One day _ennui_ made him its prey, the black possession which would allow him neither to work, nor to read, nor to pray; so overwhelming that he knew not whither to turn nor what to do.
After spending dark and futile days in lounging round his library, taking down a volume and shutting it up again, opening another of which he failed to master a single page, he tried to escape from the weariness of the hours by taking walks, and he determined finally to study the town of Chartres.
He found a number of blind alleys and break-neck steeps, such as the road down the knoll of St.Nicolas, which tumbles from the top of the town to the bottom in a precipitous flight of steps; and then the Boulevard des Filles-Dieu, so lonely with its walks planted with trees, was worthy of his notice.

Starting from the Place Drouaise, he came to a little bridge where the waters meet of the two branches of the Eure; to the right, above the eddying current and the buildings on the shore, he could see the pile of the old town shouldering up the cathedral; to the left, all along the quay, and looking out on the tall poplars that fanned the water-mills, were saw-mills and timber-yards, the washing places where laundresses knelt on straw in troughs, and the water foamed before them in widening inky circles splashed into white bubbles by the dip of a bird's wing.
This arm of the river diverted into the moat of the old ramparts, encircled Chartres, bordered on one side by the trees of the alleys, and on the other by cottages with terraced gardens down to the level of the stream, the two banks joined by foot-bridges of planks or cast iron arches.
Near where the Porte Guillaume uplifted its crenelated towers like raised pies, there were houses that looked as if they had been gutted, displaying, as in the vanished _cagnards_ or vaults of the Hotel Dieu at Paris, cellars open on the level of the water, paved basements in whose depths of prison twilight stone steps could be seen; and on going out through the Porte Guillaume across a little humpbacked bridge, under the archway still showing the groove in which the portcullis had worked which was let down of yore to defend this side of the town, he came upon yet another arm of the river washing the feet of more houses, playing at hide and seek in the courts, musing between walls; and at once he was haunted by the recollection of another river just like this, with its decoction of walnut hulls frothed with bubbles; and to contribute to the suggestion, the more clearly to evoke a vision of the dismal Bievre, the rank, acrid, pungent smell of tan, steeped, as it were, in vinegar, came up in fumes from this broth of medlar juice brought down by the Eure.
The Bievre, a prisoner now in the sewers of Paris, seemed to have escaped from its dungeon and to have taken refuge at Chartres that it might live in the light of day; winding by the Rues de la Foulerie, de la Tannerie, du Massacre, the quarters invaded by the leather-dressers, the skinners and tan-peat makers.
But the Parisian environment, so pathetic in its aspect of silent suffering, was absent from this town; these streets suggested merely a declining hamlet, a poverty-stricken village.

He felt something lacking in this second Bievre, the fascination of exhaustion, the grace of the woman of Paris faded and smirched by misery; it lacked the charm compounded of pity and regret, of a fallen creature.
Such as they were, however, these streets, traced with a sort of descending twist round the hill on which the cathedral stood exalted, were the only curious by-ways of Chartres worth wandering through.
Here Durtal often succeeded in getting out of himself, in dreaming over the distressful weariness of these streams, and in ceasing to meditate on his own qualms, till he presently was tired of constant excursions in the same quarter of the town, and then he tramped through it in every direction, trying to find an interest in the sight of time-worn spots--the grace of Queen Berthe's tower, of Claude Huve's house and other buildings that have survived the shock of ages; but the enthusiasm he threw into the study of these relics, spoilt by the foregone eulogiums of the guides, could not last, and he then fell back on the churches.
Although the cathedral crushed everything near it, Saint-Pierre, the ancient Abbey church of a Benedictine monastery, now used as barracks, deserved a lingering visit for the sake of its splendid windows, the dwelling-place of Abbots and Bishops who look down with stern eyes, holding up their croziers.

And these windows, damaged by time, were very singular.