All the superiors of the different Archdeaconries--Chartres, Chateaudun, Nogent le Rotrou, and Dreux--had left there, within the great gate, their following of parish priests and cures, who were pacing round and round the green circus of a grass plot.
The big-wigs of the town, not at all less ridiculous than the pensioners of the Little Sisters of the Poor, crowded in, driving the ecclesiastics into the garden walks.

Teratology seemed to have emptied out its specimen bottles; it was a seething swarm of human larvae, of strange heads--bullet-shaped, egg-shaped, faces as seen through a bottle or in a distorting mirror, or escaped from one of Redon's grotesque albums; a perfect museum of monsters on the move.

The stagnation of monotonous toil, handed down for generations from father to son in a city of the dead, was stamped on every face, and the Sunday-best festivity of the day added a touch of the absurd to hereditary ugliness.
Every black coat in Chartres had come out to take the air.

Some dated from the days of the Directory, swallowed up the wearer's neck, climbed up high behind the nape, muffled the ears and padded the shoulders; others had shrunk by lying in the drawer, and their sleeves, much too short, cut the wearer round the armholes so that he dared not move.
A miasma of benzine and camphor exhaled from these groups.

The clothes, only that morning taken out of pickle to be aired by the good wife, were pestilential.