He had believed that the breezes of this beloved country-side would carry away the last shudders of the fever, and instead he felt in his heart a discouragement a thousand-fold more painful than any physical ill.

The miserable emptiness of his life suddenly appeared before him; he was terrified at his solitude, the solitude of a great soul in which there is no altar.
Memories of the past assailed him with intolerable bitterness; he was seized with a disgust of himself, his former ambitions seemed to him ridiculous or despicable.

He went home overwhelmed with the weight of a new suffering.
In such hours of moral anguish man seeks a refuge either in love or in faith.

Unhappily the family and friends of Francis were incapable of understanding him.

As to religion, it was for him, as for the greater number of his contemporaries, that crass fetichism with Christian terminology which is far from having entirely disappeared.