In these days of penury he was saved by his friendship with an old legitimist Countess, who invited him to spend several days in her country house, introducing the warlike seminarist to all the grave and pious friends at her assemblies as though he had been a crusader newly returned from Palestine.
Gabriel's great desire was to go to Paris; his life in France had radically changed his ideas, he really felt as though he had fallen into a new planet.

Accustomed to the monotonous life in the seminary, and to the nomadic existence during that mountainous and inglorious war, he was astonished at the material progress, the refinement of civilisation, the culture and the well-being of the people in France.
He remembered now with shame his Spanish ignorance, all that Castilian phantasmagoria, fed by lying literature, that had made him believe that Spain was the first country in the world, and its people the noblest and bravest, and that all the other nations were a sort of wretched mob, created by God to be victims of heresy, and to receive overwhelming punishment each time that they ventured to interfere with this privileged country, which, though it eats little and drinks less, has yet produced the holiest saints and the greatest captains of Christendom.
When Gabriel could express himself fluently in French and had contrived to save a few francs for his journey, he went to Paris.

A friendly abbe had procured him employment as corrector of proofs in a religious library close to Saint Sulpice.

In this priestly quarter of Paris, with its hostels for the clergy and for religious families, as gloomy as convents, with its shops full of pious images, which flood the globe with varnished and smiling saints, was accomplished the great transformation of Gabriel.
This quarter of Saint Sulpice with its streets almost Spanish in their silence and peacefulness, with the sisters in black veils gliding by the walls of the seminary, drawn by the sound of the bells, was for the Spanish seminarist what the road to Damascus had been for the Apostle.

The French Catholicism, cultivated, reasoning and respectful to human progress, bewildered Gabriel, whose fierce Spanish bigotry had taught him to despise all profane science.