He rebounds in a somersault, then he crawls to the crucifix, like a wolf, on all fours, and howling, strains his lips to the feet of the Christ.
"A sudden reaction overwhelms him.

He trembles before the image whose convulsed face looks down on him.

He adjures Christ to have pity, supplicates Him to spare a sinner, and sobs and weeps, and when, incapable of further effort, he whimpers, he hears, terrified, in his own voice, the lamentations of the children crying for their mothers and pleading for mercy." * * * * * And Durtal, coming slowly out of the vision he had conjured up, closed his notebook and remarked, "Rather petty, my own spiritual conflict regarding a woman whose sin--like my own, to be sure--is commonplace and bourgeois.".