We discern in him wide gaps, vast clearings in the soul.

Weary of everything, sick of enjoyment, and drunken with sin, he wrote some admirable reflections and anticipated the blackest pessimism of our day, summing up the misery of him who endures the condemnation of living, in phrases that are its final expression.

What distress is that of the Preacher: All the days of man are sorrow, and his travail grief; better is the day of death than the day of birth; all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
After his death, too, the old king remains a mystery.

Had he expiated his apostacy and his fall?
Was he, like his fathers, received into Abraham's bosom?
And the greatest writers of the Church have not agreed about it.
According to St.Irenaeus, St.Hilary, St.Cyril of Jerusalem, St.
Ambrose, and St.Jerome, his penance was accomplished, and he is saved.
According to Tertullian, St.Cyprian, St.Augustine, and St.Gregory the Great, he did not repent to amendment, and so he is damned.
Durtal turned over in his bed and tried to lose consciousness.
Everything was in confusion in his brain, and at last he fell into disturbed slumbers mingled with hideous nightmares, in which he saw Madame Mesurat standing in the place of the queen on a pedestal in the porch; and Durtal fumed at her ugliness, raging against the Canons, to whom he vainly appealed to remove his housekeeper and replace the queen..