of an iron necklet riveted to the wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of four slabs of granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low for him to stand upright in.
A human being was put inside, with a coverlid of stone on top.
This exists.
It can be seen. It can be touched.
These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river''s current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls,-- what declaimers!
BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS
CHAPTER III
ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST
Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists in Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization.
It stops life short.
It simply depopulates.
Claustration, castration. It has been the scourge of Europe.
Add to this the violence so often done to the conscience, the forced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the cloister, the right of the first-born pouring the excess of the family into monasticism, the ferocities of which we have just spoken, the in pace, the closed mouths, the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate minds placed in the dungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, the interment of living souls. Add individual tortures to national degradations, and, whoever you may be, you will shudder before the frock and the veil,--those two winding-sheets of human devising.