In fact, there reigns in these gloomy halls where no tear has ever
fallen, no prayer has ever been heard and no ray of hope has ever
pierced--there reigns something yet colder than death, something more
unwholesome, more nauseous, more deleterious than the putrid miasmas
that infect the air, something more sad to see than the nameless
fragments of extinct life, something more loathsome than those filthy
and disgusting remnants, something more repulsive than those noses eaten
by worms and those empty eyeballs devoured by rats. I mean the cynicism
of the dwellers in that place; I mean their insensibility, their
indifference and calm heedlessness in the presence of such grave
subjects for thought. I mean that lack of perception, that spirit of
negation and revolt of which those wretched men make a boast and which
they obstinately oppose to all religious sentiment, all principle of
tradition or revealed authority. I mean the atheism and ceaseless
mockery with which they invariably meet any generous impulse aroused in
an honest soul by a healthy faith.
This struck me even more sensibly than the spectacle of death and
dissolution which I have striven to describe. Thus the apparently living
men who haunt this spot are more truly dead than the corpses upon which
they exercise their pretended science. They seemed to me ruins far more
terrible than those of the body, ruins which repelled all hope, being
born of doubt and leading to negation.
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