Pious and habituated to ecstatic experiences in
sumptuous chapels, he there re-encountered precisely the same mystical
sensations as when he knelt under some painted window and gave way
to the intoxication of organ music and incense. Woman swayed him as
jealously and despotically as the God of wrath, terrifying him, granting
him moments of delight, which were like spasms in their keenness, in
return for hours filled with frightful, tormenting visions of hell and
eternal tortures. In Nana's presence, as in church, the same stammering
accents were his, the same prayers and the same fits of despair--nay,
the same paroxysms of humility peculiar to an accursed creature who is
crushed down in the mire from whence he has sprung. His fleshly desires,
his spiritual needs, were confounded together and seemed to spring from
the obscure depths of his being and to bear but one blossom on the
tree of his existence. He abandoned himself to the power of love and
of faith, those twin levers which move the world. And despite all the
struggles of his reason this bedroom of Nana's always filled him with
madness, and he would sink shuddering under the almighty dominion of
sex, just as he would swoon before the vast unknown of heaven.
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