The law had proved as futile as politics or religion, or any
other single thread spun by the human spider; it offered no more
continuity than architecture or coinage, and no more force of its
own. St. Francis expressed supreme contempt for them all, and
solved the whole problem by rejecting it altogether. Adams
returned to Paris with a broken and contrite spirit, prepared to
admit that his life had no meaning, and conscious that in any
case it no longer mattered. He passed a summer of solitude
contrasting sadly with the last at Surrenden; but the solitude
did what the society did not -- it forced and drove him into the
study of his ignorance in silence. Here at last he entered the
practice of his final profession. Hunted by ennui, he could no
longer escape, and, by way of a summer school, he began a
methodical survey -- a triangulation -- of the twelfth century.
The pursuit had a singular French charm which France had long
lost -- a calmness, lucidity, simplicity of expression, vigor of
action, complexity of local color, that made Paris flat. In the
long summer days one found a sort of saturated green pleasure in
the forests, and gray infinity of rest in the little
twelfth-century churches that lined them, as unassuming as their
own mosses, and as sure of their purpose as their round arches;
but churches were many and summer was short, so that he was at
last driven back to the quays and photographs.
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