five in the morning
Contact with all the mass of honest and laborious knowledge of which it was a summary gave him back his dignity , raised him from the pit of humiliation into which he seemed to have fallen , and strengthened him to resist . The spiritual privations that his state brought him could be sometimes forgotten . There were moments indeed when the iron entered into his soul . When the bell of the little church rang at half-past five in the morning , he was always there in his corner by the door . The peasants brushed past him suspiciously as they went in and out . He did not see them . He was absorbed in the function , or else in a bitter envy of the officiating priest , and at such moments he suffered all that any ` Vaticanist ' could have wished him to suffer .