The stamp of genius is usually found only on countenances with fantastic features.  Have you ever seen on the fair insipid faces of our young swells the imprint of a powerful and fertile intelligence?

The body nearly always is adorned at the expense of the mind.

Of all the deformities of nature, the hunchbacks are intellectual in proportion as the handsome men are not.

Enquire of the army its opinion on its pre-eminently fine man, the drum-major.

Vincent Voiture, who had, as he confessed himself, the silly face of a dreaming sheep, used to say that nature usually likes to place the most precious souls in ill-favoured, puny bodies, as jewellers set the richest diamonds in a small quantity of gold.

Accordingly, the pitiful wrapper of the Abbe Ridoux covered an excellent soul.  With his ugly face and his old stained cassock, he reminded me of those dirty bottles, coated with spider-webs and dust, which we place daintily on the table on days of rejoicing, and which lord it majestically among the glittering decanters, soon to be despised, when their dusty sides appear.

Thus Monsieur Ridoux lorded it amongst his curates, younger, handsomer, fresher, more tasty than himself, and eclipsed them by all the brilliancy of his good-sense, his tact, and his experience.

He had certainly his little failings!...  Who can say that he is exempt from them?  But his mind was sound.  A good companion, besides, and of a cheerful disposition.  “We have reached a period,” he used to say, “when the priest must lay aside the stern front and the anathema.  There is already much to obtain pardon for in the colour of his robe.  Let us be cheerful, let us be insinuating, let us be compassionate to human weaknesses.  Let us sin, if need be, with discretion and propriety; but, in heaven’s name, let us not terrify.  Let us promise paradise to all.  There are always plenty enough whose life is a hell.”

In that he was not of Veuillot’s opinion, that rigid saint, who wished to see all the world damned for the love of God.

Therefore, on seeing this cheerful countenance, this openness of manner, this freedom of speech, this unrestrained good-nature, even those who had been warned, could not help saying:  “Well indeed! this Cure has a pleasant phiz!”

Slanderous tongues, Voltairians—­who is sheltered from the stings of that race of vipers?—­slanderous tongues affirmed that beneath this Rabelaisian exterior, he was profoundly vicious, artful, and hypocritical.  Marcel, who had been brought up by him, and was acquainted with the most secret details of his inmost life, has always assured me that he was nothing of the kind, and that his uncle Ridoux, endowed with the ugliness of Socrates, had also his wisdom.

Nevertheless, I would not dare to assert that he did not like to pinch the young girls’ chins, especially of those who had made their first communion and were near to the marriageable age; a familiarity which, thanks to his gray hairs, and the development of his abdomen, he thought was permitted him, but which, however, is not always without danger.