Cazotte, a wise man, used to say to his daughters:  “When you are alone with young people, distrust yourselves; but if you find yourselves with old men, distrust them, and avoid allowing them to take hold of your chin.”

Cazotte was right, for old men begin with that.  I would not dare either to assert that the charms of his cook were safe from his indiscreet curiosity, for it is there too that old men finish; and we must swear not at all.  Everybody knows the wise man’s precept:  “When in doubt, abstain.”

At the period of which I am speaking to you, he reigned in a good parish, well frequented by devout ladies, both young and middle-aged, where from the height of his pulpit he laid down his laws to his kneeling people, without hindrance or control.

He was happy, as all wise men ought to be.  Happy to be in the world, satisfied to be a Cure.  “It is the first of professions,” he often used to say, and there is not one of them which can be compared to it.

  “I am a village Cure,
  Where I live most modestly;
  I’m no important person,
  But I’m happy and content
  No, I do not envy aught,
  For my wants they are but small. 
  How I love to pass my days
  Within the house of God!”

But if he had complained, it would have been very hard, and everybody in the diocese, from Monseigneur the Bishop to his sexton, would have risen with indignation and called him, “Ungrateful wretch.”  For Ridoux was favoured above all his colleagues; above all his colleagues Divine Providence bad overwhelmed him with its favours.  He possessed in his parish, in his very church, at his door, beneath his eyes, beneath his hand, a real blessing from Heaven, a grace of God, a Pactolus always rolling down a mine of Peru, a secret of an alchemist, the veritable philosopher’s stone caught sight of by Nicolas Flamel, and vainly sought for till the time of Cagliostro, a marvel which made him at once honoured and envied, which made his name celebrated, which gave him a preponderant voice in the Chapter and a place in the episcopal Council, which swelled his heart with pride and his money-bag with crowns; he had in the choir of his church behind the mother altar, in a splendid glass-case, laid on a bed of blue velvet ... an old yellow skeleton!  The relics of a saint.

But there are saints and saints; those which do miracles, and those which do them not, those which work and those which rest.

Monsieur Ridoux’s saint worked.

LXIII.

THE MIRACLES.

“Miracles have served for the foundation, and will serve for the continuation of the Church until Antichrist, until the end.”

  (Pensees de PASCAL).

The miserable herd of free-thinkers, people who have no faith, those who are still plunged in the rut of unbelief, are ignorant perhaps that all the saints have done miracles, that they have all begun in that way, that that is the condition sine qua non, for entrance into the blessed confraternity.