—­Let me finish.

Another thing which is very valuable.  She is full of little attentions for her master.  Ah, you are not aware with what tender solicitude, with what kindness, with what jealous affection an old mistress surrounds you.  She fears more for your health than for her own, she is acquainted with your tastes and knows how to anticipate them, she satisfies all your desires, and lends herself to all your fancies.

—­What a conversation!  If anyone heard us....

—­Be easy.  I have drawn the screen.

The young mistress is fickle, egotistical, capricious; she exacts adoration, and most frequently loves you for a whim and for want of occupation.

The old one devotes herself entirely to you and does not ask you (sublime self-denial!), that you should love her, but only that you should let her love you.  Balzac extolled the women of thirty; that was because he had not tasted those of forty.  Ah! the women of forty!

They are the only women who are of value to the priest, my friend.  You have had the good fortune to meet one here, and instead of profiting by it, of thinking yourself fortunate, of thanking heaven and piously and devoutly enjoying the good which God grants you, you cast it away, you disdain, you despise it; and why?  For some giddy little thing who will bring upon you every kind of vexation and unpleasantness. Dixi.  You can speak now.

Marcel made no reply.  With his elbows resting on the table and his head in his hands, he stared at his uncle.

He asked himself if he was really awake, if it was really his adopted father, the mentor of his childhood, the wise and virtuous Cure of St. Nicholas, who was talking to him so.

He knew the worthy man’s somewhat eccentric character, his coarse witticisms in bad taste, but he never could have believed that he would have stated such theories before him with a cynisism like that.  He quite understood that a man might commit faults, he even excused in petto certain crimes, and he excused them the more willingly because he himself had been guilty of them; but he did not understand how a man could dare to talk about them.

He was rather of that class of persons who are modest in words, but not in deeds, who are offended at the talk, while they delight in the acts.  We hear them utter cries of horror and indignation at the slightest equivocal word, we see them stop their ears at the recital of a racy tale, chastely cover their face before the figure of the Callipygean Venus, treating Moliere as obscene and Rabelais as debauched; yet, out of sight, sheltered by the curtains of the alcove, they love to strip in silence some lascivious Maritorne, and cautiously abandon themselves to disgusting orgies with Phrynes whom they chance to encounter.

Therefore the Cure of Althausen was offended and indignant at his uncle’s cynicism, who had so crudely broached the chapter about the love of middle-aged women to him, who the evening before had abandoned himself to all the furies of a long-repressed passion, in the arms of a debauched old maid-servant.