—­I have known that.  He was a very harsh and a very tiresome man.  Too frozen virtue which has melted, I am told.  I do not want to believe it.  He is the talk of the town.  It is abominable, but I do not pity him.  That is what comes of not making religion amiable.  Although we are old, Monsieur Marcel, we are of the new school; we firmly believe that religion and agreeable gaiety ought to proceed in harmony.  We want conciliatory and amiable priests.  In this way the women let themselves be won over.  I may confess it to you, I who am double your age; and in so far as we shall have the women, the world is ours.

While asking himself, what influence this more than middle-aged lady could exercise over the Bishop’s decisions, Marcel quickly perceived that in order to be successful, he had only to be in the good graces of this estimable dowager, and, in spite of the remembrance of Suzanne, he tried to be amiable and witty.

But soon his ideas of ambition returned to him in this sumptuous drawing-room, surrounded with comfort and luxury:  he thought that he had only to wish it, in order to become himself too, one of the great of the earth, and it appeared to him that the Comtesse do Montluisant ought to be the instrument of a rapid fortune.

The old lady was one of those women, very numerous in the world, who make of religion a convenient chaperone for their intrigues and their affairs of gallantry.  When they are old, and can scarcely venture any longer on their own account, they generously place their experience and their small talents at another’s service, and willingly assist the intrigues of others.  That is called lending the hand, and more than once the old lady had countenanced, through perfectly Christian charity, the secret interviews of sweet sheep with their tender pastor.

The deduction must not be made from this that all the devout are courtesans when they are young and procuresses in their ripened age.

Whatever may be said, all are not hypocritical and vicious.  Vice usually comes in the long run, and hypocrisy, which oozes from the old arches of the temples, and from the antique wainscoting of the sacristies, falls at length upon their shoulders like an unwholesome drizzling rain, but for the most part they begin with conviction and good faith.

They attend church frequently, not only because it is good form, not only through want of occupation and through habit, but from inclination.

The melodies of the organ, the odour of incense, the singing of the choir, the meditation and silence, the flowers, the wax-tapers, the gilding, the pictures, the mysterious light which filters through the stained-glass windows, the radiant face of the Virgin, the sweet and pale countenance of Christ, the statues of the saints, the niches, the old pillars, the small chapels, all this mystic poetry pleases them, everything enchants and intoxicates them, even to the sanctimonious and hypocritical face of the beadle and the sacristan.