—­She will certainly come back again, for she seemed very desirous of seeing you.  Must I send her to you at that lady’s?

—­No, but tell her to come again this evening late.  I have a thousand things to do, and I can scarcely see any moment but that when I shall be free.

That evening at eight o’clock, he was at Monsieur Patin’s, where he found a good fire in a small sitting-room well closed, with the newspapers and a cup of coffee.  The young girl had called again during the day, and would return.  Marcel installed himself comfortably in an arm-chair and waited for her.

He had seen the Bishop again, who had flashed before his eyes a future, full of golden rays.  The visit of Ridoux and the Comtesse had preceded his own, and in the sudden change of manner of the prelate towards him, he recognized the good offices of his new friend.

A good dinner had completed the happy day, and life appeared to him, after all, to have some sweetness.

LXXXIX.

LOVE AGAIN.

“Oh Folly, which we call love, what dost thou make of us?  Out of free-men thou dost make us slaves; thou dost breathe into us all the vices.  It is thou who dost supply the altars of disloyalty and fear!  It is thou who dost extract from thought the rhetorician’s art, and from enthusiasm a vile profession.  How many young people have you blighted! all the fairest.  Ah, siren, thy voice is sweet.  Thou speakest to us the language of the gods, but thou are only an impure beast.”

  JEAN LAROQUE (Niobe).

A kind of emotion seized him.  He was almost ashamed of it, and tried to give an account of it to himself.  It seemed to him that he was affected as if at the approach of sin.  He restrained his feelings and enquired of himself what this young girl could want with him.

Perhaps she was but a common courtesan who, attracted by the handsome appearance and tender look of the priest, counted on speculating profitably in a clandestine intrigue.

Nevertheless, he was not terrified at the prospect, and he recalled complacently the scene in the open air in the market-place at Althausen.  With his eyes closed, he saw her again playing the castanets, rounding her hips and shooting forward her little foot, in order to make the enraptured rustics admire the sculptural beauty of her leg.  He saw again that bosom, free from all covering, which had plunged him into such confusion.

Ah, if instead of his love for Suzanne, so full of fever and danger, he had picked up on his way some pretty girl like this Bohemian, who, while calming his feelings, would have left his heart in peace.

With a common peasant girl, vigorous and sensual, like this dancer at the fair, he would have gratified the only low permissible to a priest; for it was the most unpardonable folly, he recognized now, to surrender his heart.