Death, which with its brutal hand, seizes us at the moment when perhaps at last we are going to rest ourselves and rejoice.

No, that shall not be.  He will not continue to vegetate without happiness in these dull, common-place surroundings; to walk at random in this road bristling with thorns; to pursue his disheartening career, enclosed by miserable vices.

Nothing around him but stupid, vulgar prosiness, foolish moral annihilation.  No poetry, no golden ray, no rainbow!  Everything most low, unsightly, pitiful.  Such was his lot as priest.

Complaints of the soul, wandering flashes of the imagination, criminal aspirations of the heart, sinful desires ... these ... that was all.

Was this then life?

Was it for this that God had created him, that his mother had drawn him painfully forth from her entrails, that nature had one day counted one intelligent being the more?

Ah! he felt full well it was not so.  He felt full well it was not so by his thirst for emotions and enjoyment, by his altered lips, by his aspirations for an unknown world.  He was in haste to strip off for once at least this old man’s shell which enveloped him, this black, hideous, hardened covering of the bad priest, beneath which he felt his vitality, his youth, his strength, his heart of thirty, bounding, boiling, roaring, like burning lava.

The next day be remembered that though it was nearly six months since he had taken possession of his cure, his pastoral visits were not yet completed.

In fact, he had gone everywhere, even to Captain Durand’s.  Only, he had found the door closed and, after the information he received, he had fully resolved not to go there again.

[Footnote 1:  The Antigone of Soto.]

XIV.

THE CAPTAIN.

“The disposition of a man of sixty is nearly always the happy or sad reflection of his life.  Young people are such as Nature has made them; old men have been fashioned by the often awkward hands of society.”

  ED. ABOUT (Trente et Quarante).

The old Captain was in fact a bad parishioner, as his servant had told him, and had only one good quality in the eyes of that careful housekeeper, “that he was always shining like a new halfpenny.”

Durand, in fact, was what is called in a regiment “a smart soldier,” which means to say “a clean soldier.”  And still, one of his most important occupations was to brush his things.  The son of peasants, without patronage, fortune or backstairs influence, he had raised himself, a rare and difficult thing nowadays; therefore he was proud of himself, and would say to anyone who would listen to him:  “I am the son of my own deeds.”

He had been one of those serious-minded officers of whom Jules Noriac speaks, who instead of dividing their many spare hours between the goddess of play and the goddess of the bar, employ themselves in regimental reforms.