But when he has met with obstacles and ruts on that road which appeared to him so wide and so fair, when he has torn his heart with the first briars of life, when his thought has ripened beneath the sun of passions, and his soul, stripped of its illusions, feels all chilly and bare amidst the ice of reality, then he returns to the joys of infancy, he warms himself again with the memory of his mother, and sits once again in the pleasant corner of the family fire-side, on the little stool of his childhood.

Marcel saw himself again at the little seminary of Pont-a-Mousson, on the benches, all blackened with ink, of the school-room, studying with ardour the Epitome or the De Viris beneath the paternal eye of Father Martin, a father aged 24, a deacon with curly hair, as timid as a maid.  Then he ran in the long corridors, or in the great square court lined with galleries shaded by the chapel.  He remembered his joy when he had slipped on some excuse into the Seniors’ garden:  “Ah! there is little Marcel, come here, you brat!” And everyone wished to give him a caress.

Then, the first time when he was called to the honour of serving the Mass.  He had thought of it a week beforehand, full of emotion and fear.  At length the day has come.  He is dressed in the white surplice, wearing on his head the red cap.  He would have wished the whole world to see him; but the pupils alone were present, and that diminished his happiness.

Father Barbelin, the censor, a severe but just man, officiated.  He trembled in every limb, as he responded the sacramental verses to this formidable functionary.  That was a great business; his little comrades called him in a whisper from behind:  Marcel!  Marcel! and laughed and nudged each other, while the elder ones, their nose in their book, with sanctimonious face and ecstatic look were wrapt in God.

Then his success, his entrance to the great seminary at Nancy, his first sermon in the chapel.  His voice trembled at the commencement, but little by little, growing stronger, taking courage, inspired by the sacred text, he forgot everything, and the Superior, old Father Richard, who watched him with his little bright cunning eyes, and the unmoved professors, and his watchful fellow-students, jeering and scoffing at first, then at last astonished and jealous.  “There is the stuff of an orator in him,” the Professor of Sacred Eloquence had said, “we must push this lad forward.”  “He is full of talent and virtue,” the Superior had replied, “he will get on.  He is our chosen vessel.”  And the same day he had dined at the master’s table, and they had spoken of him to Monseigneur.  He had in fact been pushed forward ... and with his talents, his learning, his virtues and his eloquence, he had come to teaching the catechism to the little peasants of Althausen!

Althausen!  That was the blow of the hammer which recalled him to reality.  He found himself again the poor village Cure, and he began to laugh.