There are as many kinds of virtues as there are different peoples.  History swarms with virtuous people who have been so in their own way.  Socrates was virtuous, and yet what strange familiarities he allowed himself with the young Alcibiades.  The virtuous Brutus virtuously assassinated his father.  The virtuous Elizabeth of Hungary had herself whipped by her confessor, the virtuous Conrad, and the virtuous Janicot doted on virtuous little boys; and finally Monseigneur is virtuous, but his old lady friends look down and smile when he talks of virtue.

See this priest of austere countenance and whitened hair.  He too, during long years, has believed in that virtue which forms his torment.  Candid and trustful, he felt the fervency of religion fill his heart from his youth.  He had faith, he was filled with the spirit of charity and love.  He said like the apostle:  Ubi charitas et amor, Deus ibi est.  And he believed that God was with him, and that alone with God he was peacefully pursuing his road.  But he had counted without that troublesome guest who comes and places himself as a third between the creature and the Creator, and who, more powerful than the God of legend, quickly banishes him, for he is the principle of life and the other is the principle of death; it is the fruitful love and the other is the wasting barren love; it is present and active, while the other is inert, dumb and in the clouds of your sickly brain.

“It is in vain that in his successive halts from parish to parish, he has resisted the thousand seductions which surround the priest, from the timid gaze of the simple school-girl, smitten with a holy love for the young curate, to the veiled smile of the languishing woman.  In vain will he attempt, like Fenelon formerly, to put the warmth of his heart and the incitements of the flesh upon the wrong scent by carrying on a platonic love with some chosen souls; what is the result in the end of his efforts and his struggles?  Now he is old; ought he not to be appeased?  No, weighty and imperious matter has regained the upper hand.  He loves no longer, he is not able to love any longer, but the fury urges him on.  He seduces his cook, or dishonours his niece.”

And yet those most courageous natures exist, for they have resisted to the end.  We blame them, we are wrong.  Who would have been capable of such efforts and sacrifices?  Who would sustain during ten, fifteen, twenty years, similar straggles between the imperious requirements of nature and the miserable duties of convention?  They, therefore, who see their hair fall before their virtue are very rare.

The crowd of priests strike themselves against the obstacles of the road from the first steps, they tear their catechumen’s robe with the white thorns of May, and when they have arrived at the end of their career, they have stopped many a time under some mysterious thicket, unknown by the vulgar, relishing the forbidden fruit.