Let us leave them in peace.  It is not I who will disturb their sweet tete-a-tete.

XLII.

MEMORY LOOKING BACK.

  “Man can do nothing against Destiny. 
  We go, time flies, and that which must
  arrive, arrives.”

  LEON CLADEL (L’Homme de la Croix-aux-Baufs).

Marcel was one of those energetic natures who believe that struggle is one of the conditions of life.  He had valiantly accepted the task which was incumbent upon him.

But there are hours of discouragement and exhaustion, in which the boldest and the strongest succumb, and he had reached one of those hours.

And then, it is so difficult to struggle without ceasing, especially when we catch no glimpse of calmer days.  Weariness quickly comes and we sink down on the road.

Then a friendly hand should be stretched towards us, should lift us up and say to us “Courage.”  But Marcel could not lean on any friendly hand.

He had no one to whom he could confide his struggles, his vexations, and the apprehension of his coming weaknesses.

Although his life as priest had been spotless up to then, his brethren held aloof from him, for there was a bad mark against him at the Bishop’s Palace.  It had been attached at the commencement of his career.  He was one of those catechumens on whom from the very first the most brilliant hopes are founded.  Knowledge, intelligence, respectful obedience, appearance of piety, sympathetic face, everything was present in him.

The Bishop, a frivolous old man, a great lover of little girls, who combined the sinecure of his bishopric with that of almoner to a second-hand empress, whose name will remain celebrated in the annals of devout gallantry or of gallant devotion, the Bishop, a worthy pastor for such a sheep, passed the greater portion of his time in the intrigues of petticoats and sacristies, and left to the young secretary the care of matters spiritual.

It was he who, like Gil-Blas, composed the mandates and sometimes the sermons of Monseigneur.

This confidence did not fail to arouse secret storms in the episcopal guest-chamber.

A Grand-Vicar, jealous of the influence which the young Abbe was assuming over his master’s mind, had resolved upon his dismissal and fall.

With a church-man’s tortuous diplomacy, he pried into the young man’s heart, as yet fresh and inexperienced.

He insinuated himself into the most hidden recesses of his conscience, seized, so to say, in their flight the timid fleeting transports of his thought, of his vigorous imagination, and soon discovered with secret satisfaction that he was straying from the ancient path of orthodoxy.