—­Are you afraid of me then?  Angels of heaven, a woman like me.  Is it possible?  Ah, I should have been very proud of it.

—­Proud to make me sin?

—­Sin!  Sin!  Monsieur le Cure:  why do we call that a sin?

She came nearer to him.  He wished to rise from his chair, but his hand went astray, he never knew how, on his servant’s waist.

Oh vow of chastity, sentiments of modesty, manly dignity and priestly virtue, where were you, where were you?

LIV.

MATER SAEVA CUPIDINUM.

  “Well, you have found it, this ephemeral happiness.”

  BABILLOT (La Mascarade humaine).

Sadness succeeds to joy, deception to illusion, the awakening to the dream, the head-ache to the debauch.

When the crime is perpetrated, remorse, the avenging lash of virtue, comes and scourges the conscience.  “Come, up, vile thing! thou hast slept over long.”

And it exposes to the wretch the emptiness of pleasures, purchased at the price of honour.

The dawn found the Cure of Althausen groaning secretly to himself on his couch.

He had made himself guilty of an abominable wickedness, he had just committed an inexcusable crime, he had succumbed cowardly, ignominiously; he had betrayed his faith, abjured his priestly oaths, forgotten his duties, prostituted his dignity on the withered breast of an old corrupted maid-servant.

Suzanne, the adorable young girl, who in the first place had insensibly and involuntarily drawn him on the road of perjury, for whom he would have sacrificed honour, reputation, the universe and his God, he had abjured her also in the arms of this drab.

And that was the wound which consumed his heart the most.

For as soon as we have yielded to the infernal temptation, the lying prism vanishes, the halo disappears, and there only remains vice in all its hideousness and repulsive nudity.  It is then that we hear a threatening voice mutter secretly in the depths of our being.

Happy is he who, already slipping on the fatal descent, listens to that voice:  “Stop, stop; there is still time, raise thyself up.”

But most frequently we remain deaf to that importunate cry.  And, weary of crying in vain, conscience is silent.  It no more casts its solemn serious note into the intoxicating music of facile love.

And the wretch, devoured by insatiable desire, pursues his coarse and looks not back.  He goes on, he ever goes on, leaving right and left, like the trees on the way-side, his vigour and his youth which he scatters behind him.  He set forth young, robust and strong, and he arrives at the halting-place, worn-out, soiled and blemished.  There is the ditch, and he tumbles headlong into it.  He falls into the common grave of cowardice and infamy.  The lowest depths receive him and restore him not again.