—­For you may guess that independently of the pleasure of paying you a call, I have moreover another object in view.

—­Proceed, Captain.

—­Yes, sir.  I wish to talk to you about my daughter.

—­About your daughter! cried Marcel.

—­About my daughter, if you allow me.

—­Do so, I beg of you.

—­Monsieur le Cure, you have been in this neighbourhood some six or eight months.  People have certainly spoken to you about me; they have told you who I am; a miscreant, a man without religion, who regards neither law or Gospel:  that is to say, only worth hanging.  In spite of that, you came to see me.  Very good.  You know that I do not pick and choose my words, that I do not seek a lot of little twisting ways to express my meaning.  You have had a proof of it.  I am blunt, and even brutal, that is well known; but I am open and true.

—­I do not doubt it, Captain.

—­After our little conversation the other day, you must have decided on my sentiments with regard to those of your profession.  Are those sentiments right or wrong?  That is my business.  I am not come to begin a controversy, I am come to ask for an explanation.

—­Please go on, said Marcel alarmed.

—­Not liking the priests, I should have wished to bring up my daughter in these principles.  You see I am straightforward.  Unfortunately, like many other things, her education has slipped out of my hands.  We soldiers do not accumulate property, and those who have the best share, if they have no private fortune, remain as poor as Job.  We are not able therefore to bring up our children as we intend.  The State, in its solicitude, is willing to undertake this care:  we are glad of it, and we are thankful to the State; but our children slip out of our hands; they become what the State wishes them to be, that is to say, its humble servants, and, if they are daughters, anything but what their father has ever dreamed.

Marcel breathed again: 

—­The vocation of children, he said softly, is often in contradiction to the wishes of parents, and that is precisely the sign of the real vocation ... to shatter obstacles.  Where is the great artist, the great man, the hero, the saint, the martyr, who has not had to struggle with his own family?

—­I am not speaking of a vocation, sir, but of prejudices, of fatal habits, of disheartening nonsense, which children, and especially young girls, imbibe in certain surroundings.  The education which my daughter has received, has inoculated her with ideas which I am far from blaming in a woman—­I have my religion myself too—­but the abuse of which I resent.  I am not then at war with my daughter because she has her own, and her own is more receptive, but what I blame with all my power, and what I am determined to oppose with all my power is the excessive attendance at church and on the priest ... on the priest, above all.  You are a man, sir, and you understand me, do you not?