XXIV

Sunday was a day of cheerful indolence, devoted to attending the services in the Chapel, which was filled with the scent of incense all day long.  At Vespers, while the clear, boyish voices intoned the long-drawn canticles, Jean would be gazing at some woman’s face half seen in the dusk of the galleries where the pupils’ mothers and sisters knelt during the office, their haughty air contradicting the humble attitude.  At the sound of the Ave maris stella, the lowly bookbinder’s son would lift his eyes to these ladies of high degree, the plainest of whom feels herself a jewel of price and cherishes a natural and unaffected pride of birth.  The chants and incense, the flowers and sacred images, whatever troubles the imagination and stimulates to prayer, all these things united to enervate his spirit and deliver him a trembling victim to the glamour of these patrician dames.

But it was Gabrielle he worshipped in them, Gabrielle to whom he offered up his prayers, his supplications.  All that element in religion which gives to love the fascination of forbidden fruit appealed powerfully to his imagination.  Unbeliever though he was, he loved the Magdalen’s God and savoured the creed that has bestowed on lovers one amorous bliss the more—­the bliss of losing their immortal souls.

XXV

Little by little the boys wearied of this insubordination, their imaginations proving unequal to the invention of any new forms of mischief.  Even de Grizolles himself left off shooting beans.  Instead, he conceived the notion of brewing chocolate inside his desk with a spirit-lamp and a silver patty-pan.  Jean left him in peace and reopened his Sophocles with a sigh of relief.  But the Superintendent, going by in the court, caught a smell of cooking, searched the desks and unearthed the patty-pan, which he offered, still warm, for the Reverend the Director’s inspection, with the words:  “There! that’s what goes on in Monsieur Servien’s class-room.”  The Director slapped his forehead, declared they would be the death of him and ordered the patty-pan to be restored to its owner.  Then he sent for the Assistant in charge and administered a severe reprimand, because he believed it to be his bounden duty to do so.

The next day was a whole holiday, and Jean went to spend the day at his father’s.  The latter asked him if he was ready for his professorial examination.

“My lad,” he adjured him, “be quick and find a good post if you want me to see you in it.  One of these days your aunt and I will be going out at yonder door feet foremost.  The old lady had a fit of dizziness last week on the stairs. I am not ill, but I can feel I am worn out.  I have done a hard life’s work in the world.”

He looked at his tools, and walked away, a bent old man!

Then Jean gathered up in both hands the old work-worn tools, all polished with use, scissors, punches, knives, folders, scrapers, and kissed them, the tears running down his cheeks.