Abbe Mouret smiled as he stirred the burning embers of his vine-stock fire.  In all that past he only found great purity and perfect obedience.  He had been a lily whose sweet scent had charmed his masters.  He could not recall a single bad action.  He had never taken advantage of the absolute freedom of those walks, when the two prefects in charge would go off to have a chat with a parish priest in the neighbourhood, or to have a smoke behind a hedge, or to drink beer with a friend.  Never had he hidden a novel under his mattress, nor a bottle of anisette in a cupboard.  For a long time, even, he had had no suspicion of the sinfulness around him—­of the wings of chicken and the cakes smuggled into the seminary in Lent, of the guilty letters brought in by servers, of the abominable conversations carried on in whispers in certain corners of the courtyard.  He had wept hot tears when he first perceived that few among his fellows loved God for His own sake.  There were peasants’ sons there who had taken orders simply through their terror of conscription, sluggards who dreamed of a career of idleness, and ambitious youths already agitated by a vision of the staff and the mitre.  And when he found the world’s wickedness reappearing at the altar’s very foot, he had withdrawn still further into himself, giving himself still more to God, to console Him for being forsaken.

He did recollect, however, that he had crossed his legs one day in class, and that, when the professor reproved him for it, his face had become fiery red, as if he had committed some abominable action.  He was one of the best students, never arguing, but learning his texts by heart.  He established the existence and eternity of God by proofs drawn from Holy Writ, the opinions of the fathers of the Church, the universal consensus of all mankind.  This kind of reasoning filled him with an unshakeable certainty.  During his first year of philosophy, he had worked at his logic so earnestly that his professor had checked him, remarking that the most learned were not the holiest.  In his second year, therefore, he had carried out his study of metaphysics as a regulation task, constituting but a small fraction of his daily duties.  He felt a growing contempt for science; he wished to remain ignorant, in order to preserve the humility of his faith.  Later on, he only followed the course of Rohrbacher’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’ from submission; he ventured as far as Gousset’s arguments, and Bouvier’s ’Theological Course,’ without daring to take up Bellarmin, Liguori, Suarez, or St. Thomas Aquinas.  Holy Writ alone impassioned him.  Therein he found all desirable knowledge, a tale of infinite love which should be sufficient instruction for all men of good-will.  He simply adopted the dicta of his teachers, casting on them the care of inquiry, needing nought of such rubbish to know how to love, and accusing books of stealing away the time which should be devoted to prayer.  He even succeeded in forgetting his years of college life.  He no longer knew anything, but was simplicity itself, a child brought back to the lispings of his catechism.