It was a matter of principle with Madame Claes to perform the duties of her religion privately.  Her confessor, who was almost unknown in the family, now entered the house for the second time only; but there, as elsewhere, every one was impressed with a sort of tender admiration at the aspect of the uncle and his nephew.

The Abbe de Solis was an octogenarian, with silvery hair, and a withered face from which the vitality seemed to have retreated to the eyes.  He walked with difficulty, for one of his shrunken legs ended in a painfully deformed foot, which was cased in a species of velvet bag, and obliged him to use a crutch when the arm of his nephew was not at hand.  His bent figure and decrepit body conveyed the impression of a delicate, suffering nature, governed by a will of iron and the spirit of religious purity.  This Spanish priest, who was remarkable for his vast learning, his sincere piety, and a wide knowledge of men and things, had been successively a Dominican friar, the “grand penitencier” of Toledo, and the vicar-general of the archbishopric of Malines.  If the French Revolution had not intervened, the influence of the Casa-Real family would have made him one of the highest dignitaries of the Church; but the grief he felt for the death of the young duke, Madame Claes’s brother, who had been his pupil, turned him from active life, and he now devoted himself to the education of his nephew, who was made an orphan at an early age.

After the conquest of Belgium, the Abbe de Solis settled at Douai to be near Madame Claes.  From his youth up he had professed an enthusiasm for Saint Theresa which, together with the natural bent of his mind, led him to the mystical time of Christianity.  Finding in Flanders, where Mademoiselle Bourignon and the writings of the Quietists and Illuminati made the greatest number of proselytes, a flock of Catholics devoted to those ideas, he remained there,—­all the more willingly because he was looked up to as a patriarch by this particular communion, which continued to follow the doctrines of the Mystics notwithstanding the censures of the Church upon Fenelon and Madame Guyon.  His morals were rigid, his life exemplary, and he was believed to have visions.  In spite of his own detachment from the things of life, his affection for his nephew made him careful of the young man’s interests.  When a work of charity was to be done, the old abbe put the faithful of his flock under contribution before having recourse to his own means; and his patriarchal authority was so well established, his motives so pure, his discernment so rarely at fault, that every one was ready to answer his appeal.  To give an idea of the contrast between the uncle and the nephew, we may compare the old man to a willow on the borders of a stream, hollowed to a skeleton and barely alive, and the young man to a sweet-brier clustering with roses, whose erect and graceful stems spring up about the hoary trunk of the old tree as if they would support it.