“You are very young to—­”

“—­to be a professor,” said Butscha, cutting short La Briere.  “Ha, monsieur, deformed folks are born a hundred years old.  And besides, a sick man who has long been sick, knows more than his doctor; he knows the disease, and that is more than can be said for the best of doctors.  Well, so it is with a man who cherishes a woman in his heart when the woman is forced to disdain him for his ugliness or his deformity; he ends by knowing so much of love that he becomes seductive, just as the sick man recovers his health; stupidity alone is incurable.  I have had neither father nor mother since I was six years old; I am now twenty-five.  Public charity has been my mother, the procureur du roi my father.  Oh! don’t be troubled,” he added, seeing Ernest’s gesture; “I am much more lively than my situation.  Well, for the last six years, ever since a woman’s eye first told me I had no right to love, I do love, and I study women.  I began with the ugly ones, for it is best to take the bull by the horns.  So I took my master’s wife, who has certainly been an angel to me, for my first study.  Perhaps I did wrong; but I couldn’t help it.  I passed her through my alembic and what did I find? this thought, crouching at the bottom of her heart, ‘I am not so ugly as they think me’; and if a man were to work upon that thought he could bring her to the edge of the abyss, pious as she is.”

“And have you studied Modeste?”

“I thought I told you,” replied Butscha, “that my life belongs to her, just as France belongs to the king.  Do you now understand what you called my spying in Paris?  No one but me really knows what nobility, what pride, what devotion, what mysterious grace, what unwearying kindness, what true religion, gaiety, wit, delicacy, knowledge, and courtesy there are in the soul and in the heart of that adorable creature!”

Butscha drew out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, and La Briere pressed his hand for a long time.

“I live in the sunbeam of her existence; it comes from her, it is absorbed in me; that is how we are united,—­as nature is to God, by the Light and by the Word.  Adieu, monsieur; never in my life have I talked in this way; but seeing you beneath her windows, I felt in my heart that you loved her as I love her.”

Without waiting for an answer Butscha quitted the poor lover, into whose heart his words had put an inexpressible balm.  Ernest resolved to make a friend of him, not suspecting that the chief object of the clerk’s loquacity was to gain communication with some one connected with Canalis.  Ernest was rocked to sleep that night by the ebb and flow of thoughts and resolutions and plans for his future conduct, whereas Canalis slept the sleep of the conqueror, which is the sweetest of slumbers after that of the just.

At breakfast next morning, the friends agreed to spend the evening of the following day at the Chalet and initiate themselves into the delights of provincial whist.  To get rid of the day they ordered their horses, purchased by Germain at a large price, and started on a voyage of discovery round the country, which was quite as unknown to them as China; for the most foreign thing to Frenchmen in France is France itself.