Durtal lighted a cigarette, and they walked up and down in front of the palace railing.

“Setting aside the question of art,” said Durtal, “in this long array of Christ’s ancestors there is one—­David—­who really confounds me, for he is the most complex of all; at once so august and so small! he is quite puzzling!”

“Why?”

“Well, only think of the life of the man who was by turns shepherd, warrior, and outlaw chief, an omnipotent king and a fugitive without either hearth or home; who was a wonderful poet and an exact prophet and seer!  And is not the monarch’s character even more enigmatical than his career?

“He was mild and indulgent, devoid of rancour and hatred, and yet he was ferocious.  Remember the punishments he inflicted on the Ammonites; his vengeance was appalling.  He had them sawn asunder, cut them with harrows of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln.

“He was loyal, wholly devoted to the Lord, and just; but he committed the crime of adultery, and ordered the death of the husband he had betrayed.  What contradictions!”

“To understand David,” said the Abbe Plomb, “you must not think of him apart from his surroundings, nor take him out of the age in which he lived, otherwise you measure him by the ideas of our own time, and that is absurd.  In the Asiatic conception of royalty, adultery was almost permitted to a being whom his subjects regarded as superior to the common run of humanity; besides, women were then as a species of cattle belonging almost absolutely to him as the despot and supreme master.  It was but the exercise of his regal power, as has been plainly shown by Monsieur Dieulafoy in his study of that king.  And, on the other hand, if he is accused of tortures and bloodshed, why, the whole of the Old Testament is full of them!  Jehovah Himself pours out blood like water, and exterminates men as if they were flies.  It is well not to forget that the world then still lived under the Law of Fear.  So it is not very surprising that, with a view to terrifying his enemies, whose manners and customs were not indeed any milder than his own, he should have tortured the inhabitants of Rabbah and baked the Ammonites.

“But in contrast to these acts of violence and the sins which he expiated, see how generous he was to Saul, and admire the magnanimity and charity of the man whom the followers of Renan would have us regard as a bandit chief and outlaw.  Remember, too, that he taught the world, as yet ignorant, the virtues which at a later time Christ was to preach—­humility in its most touching form, and repentance in its bitterest shape.  When the prophet Nathan reproved him for the murder of Uriah, he confessed his sin with tears, fell on his face before God, bravely accepted the most terrible punishment:  incest and murder in his family, the rebellion and death of his son, treason, misery, and a desperate flight in the woods; and with what urgency he implores for pardon in the ‘Miserere,’ with what love and contrition he cries to the God he had offended!