It was written that the poor child was to drink to the dregs the cup she had herself prepared by her intolerance.  As the abbe finished speaking, his housekeeper came in to ask if he would receive Monsieur Felix Phellion.  Thus, like the Charter of 1830, Madame de Godollo’s officious falsehood was turned into truth.

“Go this way,” he said hastily, showing his two penitents out by a private corridor.

Life has such strange encounters that it does sometimes happen that the same form of proceeding must be used by courtesans and by the men of God.

“Monsieur l’abbe,” said Felix to the young vicar as soon as they met, “I have heard of the kind manner in which you were so very good as to speak of me in Monsieur Thuillier’s salon last night, and I should have hastened to express my gratitude if another interest had not drawn me to you.”

The Abbe Gondrin passed hastily over the compliments, eager to know in what way he could be useful to his fellow-man.

“With an intention that I wish to think kindly,” replied Felix, “you were spoken to yesterday about the state of my soul.  Those who read it so fluently know more than I do about my inner being, for, during the last few days I have felt strange, inexplicable feelings within me.  Never have I doubted God, but, in contact with that infinitude where he has permitted my thought to follow the traces of his work I seem to have gathered a sense of him less vague, more immediate; and this has led me to ask myself whether an honest and upright life is the only homage which his omnipotence expects of me.  Nevertheless, there are numberless objections rising in my mind against the worship of which you are the minister; while sensible of the beauty of its external form in many of its precepts and practices, I find myself deterred by my reason.  I shall have paid dearly, perhaps by the happiness of my whole life, for the slowness and want of vigor which I have shown in seeking the solution of my doubts.  I have now decided to search to the bottom of them.  No one so well as you, Monsieur l’abbe, can help me to solve them.  I have come with confidence to lay them before you, to ask you to listen to me, to answer me, and to tell me by what studies I can pursue the search for light.  It is a cruelly afflicted soul that appeals to you.  Is not that a good ground for the seed of your word?”

The Abbe Gondrin eagerly protested the joy with which, notwithstanding his own insufficiency, he would undertake to reply to the scruples of conscience in the young savant.  After asking him for a place in his friendship, and telling him to come at certain hours for conversation, he asked him to read, as a first step, the “Thoughts” of Pascal.  A natural affinity, on the side of science, would, he believed, be established between the spirit of Pascal and that of the young mathematician.

While this scene was passing, a scene to which the greatness of the interests in question and the moral and intellectual elevation of the personages concerned in it gave a character of grandeur which, like all reposeful, tranquil aspects, is easier far to comprehend than to reproduce, another scene, of sharp and bitter discord, that chronic malady of bourgeois households, where the pettiness of minds and passions gives open way to it, was taking place in the Thuillier home.