“You are the life of your friends,” Godefroid said to her one day; “you are the tie that unites them,—­the house-mother, as it were, of some great work; and, as we are all mortal, I ask myself sometimes what your association would become without you.”

“That is what frightens the others; but Providence, to whom we owe our new book-keeper,” she said, smiling, “will provide.  Besides, I am on the look-out.”

“Will your new book-keeper soon be allowed to work at your business?” asked Godefroid.

“That depends on himself,” she answered, smiling.  “He must be sincerely religious, truly pious, without the least self-interest, not concerned about the riches of our house, able to rise above all petty social considerations on the two wings which God has given us.”

“What are they?”

“Singleness of mind and purity,” replied Madame de la Chanterie.  “Your ignorance shows that you have neglected the reading of our book.” she added, laughing at the innocent trick she had played to know if Godefroid had read the “Imitation of Jesus Christ.”  “And, lastly,” she went on, “fill your soul with Saint Paul’s epistle upon Charity.  When that is done,” she added, with a sublime look, “it will not be you who belong to us, we shall belong to you, and you will be able to count up greater riches than the sovereigns of this world possess; you will enjoy as we enjoy; yes, let me tell you (if you remember the ’Arabian Nights’) that the treasures of Aladdin are nothing to those we possess.  And so for the last year we have not sufficed for our affairs, and we needed, as you see, a book-keeper.”

While speaking, she studied Godefroid’s face; he, on his part, did not know how to take this extraordinary confidence.  But as the scene in the counting-room at Mongenod’s came often to his mind, he hovered between doubt and belief.

“Ah, you will be very happy!” she said.

Godefroid was so consumed with curiosity that from this moment he determined to break through the reserve of one of the four friends and question him.  Now, the one to whom he felt the most drawn, and who seemed naturally to excite the sympathies of all classes, was the kind, gay, simple Monsieur Alain.  By what strange path could Providence have led a being so guileless into this monastery without a lock, where recluses of both sexes lived beneath a rule in the midst of Paris, in absolute freedom, as though they were guarded by the sternest of superiors?  What drama, what event, had made him leave his own road in life, and take this path among the sorrows of the great city?

Godefroid resolved to ask.

VII

Monsieur Alain tells his secrets

One evening Godefroid determined to pay a visit to his neighbor on the floor above him, with the intention of satisfying a curiosity more excited by the apparent impossibility of a catastrophe in such an existence than it would have been under the expectation of discovering some terrible episode in the life of a corsair.