Seeing that he was speaking with a firm conviction that he was being heard by me, I was filled with disgust; I thought I could detect the deceit and cowardice that lay beneath this vile hypocrisy.  I moved away and waited for the abbe some distance off.  He soon rejoined me; the interview had ended by a mutual promise to meet again soon.  The abbe had undertaken to convey the Trappist’s words to me, while the latter had threatened in the most honeyed tone in the world to come and see me if I refused his request.  The abbe and I agreed to consult together, without informing the chevalier or Edmee, that we might not disquiet them unnecessarily.  The Trappist had gone to stay at La Chatre, at the Carmelite convent; this had thoroughly aroused the abbe’s suspicions, in spite of his first enthusiasm at the penitence of the sinner.  The Carmelites had persecuted him in his youth, and in the end the prior had driven him to secularize himself.  The prior was still alive, old but implacable; infirm, and withdrawn from the world, but strong in his hatred, and his passion for intrigue.  The abbe could not hear his name without shuddering, and he begged me to act prudently in this affair.

“Although John Mauprat,” he said, “is under the bane of the law, and you are at the summit of honour and prosperity, do not despise the weakness of your enemy.  Who knows what cunning and hatred may do?  They can usurp the place of the just and cast him out on the dung-heap; they can fasten their crimes on others and sully the robe of innocence with their vileness.  Maybe you have not yet finished with the Mauprats.”

The poor abbe did not know that there was so much truth in his words.

XIX

After thoroughly reflecting on the Trappist’s probable intentions, I decided that I ought to grant him the interview he had requested.  In any case, John Mauprat could not hope to impose upon me, and I wished to do all in my power to prevent him from pestering my great-uncle’s last days with his intrigues.  Accordingly, the very next day I betook myself to the town, where I arrived towards the end of Vespers.  I rang, not without emotion, at the door of the Carmelites.

The retreat chosen by the Trappist was of those innumerable mendicant societies which France supported at that time.  Though its rules were ostensibly most austere, this monastery was rich and devoted to pleasure.  In that age of scepticism the small number of the monks was entirely out of proportion to the wealth of the establishment which had been founded for them; and the friars who roamed about the vast monasteries in the most remote parts of the provinces led the easiest and idlest lives they had ever known, in the lap of luxury, and entirely freed from the control of opinion, which always loses its power when man isolates himself.  But this isolation, the mother of the “amiable vices,” as they used to phrase it, was dear only to the more ignorant.  The leaders were a prey to the painful dreams of an ambition which had been nurtured in obscurity and embittered by inaction.  To do something, even in the most limited sphere and with the help of the feeblest machinery; to do something at all costs—­such was the one fixed idea of the priors and abbes.