“When shall I get well?  Oh, save me!  How unfortunate I am!  How unfortunate I am!”

And the doctor left, always recommending him to diet himself.

“Don’t listen to him, my lad,” said Mere Lefrancois, “Haven’t they tortured you enough already?  You’ll grow still weaker.  Here! swallow this.”

And she gave him some good beef-tea, a slice of mutton, a piece of bacon, and sometimes small glasses of brandy, that he had not the strength to put to his lips.

Abbe Bournisien, hearing that he was growing worse, asked to see him.  He began by pitying his sufferings, declaring at the same time that he ought to rejoice at them since it was the will of the Lord, and take advantage of the occasion to reconcile himself to Heaven.

“For,” said the ecclesiastic in a paternal tone, “you rather neglected your duties; you were rarely seen at divine worship.  How many years is it since you approached the holy table?  I understand that your work, that the whirl of the world may have kept you from care for your salvation.  But now is the time to reflect.  Yet don’t despair.  I have known great sinners, who, about to appear before God (you are not yet at this point I know), had implored His mercy, and who certainly died in the best frame of mind.  Let us hope that, like them, you will set us a good example.  Thus, as a precaution, what is to prevent you from saying morning and evening a ‘Hail Mary, full of grace,’ and ’Our Father which art in heaven’?  Yes, do that, for my sake, to oblige me.  That won’t cost you anything.  Will you promise me?”

The poor devil promised.  The cure came back day after day.  He chatted with the landlady; and even told anecdotes interspersed with jokes and puns that Hippolyte did not understand.  Then, as soon as he could, he fell back upon matters of religion, putting on an appropriate expression of face.

His zeal seemed successful, for the club-foot soon manifested a desire to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if he were cured; to which Monsieur Bournisien replied that he saw no objection; two precautions were better than one; it was no risk anyhow.

The druggist was indignant at what he called the manoeuvres of the priest; they were prejudicial, he said, to Hippolyte’s convalescence, and he kept repeating to Madame Lefrancois, “Leave him alone! leave him alone!  You perturb his morals with your mysticism.”  But the good woman would no longer listen to him; he was the cause of it all.  From a spirit of contradiction she hung up near the bedside of the patient a basin filled with holy-water and a branch of box.

Religion, however, seemed no more able to succour him than surgery, and the invincible gangrene still spread from the extremities towards the stomach.  It was all very well to vary the potions and change the poultices; the muscles each day rotted more and more; and at last Charles replied by an affirmative nod of the head when Mere Lefrancois, asked him if she could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet of Neufchatel, who was a celebrity.