When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the square, he thought the priest’s behaviour just now very unbecoming.  This refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy; all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days of the tithe.

The landlady took up the defence of her curie.

“Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee.  Last year he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six trusses at once, he is so strong.”

“Bravo!” said the chemist.  “Now just send your daughters to confess to fellows which such a temperament!  I, if I were the Government, I’d have the priests bled once a month.  Yes, Madame Lefrancois, every month—­a good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals.”

“Be quiet, Monsieur Homais.  You are an infidel; you’ve no religion.”

The chemist answered:  “I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling.  I adore God, on the contrary.  I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be.  I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don’t need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do.  For one can know Him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients.  My God!  Mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger!  I am for the profession of faith of the ‘Savoyard Vicar,’ and the immortal principles of ’89!  And I can’t admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.”

He ceased, looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town council.  But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a distant rolling.  One could distinguish the noise of a carriage mingled with the clattering of loose horseshoes that beat against the ground, and at last the “Hirondelle” stopped at the door.

It was a yellow box on two large wheels, that, reaching to the tilt, prevented travelers from seeing the road and dirtied their shoulders.  The small panes of the narrow windows rattled in their sashes when the coach was closed, and retained here and there patches of mud amid the old layers of dust, that not even storms of rain had altogether washed away.  It was drawn by three horses, the first a leader, and when it came down-hill its bottom jolted against the ground.