“You threw away your pen,” said Father d’Aigrigny to Rodin with extreme deference, “while I was dictating a note for Rome.  Will you do me the favor to tell me how I have acted wrong?”

“Directly,” replied Rodin, in his sharp, cutting voice.  “For a long time this affair appeared to me above your strength; but I abstained from interfering.  And yet what mistakes! what poverty of invention; what coarseness in the means employed to bring it to bear!”

“I can hardly understand your reproaches,” answered Father d’Aigrigny, mildly, though a secret bitterness made its way through his apparent submission.  “Was not the success certain, had it not been for this codicil?  Did you not yourself assist in the measures that you now blame?”

“You commanded, then, and it was my duty to obey.  Besides, you were just on the point of succeeding—­not because of the means you had taken—­but in spite of those means, with all their awkward and revolting brutality.”

“Sir—­you are severe,” said Father d’Aigrigny.

“I am just.  One has to be prodigiously clever, truly, to shut up any one in a room, and then lock the door!  And yet, what else have you done?  The daughters of General Simon?—­imprisoned at Leipsic, shut up in a convent at Paris!  Adrienne de Cardoville?—­placed in confinement.  Sleepinbuff—­put in prison.  Djalma?—­quieted by a narcotic.  One only ingenious method, and a thousand times safer, because it acted morally, not materially, was employed to remove M. Hardy.  As for your other proceedings—­they were all bad, uncertain, dangerous.  Why?  Because they were violent, and violence provokes violence.  Then it is no longer a struggle of keen, skillful, persevering men, seeing through the darkness in which they walk, but a match of fisticuffs in broad day.  Though we should be always in action, we should always shrink from view; and yet you could find no better plan than to draw universal attention to us by proceedings at once open and deplorably notorious.  To make them more secret, you call in the guard, the commissary of police, the jailers, for your accomplices.  It is pitiable, sir; nothing but the most brilliant success could cover such wretched folly; and this success has been wanting.”

“Sir,” said Father d’Aigrigny, deeply hurt, for the Princess de Saint Dizier, unable to conceal the sort of admiration caused in her by the plain, decisive words of Rodin, looked at her old lover, with an air that seemed to say, “He is right;”—­“sir, you are more than severe in your judgment; and, notwithstanding the deference I owe to you, I must observe, that I am not accustomed—­”