when it bids them not meddle with spiritual things!  They abandon the spiritual! they despise it, they will have nothing to do with it—­oh, the venerable asses! they do not see, that, even as they go straight to the mill, it is by the spiritual that we go straight to the temporal.  As if the mind did not govern the body!  They leave us the spiritual—­that is, command of the conscience, soul, heart, and judgment—­the spiritual—­that is, the distribution of heaven’s rewards, and punishments, and pardons—­without check, without control, in the secrecy of the confessional—­and that dolt, the temporal, has nothing but brute matter for his portion, and yet rubs his paunch for joy.  Only, from time to time, he perceives, too late, that, if he has the body, we have the soul, and that the soul governs the body, and so the body ends by coming with us also—­to the great surprise of Master Temporal, who stands staring with his hands on his paunch, and says:  ’Dear me! is it possible?’”

Then, with a laugh of savage contempt, Rodin began to walk with great strides, and thus continued:  “Oh! let me reach it—­let me but reach the place of Sixtus V.—­and the world shall see (one day, when it awakes) what it is to have the spiritual power in hands like mine—­in the hands of a priest, who, for fifty years, has lived hardly, frugally, chastely, and who, were he pope, would continue to live hardly, frugally, chastely!”

Rodin became terrible, as he spoke thus.  All the sanguinary, sacrilegious, execrable ambition of the worst popes seemed written in fiery characters on the brow of this son of Ignatius.  A morbid desire of rule seemed to stir up the Jesuit’s impure blood; he was bathed in a burning sweat, and a kind of nauseous vapor spread itself round about him.  Suddenly, the noise of a travelling-carriage, which entered the courtyard of the house, attracted his attention.  Regretting his momentary excitement, he drew from his pocket his dirty white and red cotton handkerchief, and dipping it in a glass of water, he applied it to his cheeks and temples, while he approached the window, to look through the half-open blinds at the traveller who had just arrived.  The projection of a portico, over the door at which the carriage had stopped, intercepted Rodin’s view.

“No matter,” said he, recovering his coolness:  “I shall know presently who is there.  I must write at once to Jacques Dumoulin, to come hither immediately.  He served me well, with regard to that little slut in the Rue Clovis, who made my hair stand on end with her infernal Beranger.  This time, Dumoulin may serve me again.  I have him in my clutches, and he will obey me.”

Rodin sat down to his desk and wrote.  A few seconds later, some one knocked at the door, which was double-locked, quite contrary to the rules of the order.  But, sure of his own influence and importance, Rodin, who had obtained from the general permission to be rid for a time of the inconvenient company of a socius, often took upon himself to break through a number of the rules.  A servant entered and delivered a letter to Rodin.  Before opening it the latter said to the man:  “What carriage is that which just arrived?”