“If it is all the same to you, sir apologist of the modern world, I should like to pause here and ask you frankly:  Do you not feel yourself more contemporary with all the dead who slumber within these walls than with a radical elector or a free-mason deputy?  Do you not feel that if these martyrs had not come to pray beneath these vaults eighteen hundred years ago, the best part of your soul would not exist?  Where will you find a poetry more touching than that of these symbols and of these epitaphs?  That admirable De Rossi showed me one at Saint Calixtus last year.  My tears flow as I recall it.  ’Pete pro Phoebe et pro virginio ejus’.  Pray for Phoebus and for—­How do you translate the word ‘virginius’, the husband who has known only one wife, the virgin husband of a virgin spouse?  Your youth will pass, Dorsenne.  You will one day feel what I feel, the happiness which is wanting on account of bygone errors, and you will comprehend that it is only to be found in Christian marriage, whose entire sublimity is summed up in thus prayer:  ’Pro virginio ejus’....  You will be like me then, and you will find in this book,” he held up ‘l’Eucologe’, which he clasped in his hand, “something through which to offer up to God your remorse and your regrets.  Do you know the hymn of the Holy Sacrament, ‘Adoro te, devote’?  No.  Yet you are capable of feeling what is contained in these lines.  Listen.  It is this idea:  That on the cross one sees only the man, not the God; that in the host one does not even see the man, and that yet one believes in the real presence.

        In cruce latebat sola Deitas. 
        At hic latet simul et humanitas. 
        Ambo tamen credens atque confitens....

“And now this last verse: 

        Peto quod petivit latro poenitens!

     [I ask that which the penitent thief asked.]

“What a cry!  Ah, but it is beautiful!  It is beautiful!  What words to say in dying!  And what did the poor thief ask, that Dixmas of whom the church has made a saint for that one appeal:  ’Remember me, Lord, in Thy kingdom!’ But we have arrived.  Stoop, that you may not spoil your hat.  Now, what do you want with me?  You know the motto of the Montfanons:  ’Excelsior et firmior’—­Always higher and always firmer....  One can never do too many good deeds.  If it be possible, ‘present’, as we said to the rollcall.”

A singular mixture of fervor and of good-nature, of enthusiastic eloquence and of political or religious fanaticism, was Montfanon.  But the good-nature rapidly vanished from his face, at once so haughty and so simple, in proportion as Dorsenne’s story proceeded.  The writer, indeed, did not make the error of at once formulating his proposition.  He felt that he could not argue with the pontifical zouave of bygone days.  Either the latter would look upon it as monstrous and absurd, or he would see in it a charitable duty to be accomplished, and then, whatever annoyance the matter might occasion him,