He held her crushed against his body and attempted to make her yield.

"I implore you, let me go."

Her accent was so despairing that he relinquished her. Then he debated with himself whether to throw her brutally on the floor and violate her. But her bewildered eyes frightened him.

She was panting and her arms hung limp at her sides as she leaned, very pale, against the bookcase.

"Ah!" he said, marching up and down, knocking into the furniture, "I must really love you, if in spite of your supplications and refusals—"

She joined her hands to keep him away.

"Good God!" he said, exasperated, "what are you made of?"

She came to herself, and, offended, she said to him, "Monsieur, I too suffer. Spare me," and pell-mell she spoke of her husband, of her confessor, and became so incoherent that Durtal was frightened. She was silent, then in a singing voice she said, "Tell me, you will come to my house tomorrow night, won't you?"

"But I suffer too!"

She seemed not to hear him. In her smoky eyes, far, far back, there seemed to be a twinkle of feeble light. She murmured, in the cadence of a canticle, "Tell me, dear, you will come tomorrow night, won't you?"

"Yes," he said at last.

Then she readjusted herself and without saying a word quitted the room. In silence he accompanied her to the entrance. She opened the door, turned around, took his hand and very lightly brushed it with her lips.

He stood there stupidly, not knowing what to make of her behaviour.

"What does she mean?" he exclaimed, returning to the room, putting the furniture back in place and smoothing the disordered carpet. "Heavens, I wish I could as easily restore order to my brain. Let me think, if I can. What is she after? Because, of course, she has something in view. She does not want our relation to culminate in the act itself. Does she really fear disillusion, as she claims? Is she really thinking how grotesque the amorous somersaults are? Or is she, as I believe, a melancholy and terrible player-around-the-edges, thinking only of herself? Well, her obscene selfishness is one of those complicated sins that have to be shriven by the very highest confessor. She's a plain teaser!

"I don't know. Incubacy enters into this. She admits—so placidly!—that in dream she cohabits at will with dead or living beings. Is she Satanizing, and is this some of the work of Canon Docre? He's a friend of hers.

"So many riddles impossible to solve. What is the meaning of this unexpected invitation for tomorrow night? Does she wish to yield nowhere except in her own home? Does she feel more at ease there, or does she think the propinquity of her husband will render the sin more piquant? Does she loathe Chantelouve, and is this a meditated vengeance, or does she count on the fear of danger to spur our senses?

"After all, I think it is probably a final coquetry, an appetizer before the repast. And women are so funny anyway! She probably thinks these delays and subterfuges are necessary to differentiate her from a cocotte. Or perhaps there is a physical necessity for stalling me off another day."

He sought other reasons but could find none.

"Deep down in my heart," he said, vexed in spite of himself by this rebuff, "I know I have been an imbecile. I ought to have acted the cave man and paid no attention to her supplications and lies. I ought to have taken violent possession of her lips and breast. Then it would be finished, whereas now I must begin at the beginning again, and God damn her! I have other things to do.

"Who knows whether she isn't laughing at me this very moment? Perhaps she wanted me to be more violent and bold—but no, her soul-sick voice was not feigned, her poor eyes did not simulate bewilderment, and then what would she have meant by that respectful kiss—for there was an impalpable shade of respect and gratitude in that kiss which she planted on my hand!"

She was too much for him. "Meanwhile, in this hurly-burly I have forgotten my refreshments. Suppose I take off my shoes, now that I am alone, for my feet are swollen from parading up and down the room. Suppose I do better yet and go to bed, for I am incapable of working or reading," and he drew back the covers.

"Decidedly, nothing happens the way one foresees it, yet my plan of attack wasn't badly thought out," he said, crawling in. With a sigh he blew out the lamp, and the cat, reassured, passed over him, lighter than a breath, and curled up without a sound.



CHAPTER XI

Contrary to his expectations, he slept all night, with clenched fists, and woke next morning quite calm, even gay. The scene of the night before, which ought to have exacerbated his senses, produced exactly the opposite effect. The truth is that Durtal was not of those who are attracted by difficulties. He always made one hardy effort to surmount them, then when that failed he would withdraw, with no desire to renew the combat. If Mme. Chantelouve thought to entice him by delays, she had miscalculated. This morning, already, he was weary of the comedy.

His reflections began to be slightly tinged with bitterness. He was angry at the woman for having wished to keep him in suspense, and he was angry at himself for having permitted her to make a fool of him. Then certain expressions, the impertinence of which had not struck him at first, chilled him now. "Her nervous trick of laughing, which sometimes caught her in public places," then her declaration that she did not need his permission, nor even his person, in order to possess him, seemed to him unbecoming, to say the least, and uncalled for, as he had not run after her nor indeed made any advances to her at all.

"I will fix you," he said, "when I get some hold over you."

But in the calm awakening of this morning the spell of the woman had relaxed. Resolutely he thought, "Keep two dates with her. This one tonight at her house. It won't count, because nothing can be done. For I intend neither to allow myself to be assaulted nor to attempt an assault. I certainly have no desire to be caught by Chantelouve in flagrante delicto, and probably get into a shooting scrape and be haled into police court. Have her here once. If she does not yield then, why, the matter is closed. She can go and tickle somebody else."

And he made a hearty breakfast, and sat down to his writing table and ran over the scattered notes for his book.

"I had got," he said, glancing at his last chapter, "to where the alchemic experiments and diabolic evocations have proved unavailing. Prelati, Blanchet, all the sorcerers and sorcerers' helpers whom the Marshal has about him, admit that to bring Satan to him Gilles must make over his soul and body to the Devil or commit crimes.

"Gilles refuses to alienate his existence and sell his soul, but he contemplates murder without any horror. This man, so brave on the battlefield, so courageous when he accompanied Jeanne d'Arc, trembles before the Devil and is afraid when he thinks of eternity and of Christ. The same is true of his accomplices. He has made them swear on the Testament to keep the secret of the confounding turpitudes which the chateau conceals, and he can be sure that not one will violate the oath, for, in the Middle Ages, the most reckless of freebooters would not commit the inexpiable sin of deceiving God.

"At the same time that his alchemists abandon their unfruitful furnaces, Gilles begins a course of systematic gluttony, and his flesh, set on fire by the essences of inordinate potations and spiced dishes, seethes in tumultuous eruption.

"Now, there are no women in the chateau. Gilles appears to have despised the sex ever since leaving the court. After experience of the ribalds of the camps and frequentation, with Xaintrailles and La Hire, of the prostitutes of Charles VII, it seems that a dislike for the feminine form came over him. Like others whose ideal of concupiscence is deteriorated and deviated, he certainly comes to be disgusted by the delicacy of the grain of the skin of women and by that odour of femininity which all sodomists abhor.

"He depraves the choir boys who are under his authority. He chose them in the first place, these little psaltry ministrants, for their beauty, and 'beautiful as angels' they are. They are the only ones he loves, the only ones he spares in his murderous transports.

"But soon infantile pollution seems to him an insipid delicacy. The law of Satanism which demands that the elect of Evil, once started, must go the whole way, is once more fulfilled. Gilles's soul must become thoroughly cankered, a red tabernacle, that in it the Very Low may dwell at ease.

"The litanies of lust arise in an atmosphere that is like the wind over a slaughter house. The first victim is a very small boy whose name we do not know. Gilles disembowels him, and, cutting off the hands and tearing out the eyes and heart, carries these members into Prelati's chamber. The two men offer them, with passionate objurgations, to the Devil, who holds his peace. Gilles, confounded, flees. Prelati rolls up the poor remains in linen and, trembling, goes out at night to bury them in consecrated ground beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent.

"Gilles preserves the blood of this child to write formulas of evocation and conjurements. It manures a horrible crop. Not long afterward the Marshal reaps the most abundant harvest of crimes that has ever been sown.

"From 1432 to 1440, that is to say during the eight years between the Marshal's retreat and his death, the inhabitants of Anjou, Poitou, and Brittany walk the highways wringing their hands. All the children disappear. Shepherd boys are abducted from the fields. Little girls coming out of school, little boys who have gone to play ball in the lanes or at the edge of the wood, return no more.

"In the course of an investigation ordered by the duke of Brittany, the scribes of Jean Touscheronde, duke's commissioner in these matters, compile interminable lists of lost children.

"Lost, at la Rochebernart, the child of the woman Peronne, 'a child who did go to school and who did apply himself to his book with exceeding diligence.'

"Lost, at Saint Etienne de Montluc, the son of Guillaume Brice, 'and this was a poor man and sought alms.'

"Lost, at Machecoul, the son of Georget le Barbier, 'who was seen, a certain day, knocking apples from a tree behind the hotel Rondeau, and who since hath not been seen.'

"Lost, at Thonaye, the child of Mathelin Thouars, 'and he had been heard to cry and lament and the said child was about twelve years of age.'

"At Machecoul, again, the day of Pentecost, mother and father Sergent leave their eight-year-old boy at home, and when they return from the fields 'they did not find the said child of eight years of age, wherefore they marvelled and were exceeding grieved.'

"At Chantelou, it is Pierre Badieu, mercer of the parish, who says that a year or thereabouts ago, he saw, in the domain de Rais, 'two little children of the age of nine who were brothers and the children of Robin Pavot of the aforesaid place, and since that time neither have they been seen neither doth any know what hath become of them.'

"At Nantes, it is Jeanne Darel who deposes that 'on the day of the feast of the Holy Father, her true child named Olivier did stray from her, being of the age of seven and eight years, and since the day of the feast of the Holy Father neither did she see him nor hear tidings.'

"And the account of the investigation goes on, revealing hundreds of names, describing the grief of the mothers who interrogate passersby on the highway, and telling of the keening of the families from whose very homes children have been spirited away when the elders went to the fields to hoe or to sow the hemp. These phrases, like a desolate refrain, recur again and again, at the end of every deposition: 'They were seen complaining dolorously,' 'Exceedingly they did lament.' Wherever the bloodthirsty Gilles dwells the women weep.

"At first the frantic people tell themselves that evil fairies and malicious genii are dispersing the generation, but little by little terrible suspicions are aroused. As soon as the Marshal quits a place, as he goes from the chateau de Tiffauges to the chateau de Champtoce, and from there to the castle of La Suze or to Nantes, he leaves behind him a wake of tears. He traverses a countryside and in the morning children are missing. Trembling, the peasant realizes also that wherever Prelati, Roger de Bricqueville, Gilles de Sille, any of the Marshal's intimates, have shown themselves, little boys have disappeared. Finally, the peasant learns to look with horror upon an old woman, Perrine Martin, who wanders around, clad in grey, her face covered—as is that of Gilles de Sille—with a black stamin. She accosts children, and her speech is so seductive, her face, when she raises her veil, so benign, that all follow her to the edge of a wood, where men carry them off, gagged, in sacks. And the frightened people call this purveyor of flesh, this ogress, 'La Mefrraye,' from the name of a bird of prey.

"These emissaries spread out, covering all the villages and hamlets, tracking the children down at the orders of the Chief Huntsman, the sire de Bricqueville. Not content with these beaters, Gilles takes to standing at a window of the chateau, and when young mendicants, attracted by the renown of his bounty, ask an alms, he runs an appraising eye over them, has any who excite his lust brought in and thrown into an underground prison and kept there until, being in appetite, he is pleased to order a carnal supper.

"How many children did he disembowel after deflowering them? He himself did not know, so many were the rapes he had consummated and the murders he had committed. The texts of the times enumerate between, seven and eight hundred, but the estimate is inaccurate and seems overconservative. Entire regions were devastated. The hamlet of Tiffauges had no more young men. La Suze was without male posterity. At Champtoce the whole foundation room of a tower was filled with corpses. A witness cited in the inquest, Guillaume Hylairet, declared also, "that one hight Du Jardin hath heard say that there was found in the said castle a wine pipe full of dead little children.'

"Even today traces of these assassinations linger. Two years ago at Tiffauges a physician discovered an oubliette and brought forth piles of skulls and bones.

"Gilles confessed to frightful holocausts, and his friends confirmed the atrocious details.

"At dusk, when their senses are phosphorescent, enkindled by inflammatory spiced beverages and by 'high' venison, Gilles and his friends retire to a distant chamber of the chateau. The little boys are brought from their cellar prisons to this room. They are disrobed and gagged. The Marshal fondles them and forces them. Then he hacks them to pieces with a dagger, taking great pleasure in slowly dismembering them. At other times he slashes the boy's chest and drinks the breath from the lungs; sometimes he opens the stomach also, smells it, enlarges the incision with his hands, and seats himself in it. Then while he macerates the warm entrails in mud, he turns half around and looks over his shoulder to contemplate the supreme convulsions, the last spasms. He himself says afterwards, 'I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures, tears, fright, and blood, than in any other pleasure.'

"Then he becomes weary of these fecal joys. An unpublished passage in his trial proceedings informs us that 'The said sire heated himself with little boys, sometimes also with little girls, with whom he had congress in the belly, saying that he had more pleasure and less pain than acting in nature.' After which, he slowly saws their throats, cuts them to pieces, and the corpses, the linen and the clothing, are put in the fireplace, where a smudge fire of logs and leaves is burning, and the ashes are thrown into the latrine, or scattered to the winds from the top of a tower, or buried in the moats and mounds.

"Soon his furies become aggravated. Until now he has appeased the rage of his senses with living or moribund beings. He wearies of stuprating palpitant flesh and becomes a lover of the dead. A passionate artist, he kisses, with cries of enthusiasm, the well-made limbs of his victims. He establishes sepulchral beauty contests, and whichever of the truncated heads receives the prize he raises by the hair and passionately kisses the cold lips.

"Vampirism satisfies him for months. He pollutes dead children, appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of the tomb. He even goes so far—one day when his supply of children is exhausted—as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the foetus. After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar to those heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after his violations of the grave. But if that leaden sleep is one of the known phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.

"As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin. It is no longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing with the body of a victim. His ferocity does not remain merely carnal; it becomes spiritual. He wishes to make the child suffer both in body and soul. By a thoroughly Satanic cheat he deceives gratitude, dupes affection, and desecrates love. At a leap he passes the bounds of human infamy and lands plump in the darkest depth of Evil.

"He contrives this: One of the unfortunate children is brought into his chamber, and hanged, by Bricqueville, Prelati, and de Sille, to a hook fixed into the wall. Just at the moment when the child is suffocating, Gilles orders him to be taken down and the rope untied. With some precaution, he takes the child on his knees, revives him, caresses him, rocks him, dries his tears, and pointing to the accomplices, says, 'These men are bad, but you see they obey me. Do not be afraid. I will save your life and take you back to your mother,' and while the little one, wild with joy, kisses him and at that moment loves him, Gilles gently makes an incision in the back of the neck, rendering the child 'languishing,' to follow Gilles's own expression, and when the head, not quite detached, bows, Gilles kneads the body, turns it about, and violates it, bellowing.

"After these abominable pastimes he may well believe that the art of the charnalist has beneath his fingers expressed its last drop of pus, and in a vaunting cry he says to his troop of parasites, "There is no man on earth who dare do as I have done.'

"But if in Love and Well-doing the infinite is approachable for certain souls, the out-of-the-world possibilities of Evil are limited. In his excesses of stupration and murder the Marshal cannot go beyond a fixed point. In vain he may dream of unique violations, of more ingenious slow tortures, but human imagination has a limit and he has already reached it—even passed it, with diabolic aid. Insatiable he seethes—there is nothing material in which to express his ideal. He can verify that axiom of demonographers, that the Evil One dupes all persons who give themselves, or are willing to give themselves, to him.

"As he can descend no further, he tries returning on the way by which he has come, but now remorse overtakes him, overwhelms him, and wrenches him without respite. His nights are nights of expiation. Besieged by phantoms, he howls like a wounded beast. He is found rushing along the solitary corridors of the chateau. He weeps, throws himself on his knees, swears to God that he will do penance. He promises to found pious institutions. He does establish, at Machecoul, a boys' academy in honour of the Holy Innocents. He speaks of shutting himself up in a cloister, of going to Jerusalem, begging his bread on the way.

"But in this fickle and aberrated mind ideas superpose themselves on each other, then pass away, and those which disappear leave their shadow on those which follow. Abruptly, even while weeping with distress, he precipitates himself into new debauches and, raving with delirium, hurls himself upon the child brought to him, gouges out the eyes, runs his finger around the bloody, milky socket, then he seizes a spiked club and crushes the skull. And while the gurgling blood runs over him, he stands, smeared with spattered brains, and grinds his teeth and laughs. Like a hunted beast he flees into the wood, while his henchmen remove the crimson stains from the ground and dispose prudently of the corpse and the reeking garments.

"He wanders in the forests surrounding Tiffauges, dark, impenetrable forests like those which Brittany still can show at Carnoet. He sobs as he walks along. He attempts to thrust aside the phantoms which accost him. Then he looks about him and beholds obscenity in the shapes of the aged trees. It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that his very presence depraves it. For the first time he understands the motionless lubricity of trees. He discovers priapi in the branches.

"Here a tree appears to him as a living being, standing on its root-tressed head, its limbs waving in the air and spread wide apart, subdivided and re-subdivided into haunches, which again are divided and re-subdivided. Here between two limbs another branch is jammed, in a stationary fornication which is reproduced in diminished scale from bough to twig to the top of the tree. There it seems the trunk is a phallus which mounts and disappears into a skirt of leaves or which, on the contrary, issues from a green clout and plunges into the glossy belly of the earth.

"Frightful images rise before him. He sees the skin of little boys, the lucid white skin, vellum-like, in the pale, smooth bark of the slender beeches. He recognizes the pachydermatous skin of the beggar boys in the dark and wrinkled envelope of the old oaks. Beside the bifurcations of the branches there are yawning holes, puckered orifices in the bark, simulating emunctoria, or the protruding anus of a beast. In the joints of the branches there are other visions, elbows, armpits furred with grey lichens. Even in the trunks there are incisions which spread out into great lips beneath tufts of brown, velvety moss.

"Everywhere obscene forms rise from the ground and spring, disordered, into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawn through space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine triangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents. This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the trunks frightful cancers and horrible wens. He observes exostoses and ulcers, membranous sores, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is an arboreal lazaret, a venereal clinic.

"And there, at a detour of the forest aisle, stands a mottled red beech.

"Amid the sanguinary falling leaves he feels that he has been spattered by a shower of blood. He goes into a rage. He conceives the delusion that beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with his hands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.

"He is jealous of the woodman who can murder, can massacre, the trees, and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind a response to his cries of desire. Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk, weeping, until he arrives at the chateau and sinks to his bed exhausted, an inert mass.

"The phantoms take more definite shape, now that he sleeps. The lubric enlacements of the branches, dilated crevices and cleft mosses, the coupling of the diverse beings of the wood, disappear; the tears of the leaves whipped by the wind are dried; the white abscesses of the clouds are resorbed into the grey of the sky; and—in an awful silence—the incubi and succubi pass.

"The corpses of his victims, reduced to ashes and scattered, return to the larva state and attack his lower parts. He writhes, with the blood bursting his veins. He rebounds in a somersault, then he crawls to the crucifix, like a wolf, on all fours, and howling, strains his lips to the feet of the Christ.

"A sudden reaction overwhelms him. He trembles before the image whose convulsed face looks down on him. He adjures Christ to have pity, supplicates Him to spare a sinner, and sobs and weeps, and when, incapable of further effort, he whimpers, he hears, terrified, in his own voice, the lamentations of the children crying for their mothers and pleading for mercy."

* * * * *

And Durtal, coming slowly out of the vision he had conjured up, closed his notebook and remarked, "Rather petty, my own spiritual conflict regarding a woman whose sin—like my own, to be sure—is commonplace and bourgeois."



CHAPTER XII

"Easy to find an excuse for this visit, though it will seem strange to Chantelouve, whom I have neglected for months," said Durtal on his way toward the rue Bagneux. "Supposing he is home this evening—and he probably isn't, because surely Hyacinthe will have seen to that—I can tell him that I have learned of his illness through Des Hermies and that I have come to see how he is getting along."

He paused on the stoop of the building in which Chantelouve lived. At each side and over the door were these antique lamps with reflectors, surmounted by a sort of casque of sheet iron painted green. There was an old iron balustrade, very wide, and the steps, with wooden sides, were paved with red tile. About this house there was a sepulchral and also clerical odour, yet there was also something homelike—though a little too imposing—about it such as is not to be found in the cardboard houses they build nowadays. You could see at a glance that it did not harbour the apartment house promiscuities: decent, respectable couples with kept women for neighbours. The house pleased him, and he considered Hyacinthe the more desirable for her substantial environment.

He rang at a first-floor apartment. A maid led him through a long hall into a sitting-room. He noticed, at a glance, that nothing had changed since his last visit. It was the same vast, high-ceilinged room with windows reaching to heaven. There was the huge fireplace; on the mantelpiece the same reproduction, reduced, in bronze, of Fremiet's Jeanne d'Arc, between the two globe lamps of Japanese porcelain. He recognized the grand piano, the table loaded with albums, the divan, the chairs in the style of Louis XV with tapestried covers. In front of every window there were imitation Chinese vases, mounted on tripods of imitation ebony and containing sickly palms. On the walls were religious pictures, without expression, and a portrait of Chantelouve in his youth, three-quarter length, his hand resting on a pile of his works. An ancient Russian icon in nielloed silver and one of these Christs in carved wood, executed in the seventeenth century by Bogard de Nancy, in an antique frame of gilded wood backed with velvet, were the only things that slightly relieved the banality of the decoration. The rest of the furniture looked like that of a bourgeois household fixed up for Lent, or for a charity dance or for a visit from the priest. A great fire blazed on the hearth. The room was lighted by a very high lamp with a wide shade of pink lace—

"Stinks of the sacristy!" Durtal was saying to himself at the moment the door opened.

Mme. Chantelouve entered, the lines of her figure advantageously displayed by a wrapper of white swanskin, which gave off a fragrance of frangipane. She pressed Durtal's hand and sat down facing him, and he perceived under the wrap her indigo silk stockings in little patent leather bootines with straps across the insteps.

They talked about the weather. She complained of the way the winter hung on, and declared that although the furnace seemed to be working all right she was always shivering, was always frozen to death. She told him to feel her hands, which indeed were cold, then she seemed worried about his health.

"You look pale," she said.

"You might at least say that I am pale," he replied.

She did not answer immediately, then, "Yesterday I saw how much you desire me," she said. "But why, why, want to go so far?"

He made a gesture, indicating vague annoyance.

"How funny you are!" she went on. "I was re-reading one of your books today, and I noticed this phrase, 'The only women you can continue to love are those you lose.' Now admit that you were right when you wrote that."

"It all depends. I wasn't in love then."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Well," she said, "I must tell my husband you are here."

Durtal remained silent, wondering what role Chantelouve actually played in this triangle.

Chantelouve returned with his wife. He was in his dressing-gown and had a pen in his mouth. He took it out and put it on the table, and after assuring Durtal that his health was completely restored, he complained of overwhelming labours. "I have had to quit giving dinners and receptions," he said, "I can't even go visiting. I am in harness every day at my desk."

And when Durtal asked him the nature of these labours, he confessed to a whole series of unsigned volumes on the lives of the saints, to be turned out by the gross by a Tours firm for exportation.

"Yes," said his wife, laughing, "and these are sadly neglected saints whose biographies he is preparing."

And as Durtal looked at him inquiringly, Chantelouve, also laughing, said, "It was their persons that were sadly neglected. The subjects are chosen for me, and it does seem as if the publisher enjoyed making me eulogize frowziness. I have to describe Blessed Saints most of whom were deplorably unkempt: Labre, who was so lousy and ill-smelling as to disgust the beasts in the stables; Saint Cunegonde who 'through humility' neglected her body; Saint Oportune who never used water and who washed her bed only with her tears; Saint Silvia who never removed the grime from her face; Saint Radegonde who never changed her hair shirt and who slept on a cinder pile; and how many others, around whose heads I must draw a golden halo!"

"There are worse than those," said Durtal. "Read the life of Marie Alacoque. You will see that she, to mortify herself, licked up with her tongue the dejections of one sick person and sucked an abscess from the toe of another."

"I know, but I must admit that I am less touched than revolted by these tales."

"I prefer Saint Lucius the martyr," said Mme. Chantelouve. "His body was so transparent that he could see through his chest the vileness of his heart. His kind of 'vileness' at least we can stand. But I must admit that this utter disregard of cleanliness makes me suspicious of the monasteries and renders your beloved Middle Ages odious to me."

"Pardon me, my dear," said her husband, "you are greatly mistaken. The Middle Ages were not, as you believe, an epoch of uncleanliness. People frequented the baths assiduously. At Paris, for example, where these establishments were numerous, the 'stove-keepers' went about the city announcing that the water was hot. It is not until the Renaissance that uncleanliness becomes rife in France. When you think that that delicious Reine Margot kept her body macerated with perfumes but as grimy as the inside of a stovepipe! and that Henri Quatre plumed himself on having 'reeking feet and a fine armpit.'"

"My dear, for heaven's sake," said madame, "spare us the details."

While Chantelouve was speaking, Durtal was watching him. He was small and rotund, with a bay window which his arms would not have gone around. He had rubicund cheeks, long hair very much pomaded, trailing in the back and drawn up in crescents along his temples. He had pink cotton in his ears. He was smooth shaven and looked like a pious but convivial notary. But his quick, calculating eye belied his jovial and sugary mien. One divined in his look the cool, unscrupulous man of affairs, capable, for all his honeyed ways, of doing one a bad turn.

"He must be aching to throw me into the street," said Durtal to himself, "because he certainly knows all about his wife's goings-on."

But if Chantelouve wished to be rid of his guest he did not show it. With his legs crossed and his hands folded one over the other, in the attitude of a priest, he appeared to be mightily interested in Durtal's work. Inclining a little, listening as if in a theatre, he said, "Yes, I know the material on the subject. I read a book some time ago about Gilles de Rais which seemed to me well handled. It was by abbe Bossard."

"It is the most complete and reliable of the biographies of the Marshal."

"But," Chantelouve went on, "there is one point which I never have been able to understand. I have never been able to explain to myself why the name Bluebeard should have been attached to the Marshal, whose history certainly has no relation to the tale of the good Perrault."

"As a matter of fact the real Bluebeard was not Gilles de Rais, but probably a Breton king, Comor, a fragment of whose castle, dating from the sixth century, is still standing, on the confines of the forest of Carnoet. The legend is simple. The king asked Guerock, count of Vannes, for the hand of his daughter, Triphine. Guerock refused, because he had heard that the king maintained himself in a constant state of widowerhood by cutting his wives' throats. Finally Saint Gildas promised Guerock to return his daughter to him safe and sound when he should reclaim her, and the union was celebrated.

"Some months later Triphine learned that Comor did indeed kill his consorts as soon as they became pregnant. She was big with child, so she fled, but her husband pursued her and cut her throat. The weeping father commanded Saint Gildas to keep his promise, and the Saint resuscitated Triphine.

"As you see, this legend comes much nearer than the history of our Bluebeard to the told tale arranged by the ingenious Perrault. Now, why and how the name Bluebeard passed from King Comor to the Marshal de Rais, I cannot tell. You know what pranks oral tradition can play."

"But with your Gilles de Rais you must have to plunge into Satanism right up to the hilt," said Chantelouve after a silence.

"Yes, and it would really be more interesting if these scenes were not so remote. What would have a timely appeal would be a study of the Diabolism of the present day."

"No doubt," said Chantelouve, pleasantly.

"For," Durtal went on, looking at him intently, "unheard-of things are going on right now. I have heard tell of sacrilegious priests, of a certain canon who has revived the sabbats of the Middle Ages."

Chantelouve did not betray himself by so much as a flicker of the eyelids. Calmly he uncrossed his legs and looking up at the ceiling he said, "Alas, certain scabby wethers succeed in stealing into the fold, but they are so rare as hardly to be worth thinking about." And he deftly changed the subject by speaking of a book he had just read about the Fronde.

Durtal, somewhat embarrassed, said nothing. He understood that Chantelouve refused to speak of his relations with Canon Docre.

"My dear," said Mme. Chantelouve, addressing her husband, "you have forgotten to turn up your lamp wick. It is smoking. I can smell it from here, even through the closed door."

She was most evidently conveying him a dismissal. Chantelouve rose and, with a vaguely malicious smile, excused himself as being obliged to continue his work. He shook hands with Durtal, begged him not to stay away so long in future, and gathering up the skirts of his dressing-gown he left the room.

She followed him with her eyes, then rose, in her turn, ran to the door, assured herself with a glance that it was closed, then returned to Durtal, who was leaning against the mantel. Without a word she took his head between her hands, pressed her lips to his mouth and opened it.

He grunted furiously.

She looked at him with indolent and filmy eyes, and he saw sparks of silver dart to their surface. He held her in his arms. She was swooning but vigilantly listening. Gently she disengaged herself, sighing, while he, embarrassed, sat down at a little distance from her, clenching and unclenching his hands.

They spoke of banal things: she boasting of her maid, who would go through fire for her, he responding only by gestures of approbation and surprise.

Then suddenly she passed her hands over her forehead. "Ah!" she said, "I suffer cruelly when I think that he is there working. No, it would cost me too much remorse. What I say is foolish, but if he were a different man, a man who went out more and made conquests, it would not be so bad."

He was irritated by the inconsequentiality of her plaints. Finally, feeling completely safe, he came closer to her and said, "You spoke of remorse, but whether we embark or whether we stand on the bank, isn't our guilt exactly the same?"

"Yes, I know. My confessor talks to me like that—only more severely—but I think you are both wrong."

He could not help laughing, and he said to himself, "Remorse is perhaps the condiment which keeps passion from being too unappetizing to the blase." Then aloud he jestingly, "Speaking of confessors, if I were a casuist it seems to me I would try to invent new sins. I am not a casuist, and yet, having looked about a bit, I believe I have found a new sin."

"You?" she said, laughing in turn. "Can I commit it?"

He scrutinized her features. She had the expression of a greedy child.

"You alone can answer that. Now I must admit that the sin is not absolutely new, for it fits into the known category of lust. But it has been neglected since pagan days, and was never well defined in any case."

"Do not keep me in suspense. What is this sin?"

"It isn't easy to explain. Nevertheless I will try. Lust, I believe, can be classified into: ordinary sin, sin against nature, bestiality, and let us add demoniality and sacrilege. Well, there is, in addition to these, what I shall call Pygmalionism, which embraces at the same time cerebral onanism and incest.

"Imagine an artist falling in love with his child, his creation: with an Herodiade, a Judith, a Helen, a Jeanne d'Arc, whom he has either described or painted, and evoking her, and finally possessing her in dream.

"Well, this love is worse than normal incest. In the latter sin the guilty one commits only a half-offence, because his daughter is not born solely of his substance, but also of the flesh of another. Thus, logically, in incest there is a quasi-natural side, almost licit, because part of another person has entered into the engendering of the corpus delicti; while in Pygmalionism the father violates the child of his soul, of that which alone is purely and really his, which alone he can impregnate without the aid of another. The offence is, then, entire and complete. Now, is there not also disdain of nature, of the work of God, since the subject of the sin is no longer—as even in bestiality—a palpable and living creature, but an unreal being created by a projection of the desecrated talent, a being almost celestial, since, by genius, by artistry, it often becomes immortal?

"Let us go further, if you wish. Suppose that an artist depicts a saint and becomes enamoured of her. Thus we have complications of crime against nature and of sacrilege. An enormity!"

"Which, perhaps, is exquisite!"

He was taken aback by the word she had used. She rose, opened the door, and called her husband. "Dear," she said, "Durtal has discovered a new sin!"

"Surely not," said Chantelouve, his figure framed in the doorway. "The book of sins is an edition ne varietur. New sins cannot be invented, but old ones may be kept from falling into oblivion. Well, what is this sin of his?"

Durtal explained the theory.

"But it is simply a refined expression of succubacy. The consort is not one's work become animate, but a succubus which by night takes that form."

"Admit, at any rate, that this cerebral hermaphrodism, self-fecundation, is a distinguished vice at least—being the privilege of the artist—a vice reserved for the elect, inaccessible to the mob."

"If you like exclusive obscenity—" laughed Chantelouve. "But I must get back to the lives of the saints; the atmosphere is fresher and more benign. So excuse me, Durtal. I leave it to my wife to continue this Marivaux conversation about Satanism with you."

He said it in the simplest, most debonair fashion to be imagined, but with just the slightest trace of irony.

Which Durtal perceived. "It must be quite late," he thought, when the door closed after Chantelouve. He consulted his watch. Nearly eleven. He rose to take leave.

"When shall I see you?" he murmured, very low.

"Your apartment tomorrow night at nine."

He looked at her with beseeching eyes. She understood, but wished to tease him. She kissed him maternally on the forehead, then consulted his eyes again. The expression of supplication must have remained unchanged, for she responded to their imploration by a long kiss which closed them, then came down to his lips, drinking their dolorous emotion.

Then she rang and told her maid to light Durtal through the hall. He descended, satisfied that she had engaged herself to yield tomorrow night.



CHAPTER XIII

He began again, as on the other evening, to clean house and establish a methodical disorder. He slipped a cushion under the false disarray of the armchair, then he made roaring fires to have the rooms good and warm when she came.

But he was without impatience. That silent promise which he had obtained, that Mme. Chantelouve would not leave him panting this night, moderated him. Now that his uncertainty was at an end, he no longer vibrated with the almost painful acuity which hitherto her malignant delays had provoked. He soothed himself by poking the fire. His mind was still full of her, but plethoric, content. When his thoughts stirred at all it was, at the very most, to revolve the question, "How shall I go about it, when the time comes, so as not to be ridiculous?" This question, which had so harassed him the other night, left him troubled but inert. He did not try to solve it, but decided to leave everything to chance, since the best planned strategy was almost always abortive.

Then he revolted against himself, accused himself of stagnation, and walked up and down to shake himself out of a torpor which might have been attributed to the hot fire. Well, well, was it because he had had to wait so long that his desires had left him, or at least quit bothering him—no, they had not, why, he was yearning now for the moment when he might crush that woman! He thought he had the explanation of his lack of enthusiasm in the stage fright inseparable from any beginning. "It will not be really exquisite tonight until after the newness wears off and the grotesque with it. After I know her I shall be able to consort with her again without feeling solicitous about her and conscious of myself. I wish we were on that happy basis now."

The cat, sitting on the table, cocked up its ears, gazed at the door with its black eyes, and fled. The bell rang and Durtal went to let her in.

Her costume pleased him. He took off her furs. Her skirt was of a plum colour so dark that it was almost black, the material thick and supple, outlining her figure, squeezing her arms, making an hourglass of her waist, accentuating the curve of her hips and the bulge of her corset.

"You are charming," he said, kissing her wrists, and he was pleased to find that his lips had accelerated her pulse. She did not speak, could hardly breathe. She was agitated and very pale.

He sat down facing her. She looked at him with her mysterious, half sleepy eyes. He felt that he was falling in love all over again. He forgot his reasonings and his fears, and took acute pleasure in penetrating the mystery of these eyes and studying the vague smile of this dolorous mouth.

He enlaced her fingers in his, and for the first time, in a low voice, he called her Hyacinthe.

She listened, her breast heaving, her hands in a fever. Then in a supplicating voice, "I implore you," she said, "let us have none of that. Only desire is good. Oh, I am rational, I mean what I say. I thought it all out on the way here. I left him very sad tonight. If you knew how I feel—I went to church today and was afraid and hid myself when I saw my confessor—"

These plaints he had heard before, and he said to himself, "You may sing whatever tune you want to, but you shall dance tonight." Aloud he answered in monosyllables as he continued to take possession of her.

He rose, thinking she would do the same, or that if she remained seated he could better reach her lips by bending over her.

"Your lips, your lips—the kiss you gave me last night—" he murmured, as his face came close to hers. She put up her lips and stood, and they embraced, but as his hands went seeking she recoiled.

"Think how ridiculous it all is," she said in a low voice, "to undress, put on night clothes—and that silly scene, getting into bed!"

He avoided declaring, but attempted, by an embrace which bent her over backward, to make her understand that she could spare herself those embarrassments. Tacitly, in his own turn, feeling her body stiffen under his fingers, he understood that she absolutely would not give herself in the room here, in front of the fire.

"Oh well," she said, disengaging herself, "if you will have it!"

He made way to allow her to go into the other room, and seeing that she desired to be alone he drew the portiere.

Sitting before the fire he reflected. Perhaps he ought to have pulled down the bed covers, and not left her the task, but without doubt the action would have been too direct, too obvious a hint. Ah! and that water heater! He took it and, keeping away from the bedroom door, went to the bathroom, placed the heater on the toilet table, and then, swiftly, he set out the rice powder box, the perfumes, the combs, and, returning into his study, he listened.

She was making as little noise as possible, walking on tiptoe as if in the presence of the dead. She blew out the candles, doubtless wishing no more light than the rosy glow of the hearth.

He felt positively annihilated. The irritating impression of the lips and eyes of Hyacinthe was far from him now. She was nothing but a woman, like any other, undressing in a man's room. Memories of similar scenes overwhelmed him. He remembered girls who like her had crept about on the carpet so as not to be heard, and who had stopped short, ashamed, for a whole second, if they bumped against the water pitcher. And then, what good was this going to do him? Now that she was yielding he no longer desired her! Disillusion had come even before possession, not waiting, as usual, till afterward. He was distressed to the point of tears.

The frightened cat glided under the curtain, ran from one room to the other, and finally came back to his master and jumped onto his knees. Caressing him, Durtal said to himself, "Decidedly, she was right when she refused. It will be grotesque, atrocious. I was wrong to insist, but no, it's her fault, too. She must have wanted to do this or she wouldn't have come. What a fool to think she could aggravate passion by delay. She is fearfully clumsy. A moment ago when I was embracing her and really was aroused, it would perhaps have been delicious, but now! And what do I look like? A young bridegroom waiting—or a green country boy. Oh God, how stupid! Well," he said, straining his ears and hearing no sound from the other room, "she's in bed. I must go in.

"I suppose it took her all this time to unharness herself from her corset. She was a fool to wear one," he concluded, when, drawing the curtain, he stepped into the other room.

Mme. Chantelouve was buried under the thick coverlet, her mouth half-open and her eyes closed; but he saw that she was peering at him through the fringe of her blonde eyelashes. He sat down on the edge of the bed. She huddled up, drawing the cover over her chin.

"Cold, dear?"

"No," and she opened wide her eyes, which flashed sparks.

He undressed, casting a rapid glance at Hyacinthe's face. It was hidden in the darkness, but was sometimes revealed by a flare of the red hot fire, as a stick, half consumed and smouldering, would suddenly burst into flame. Swiftly he slipped between the covers. He clasped a corpse; a body so cold that it froze him, but the woman's lips were burning as she silently gnawed his features. He lay stupified in the grip of this body wound around his own, supple as the ... and hard! He could not move; he could not speak for the shower of kisses traveling over his face. Finally, he succeeded in disengaging himself, and, with his free arm he sought her; then suddenly, while she devoured his lips he felt a nervous inhibition, and, naturally, without profit, he withdrew.

"I detest you!" she exclaimed.

"Why?"

"I detest you!"

He wanted to cry out, "And I you!" He was exasperated, and would have given all he owned to get her to dress and go home.

The fire was burning low, unflickering. Appeased, now, he sat up and looked into the darkness. He would have liked to get up and find another nightshirt, because the one he had on was tearing and getting in his way. But Hyacinthe was lying on top of it—then he reflected that the bed was deranged and the thought affected him, because he liked to be snug in winter, and knowing himself incapable of respreading the covers, he foresaw a cold night.

Once more, he was enlaced; the gripe of the woman's on his own was renewed; rational, this time, he attended to her and crushed her with mighty caresses. In a changed voice, lower, more guttural, she uttered ignoble things and silly cries which gave him pain—"My dear!—oh, hon!—oh I can't stand it!"—aroused nevertheless, he took this body which creaked as it writhed, and he experienced the extraordinary sensation of a spasmodic burning within a swaddle of ice-packs.

He finally jumped over her, out of bed, and lighted the candles. On the dresser the cat sat motionless, considering Durtal and Mme. Chantelouve alternately. Durtal saw an inexpressible mockery in those black eyes and, irritated, chased the beast away.

He put some more wood on the fire, dressed, and started to leave the room. Hyacinthe called him gently, in her usual voice. He approached the bed. She threw her arms around his neck and hung there, kissing him hungrily. Then sinking back and putting her arms under the cover, she said, "The deed is done. Now will you love me any better?"

He did not have the heart to answer. Ah yes, his disillusion was complete. The satiety following justified his lack of appetite preceding. She revolted him, horrified him. Was it possible to have so desired a woman, only to come to—that? He had idealized her in his transports, he had dreamed in her eyes—he knew not what! He had wished to exalt himself with her, to rise higher than the delirious ravenings of the senses, to soar out of the world into joys supernal and unexplored. And his dream had been shattered. He remained fettered to earth. Was there no means of escaping out of one's self, out of earthly limitations, and attaining an upper ether where the soul, ravished, would glory in its giddy flight?

Ah, the lesson was hard and decisive. For having one time hoped so much, what regrets, what a tumble! Decidedly, Reality does not pardon him who despises her; she avenges herself by shattering the dream and trampling it and casting the fragments into a cesspool.

"Don't be vexed, dear, because it is taking me so long," said Mme. Chantelouve behind the curtain.

He thought crudely, "I wish you would get to hell out of here," and aloud he asked politely if she had need of his services.

"She was so mysterious, so enticing," he resumed to himself. "Her eyes, remote, deep as space, and reflecting cemeteries and festivals at the same time. And she has shown herself up for all she is, within an hour. I have seen a new Hyacinthe, talking like a silly little milliner in heat. All the nastinesses of women unite in her to exasperate me."

After a thoughtful silence he concluded, "I must be young indeed to have lost my head the way I did."

As if echoing his thought, Mme. Chantelouve, coming out through the portiere, laughed nervously and said, "A woman of my age doing a mad thing like that!" She looked at him, and though he forced a smile she understood.

"You will sleep tonight," she said, sadly, alluding to Durtal's former complaints of sleeplessness on her account.

He begged her to sit down and warm herself, but she said she was not cold.

"Why, in spite of the warmth of the room you were cold as ice!"

"Oh, I am always that way. Winter and summer my flesh is chilly."

He thought that in August this frigid body might be agreeable, but now!

He offered her some bonbons, which she refused, then she said she would take a sip of the alkermes, which he poured into a tiny silver goblet. She took just a drop, and amicably they discussed the taste of this preparation, in which she recognized an aroma of clove, tempered by flower of cinnamon moistened with distillate of rose water.

Then he became silent.

"My poor dear," she said, "how I should love him if he were more confiding and not always on his guard."

He asked her to explain herself.

"Why, I mean that you can't forget yourself and simply let yourself be loved. Alas, you were reasoning all the time—"

"I was not!"

She kissed him tenderly. "You see I love you, anyway." And he was surprised to see how sad and moved she looked, and he observed a sort of frightened gratitude in her eyes.

"She is easily satisfied," he said to himself.

"What are you thinking about?"

"You!"

She sighed. Then, "What time is it?"

"Half past ten."

"I must go. He is waiting for me. No, don't say anything—"

She passed her hands over her cheeks. He seized her gently by the waist and kissed her, holding her thus enlaced until they were at the door.

"You will come again soon, won't you?"

"Yes.... Yes."

He returned to the fireside.

"Oof! it's done," he thought, in a whirl of confused emotions. His vanity was satisfied, his selfesteem was no longer bleeding, he had attained his ends and possessed this woman. Moreover, her spell over him had lost its force. He was regaining his entire liberty of mind, but who could tell what trouble this liaison had yet in store for him? Then, in spite of everything, he softened.

After all, what could he reproach her with? She loved as well as she could. She was, indeed, ardent and plaintive. Even this dualism of a mistress who was a low cocotte in bed and a fine lady when dressed—or no, too intelligent to be called a fine lady—was a delectable pimento. Her carnal appetites were excessive and bizarre. What, then, was the matter with him?

And at last he quite justly accused himself. It was his own fault if everything was spoiled. He lacked appetite. He was not really tormented except by a cerebral erethism. He was used up in body, filed away in soul, inept at love, weary of tendernesses even before he received them and disgusted when he had. His heart was dead and could not be revived. And his mania for thinking, thinking! previsualizing an incident so vividly that actual enactment was an anticlimax—but probably would not be if his mind would leave him alone and not be always jeering at his efforts. For a man in his state of spiritual impoverishment all, save art, was but a recreation more or less boring, a diversion more or less vain. "Ah, poor woman, I am afraid she is going to get pretty sick of me. If only she would consent to come no more! But no, she doesn't deserve to be treated in that fashion," and, seized by pity, he swore to himself that the next time she visited him he would caress her and try to persuade her that the disillusion which he had so ill concealed did not exist.

He tried to spread up the bed, get the tousled blankets together, and plump the pillows, then he lay down.

He put out his lamp. In the darkness his distress increased. With death in his heart he said to himself, "Yes, I was right in declaring that the only women you can continue to love are those you lose.

"To learn, three years later, when the woman is inaccessible, chaste and married, dead, perhaps, or out of France—to learn that she loved you, though you had not dared believe it while she was near you, ah, that's the dream! These real and intangible loves, these loves made up of melancholy and distant regrets, are the only ones that count. Because there is no flesh in them, no earthly leaven.

"To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life."



CHAPTER XIV

From this scene he had learned an alarming lesson: that the flesh domineers the soul and refuses to admit any schism. The flesh decisively does not intend that one shall get along without it and indulge in out-of-the-world pleasures which it can partake only on condition that it keep quiet. For the first time, reviewing these turpitudes, he really understood the meaning of that now obsolete word chastity, and he savoured it in all its pristine freshness. Just as a man who has drunk too deeply the night before thinks, the morning after, of drinking nothing but mineral water in future, so he dreamed, today, of pure affection far from a bed.

He was still ruminating these thoughts when Des Hermies entered.

They spoke of amorous misadventures. Astonished at once by Durtal's languor and the ascetic tone of his remarks, Des Hermies exclaimed, "Ah, we had a gay old time last night?"

With the most decisive bad grace Durtal shook his head.

"Then," replied Des Hermies, "you are superior and inhuman. To love without hope, immaculately, would be perfect if it did not induct such brainstorms. There is no excuse for chastity, unless one has a pious end in view, or unless the senses are failing, and if they are one had best see a doctor, who will solve the question more or less unsatisfactorily. To tell the truth, everything on earth culminates in the act you reprove. The heart, which is supposed to be the noble part of man, has the same form as the penis, which is the so-called ignoble part of man. There's symbolism in that similarity, because every love which is of the heart soon extends to the organ resembling it. The human imagination, the moment it tries to create artificially animated beings, involuntarily reproduces in them the movements of animals propagating. Look at the machines, the action of the piston and the cylinder; Romeos of steel and Juliets of cast iron. Nor do the loftier expressions of the human intellect get away from the advance and withdrawal copied by the machines. One must bow to nature's law if one is neither impotent nor a saint. Now you are neither the one nor the other, I think, but if, from inconceivable motives, you desire to live in temporary continence, follow the prescription of an occultist of the sixteenth century, the Neapolitan Piperno. He affirms that whoever eats vervain cannot approach a woman for seven days. Buy a jar, and let's try it."

Durtal laughed. "There is perhaps a middle course: never consummate the carnal act with her you love, and, to keep yourself quiet, frequent those you do not love. Thus, in a certain measure, you would conjure away possible disgust."

"No, one would never get it out of one's head that with the woman of whom one was enamoured one would experience carnal delights absolutely different from those which one feels with the others, so your method also would end badly. And too, the women who would not be indifferent to one, have not charity and discretion enough to admire the wisdom of this selfishness, for of course that's what it is. But what say, now, to putting on your shoes? It's almost six o'clock and Mama Carhaix's beef can't wait."

It had already been taken out of the pot and couched on a platter amid vegetables when they arrived. Carhaix, sprawling in an armchair, was reading his breviary.

"What's going on in the world?" he asked, closing his book.

"Nothing. Politics doesn't interest us, and General Boulanger's American tricks of publicity weary you as much as they do us, I suppose. The other newspaper stories are just a little more shocking or dull than usual.—Look out, you'll burn your mouth," as Durtal was preparing to take a spoonful of soup.

"In fact," said Durtal, grimacing, "this marrowy soup, so artistically golden, is like liquid fire. But speaking of the news, what do you mean by saying there is nothing of pressing importance? And the trial of that astonishing abbe Boudes going on before the Assizes of Aveyron! After trying to poison his curate through the sacramental wine, and committing such other crimes as abortion, rape, flagrant misconduct, forgery, qualified theft and usury, he ended by appropriating the money put in the coin boxes for the souls in purgatory, and pawning the ciborium, chalice, all the holy vessels. That case is worth following."

Carhaix raised his eyes to heaven.

"If he is not sent to jail, there will be one more priest for Paris," said Des Hermies.

"How's that?"

"Why, all the ecclesiastics who get in bad in the provinces, or who have a serious falling out with the bishop, are sent here where they will be less in view, lost in the crowd, as it were. They form a part of that corporation known as 'scratch priests.'"

"What are they?"

"Priests loosely attached to a parish. You know that in addition to a curate, ministrants, vicars, and regular clergy, there are in every church adjunct priests, supply priests. Those are the ones I am talking about. They do the heavy work, celebrate the morning masses when everybody is asleep and the late masses when everybody is doing. It is they who get up at night to take the sacrament to the poor, and who sit up with the corpses of the devout rich and catch cold standing under the dripping church porches at funerals, and get sunstroke or pneumonia in the cemetery. They do all the dirty work. For a five or ten franc fee they act as substitutes for colleagues who have good livings and are tired of service. They are men under a cloud for the most part. Churches take them on, ready to fire them at a moment's notice, and keep strict watch over them while waiting for them to be interdicted or to have their celebret taken away. I simply mean that the provincial parishes excavate on the city the priests who for one reason or another have ceased to please."

"But what do the curates and other titulary abbes do, if they unload their duties onto the backs of others?"

"They do the elegant, easy work, which requires no effort, no charity. They shrive society women who come to confession in their most stunning gowns; they teach proper little prigs the catechism, and preach, and play the limelight roles in the gala ceremonials which are got up to pander to the tastes of the faithful. At Paris, not counting the scratch priests, the clergy is divided thus: Man-of-the-world priests in easy circumstances: these are placed at la Madeleine and Saint Roch where the congregations are wealthy. They are wined and dined, they pass their lives in drawing-rooms, and comfort only elegant souls. Other priests who are good desk clerks, for the most part, but who have neither the education nor the fortune necessary to participate in the inconsequentialities of the idle rich. They live more in seclusion and visit only among the middle class. They console themselves for their unfashionableness by playing cards with each other and uttering crude commonplaces at the table."

"Now, Des Hermies," said Carhaix, "you are going too far. I claim to know the clerical world myself, and there are, even in Paris, honest men who do their duty. They are covered with opprobrium and spat on. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry accuses them of the foulest vices. But after all, it must be said that the abbe Boudes and the Canon Docres are exceptions, thank God! and outside of Paris there are veritable saints, especially among the country clergy."

"It's a fact that Satanic priests are relatively rare, and the lecheries of the clergy and the knaveries of the episcopate are evidently exaggerated by an ignoble press. But that isn't what I have against them. If only they were gamblers and libertines! But they're lukewarm, mediocre, lazy, imbeciles. That is their sin against the Holy Ghost, the only sin which the All Merciful does not pardon."

"They are of their time," said Durtal. "You wouldn't expect to find the soul of the Middle Ages inculcated by the milk-and-water seminaries."

"Then," Carhaix observed, "our friend forgets that there are impeccable monastic orders, the Carthusians, for instance."

"Yes, and the Trappists and the Franciscans. But they are cloistered orders which live in shelter from an infamous century. Take, on the other hand, the order of Saint Dominic, which exists for the fashionable world. That is the order which produces jewelled dudes like Monsabre and Didon. Enough said."

"They are the hussars of religion, the jaunty lancers, the spick and span and primped-up Zouaves, while the good Capuchins are the humble poilus of the soul," said Durtal.

"If only they loved bells," sighed Carhaix, shaking his head. "Well, pass the Coulommiers," he said to his wife, who was taking up the salad bowl and the plates.

In silence they ate this Brie-type cheese. Des Hermies filled the glasses.

"Tell me," Durtal asked Des Hermies, "do you know whether a woman who receives visits from the incubi necessarily has a cold body? In other words, is a cold body a presumable symptom of incubacy, as of old the inability to shed tears served the Inquisition as proof positive to convict witches?"

"Yes, I can answer you. Formerly women smitten with incubacy had frigid flesh even in the month of August. The books of the specialists bear witness. But now the majority of the creatures who voluntarily or involuntarily summon or receive the amorous larvae have, on the contrary, a skin that is burning and dry to the touch. This transformation is not yet general, but tends to become so. I remember very well that Dr. Johannes, he of whom Gevingey told you, was often obliged, at the moment when he attempted to deliver the patient, to bring the body back to normal temperature with lotions of dilute hydriodate of potassium."

"Ah!" said Durtal, who was thinking of Mme. Chantelouve.

"You don't know what has become of Dr. Johannes?" asked Carhaix.

"He is living very much in retirement at Lyons. He continues, I believe, to cure venefices, and he preaches the blessed coming of the Paraclete."

"For heaven's sake, who is this doctor?" asked Durtal.

"He is a very intelligent and learned priest. He was superior of a community, and he directed, here in Paris, the only review which ever was really mystical. He was a theologian much consulted, a recognized master of divine jurisprudence; then he had distressing quarrels with the papal Curia at Rome and with the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris. His exorcisms and his battles against the incubi, especially in the female convents, ruined him.

"Ah, I remember the last time I saw him, as if it were yesterday. I met him in the rue Grenelle coming out of the Archbishop's house, the day he quitted the Church, after a scene which he told me all about. Again I can see that priest walking with me along the deserted boulevard des Invalides. He was pale, and his defeated but impressive voice trembled. He had been summoned and commanded to explain his actions in the case of an epileptic woman whom he claimed to have cured with the aid of a relic, the seamless robe of Christ preserved at Argenteuil. The Cardinal, assisted by two grand vicars, listened to him, standing.

"When he had likewise furnished the information which they demanded about his cures of witch spells, Cardinal Guibert said, 'You had best go to La Trappe.'

"And I remember word for word his reply, 'If I have violated the laws of the Church, I am ready to undergo the penalty of my fault. If you think me culpable, pass a canonical judgment and I will execute it, I swear on my sacerdotal honour; but I wish a formal sentence, for, in law, nobody is bound to condemn himself: "Nemo se tradere tenetur," says the Corpus Juris Canonici.'

"There was a copy of his review on the table. The Cardinal pointed to a page and asked, 'Did you write that?'

"'Yes, Eminence.'

"'Infamous doctrines!' and he went from his office into the next room, crying, 'Out of my sight!'

"Then Johannes advanced as far as the threshold of the other room, and falling on his knees, he said, 'Eminence, I had no intention of offending. If I have done so, I beg forgiveness.'

"The Cardinal cried more loudly, 'Out of my sight before I call for assistance!'

"Johannes rose and left.

"'All my old ties are broken,' he said, as he parted from me. He was so sad that I had not the heart to question him further."

There was a silence. Carhaix went up to his tower to ring a peal. His wife removed the dessert dishes and the cloth. Des Hermies prepared the coffee. Durtal, pensive, rolled his cigarette.

Carhaix, when he returned, as if enveloped in a fog of sounds, exclaimed, "A while ago, Des Hermies, you were speaking of the Franciscans. Do you know that that order, to live up to its professions of poverty, was supposed not to possess even a bell? True, this rule has been relaxed somewhat. It was too severe! Now they have a bell, but only one."

"Just like most other abbeys, then."

"No, because all communities have at least three, in honour of the holy and triple Hypostasis."

"Do you mean to say that the number of bells a monastery or church can have is limited by rule?"

"Formerly it was. There was a pious hierarchy of ringing: the bells of a convent could not sound when the bells of a church pealed. They were the vassals, and, respectful and submissive as became their rank, they were silent when the Suzerain spoke to the multitudes. These principles of procedure, consecrated, in 1590, by a canon of the Council of Toulouse and confirmed by two decrees of the Congress of Rites, are no longer followed. The rulings of San Carlo Borromeo, who decreed that a church should have from five to seven bells, a boy's academy three, and a parochial school two, are abolished. Today churches have more or fewer bells as they are more or less rich.... Oh, well, why worry? Where are the little glasses?"

His wife brought them, shook hands with the guests, and retired.

Then while Carhaix was pouring the cognac, Des Hermies said in a low voice, "I did not want to speak before her, because these matters distress and frighten her, but I received a singular visit this morning from Gevingey, who is running over to Lyons to see Dr. Johannes. He claims to have been bewitched by Canon Docre, who, it seems, is making a flying visit to Paris. What have been their relations? I don't know. Anyway, Gevingey is in a deplorable state."

"Just what seems to be the matter with him?" asked Durtal.

"I positively do not know. I made a careful auscultation and examined him thoroughly. He complains of needles pricking him around the heart. I observed nervous trouble and nothing else. What I am most worried about is a state of enfeeblement inexplicable in a man who is neither cancerous nor diabetical."

"Ah," said Carhaix, "I suppose people are not betwitched now with wax images and needles, with the 'Manei' or the 'Dagyde' as it was called in the good old days."

"No, those practises are now out of date and almost everywhere fallen into disuse. Gevingey who took me completely into his confidence this morning, told me what extraordinary recipes the frightful canon uses. These are, it seems, the unrevealed secrets of modern magic."

"Ah, that's what interests me," exclaimed Durtal.

"Of course I limit myself to repeating what was told me," resumed Des Hermies, lighting his cigarette. "Well, Docre keeps white mice in cages, and he takes them along when he travels. He feeds them on consecrated hosts and on pastes impregnated with poisons skilfully dosed. When these unhappy beasts are saturated, he takes them, holds them over a chalice, and with a very sharp instrument he pricks them here and there. The blood flows into the vase and he uses it, in a way which I shall explain in a moment, to strike his enemies with death. Formerly he operated on chickens and guinea pigs, but he used the grease, not the blood, of these animals, become thus execrated and venomous tabernacles.

"Formerly he also used a recipe discovered by the Satanic society of the Re-Theurgistes-Optimates, of which I have spoken before, and he prepared a hash composed of flour, meat, Eucharist bread, mercury, animal semen, human blood, acetate of morphine and aspic oil.

"Latterly, and according to Gevingey this abomination is more perilous yet, he stuffs fishes with communion bread and with toxins skilfully graduated. These toxins are chosen from those which produce madness or lockjaw when absorbed through the pores. Then, when these fishes are thoroughly permeated with the substances sealed by sacrilege, Docre takes them out of the water, lets them rot, distills them, and expresses from them an essential oil one drop of which will produce madness. This drop, it appears, is applied externally, by touching the hair, as in Balzac's Thirteen."

"Hmmm," said Durtal, "I am afraid that a drop of this oil long ago fell on the scalp of poor old Gevingey."

"What is interesting about this story is not the outlandishness of these diabolical pharmacopoeia so much as the psychology of the persons who invent and manipulate them. Think. This is happening at the present day, and it is the priests who have invented philtres unknown to the sorcerers of the Middle Ages."

"The priests, no! A priest. And what a priest!" remarked Carhaix.

"Gevingey is very precise. He affirms that others use them. Bewitchment by veniniferous blood of mice took place in 1879 at Chalons-sur-Marne in a demoniac circle—to which the canon belonged, it is true. In 1883, in Savoy, the oil of which I have spoken was prepared in a group of defrocked abbes. As you see, Docre is not the only one who practises this abominable science. It is known in the convents; some laymen, even, have an inkling of it."

"But now, admitting that these preparations are real and that they are active, you have not explained how one can poison a man with them either from a distance or near at hand."

"Yes, that's another matter. One has a choice of two methods to reach the enemy one is aiming at. The first and least used is this: the magician employs a voyant, a woman who is known in that world as 'a flying spirit'; she is a somnambulist, who, put into a hypnotic state, can betake herself, in spirit, wherever one wishes her to go. It is then possible to have her transmit the magic poisons to a person whom one designates, hundreds of leagues away. Those who are stricken in this manner have seen no one, and they go mad or die without suspecting the venefice. But these voyants are not only rare, they are also unreliable, because other persons can likewise fix them in a cataleptic state and extract confessions from them. So you see why persons like Docre have recourse to the second method, which is surer. It consists in evoking, just as in Spiritism, the soul of a dead person and sending it to strike the victim with the prepared spell. The result is the same but the vehicle is different. There," concluded Des Hermies, "reported with painstaking exactness, are the confidences which our friend Gevingey made me this morning."

"And Dr. Johannes cures people poisoned in this manner?" asked Carhaix.

"Yes, Dr. Johannes—to my knowledge—has made inexplicable cures."

"But with what?"

"Gevingey tells me, in this connection, that the doctor celebrates a sacrifice to the glory of Melchisedek. I haven't the faintest idea what this sacrifice is, but Gevingey will perhaps enlighten us if he returns cured."

"In spite of all, I should not be displeased, once in my life to get a good look at Canon Docre," said Durtal.

"Not I! He is the incarnation of the Accursed on earth!" cried Carhaix, assisting his friends to put on their overcoats.

He lighted his lantern, and while they were descending the stair, as Durtal complained of the cold, Des Hermies burst into a laugh.

"If your family had known the magical secrets of the plants, you would not shiver this way," he said. "It was learned in the sixteenth century that a child might be immune to heat or cold all his life if his hands were rubbed with juice of absinth before the twelfth month of his life had passed. That, you see, is a tempting prescription, less dangerous than those which Canon Docre abuses."

Once below, after Carhaix had closed the door of his tower, they hastened their steps, for the north wind swept the square.

"After all," said Des Hermies, "Satanism aside—and yet Satanism also is a phase of religion—admit that, for two miscreants of our sort, we hold singularly pious conversations. I hope they will be counted in our favour up above."

"No merit on our part," replied Durtal, "for what else is there to talk about? Conversations which do not treat of religion or art are so base and vain."



CHAPTER XV

The memory of these frightful magisteria kept racing through his head next day, and, while smoking cigarettes beside the fire, Durtal thought of Docre and Johannes fighting across Gevingey's back, smiting and parrying with incantations and exorcisms.

"In the Christian symbolism," he said to himself, "the fish is one of the representations of Christ. Doubtless the Canon thinks to aggravate his sacrileges by feeding fishes on genuine hosts. His is the reverse of the system of the mediaeval witches who chose a vile beast dedicated to the Devil to submit the body of the Saviour to the processes of digestion. How real is the pretended power which the deicide chemists are alleged to wield? What faith can we put in the tales of evoked larvae killing a designated person to order with corrosive oil and blood virus? None, unless one is extremely credulous, and even a bit mad.

"And yet, come to think of it, we find today, unexplained and surviving under other names, the mysteries which were so long reckoned the product of mediaeval imagination and superstition. At the charity hospital Dr. Louis transfers maladies from one hypnotized person to another. Wherein is that less miraculous than evocation of demons, than spells cast by magicians or pastors? A larva, a flying spirit, is not, indeed, more extraordinary than a microbe coming from afar and poisoning one without one's knowledge, and the atmosphere can certainly convey spirits as well as bacilli. Certainly the ether carries, untransformed, emanations, effluences, electricity, for instance, or the fluids of a magnet which sends to a distant subject an order to traverse all Paris to rejoin it. Science has no call to contest these phenomena. On the other hand, Dr. Brown-Sequard rejuvenates infirm old men and revitalizes the impotent with distillations from the parts of rabbits and cavies. Were not the elixirs of life and the love philtres which the witches sold to the senile and impotent composed of similar or analogous substances? Human semen entered almost always, in the Middle Ages, into the compounding of these mixtures. Now, hasn't Dr. Brown-Sequard, after repeated experiments, recently demonstrated the virtues of semen taken from one man and instilled into another?

"Finally, the apparitions, doppelgaenger, bilocations—to speak thus of the spirits—that terrified antiquity, have not ceased to manifest themselves. It would be difficult to prove that the experiments carried on for three years by Dr. Crookes in the presence of witnesses were cheats. If he has been able to photograph visible and tangible spectres, we must recognize the veracity of the mediaeval thaumaturges. Incredible, of course—and wasn't hypnotism, possession of one soul by another which could dedicate it to crime—incredible only ten years ago?

"We are groping in shadow, that is sure. But Des Hermies hit the bull's-eye when he remarked, 'It is less important to know whether the modern pharmaceutic sacrileges are potent, than to study the motives of the Satanists and fallen priests who prepare them.'

"Ah, if there were some way of getting acquainted with Canon Docre, of insinuating oneself into his confidence, perhaps one would attain clear insight into these questions. I learned long ago that there are no people interesting to know except saints, scoundrels, and cranks. They are the only persons whose conversation amounts to anything. Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life. They are the crowd, more or less intelligent, but they are the crowd, and they give me a pain. Yes, but who will put me in touch with this monstrous priest?" and, as he poked the fire, Durtal said to himself, "Chantelouve, if he would, but he won't. There remains his wife, who used to be well acquainted with Docre. I must interrogate her and find out whether she still corresponds with him and sees him."

The entrance of Mme. Chantelouve into his reflections saddened him. He took out his watch and murmured, "What a bore. She will come again, and again I shall have to—if only there were any possibility of convincing her of the futility of the carnal somersaults! In any case, she can't be very well pleased, because, to her frantic letter soliciting a meeting, I responded three days later by a brief, dry note, inviting her to come here this evening. It certainly was lacking in lyricism, too much so, perhaps."

He rose and went into his bedroom to make sure that the fire was burning brightly, then he returned and sat down, without even arranging his room as he had the other times. Now that he no longer cared for this woman, gallantry and self-consciousness had fled. He awaited her without impatience, his slippers on his feet.

"To tell the truth, I have had nothing pleasant from Hyacinthe except that kiss we exchanged when her husband was only a few feet away. I certainly shall not again find her lips a-flame and fragrant. Here her kiss is insipid."

Mme. Chantelouve rang earlier than usual.

"Well," she said, sitting down. "You wrote me a nice letter."

"How's that?"

"Confess frankly that you are through with me."

He denied this, but she shook her head.

"Well," he said, "what have you to reproach me with? Having written you only a short note? But there was someone here, I was busy and I didn't have time to assemble pretty speeches. Not having set a date sooner? I told you our relation necessitates precautions, and we can't see each other very often. I think I gave you clearly to understand my motives—"

"I am so stupid that I probably did not understand them. You spoke to me of 'family reasons,' I believe."

"Yes."

"Rather vague."

"Well, I couldn't go into detail and tell you that—"

He stopped, asking himself whether the time had come to break decisively with her, but he remembered that he wanted her aid in getting information about Docre.

"That what? Tell me."

He shook his head, hesitating, not to tell her a lie, but to insult and humiliate her.

"Well," he went on, "since you force me to do it, I will confess, at whatever cost, that I have had a mistress for several years—I add that our relations are now purely amical—"

"Very well," she interrupted, "your family reasons are sufficient."

"And then," he pursued, in a lower tone, "if you wish to know all, well—I have a child by her."

"A child! Oh, you poor dear." She rose. "Then there is nothing for me to do but withdraw."

But he seized her hands, and, at the same time satisfied with the success of his deception and ashamed of his brutality, he begged her to stay awhile. She refused. Then he drew her to him, kissed her hair, and cajoled her. Her troubled eyes looked deep into his.

"Ah, then!" she said. "No, let me undress."

"Not for the world!"

"Yes!"

"Oh, the scene of the other night beginning all over again," he murmured, sinking, overwhelmed, into a chair. He felt borne down, burdened by an unspeakable weariness.

He undressed beside the fire and warmed himself while waiting for her to get to bed. When they were in bed she enveloped him with her supple, cold limbs.

"Now is it true that I am to come here no more?"

He did not answer, but understood that she had no intention of going away and that he had to do with a person of the staying kind.

"Tell me."

He buried his head in her breast to keep from having to answer.

"Tell me in my lips."

He beset her furiously, to make her keep silent, then he lay disabused, weary, happy that it was over. When they lay down again she put her arm about his neck and ran her tongue around in his mouth like an auger, but he paid little heed to caresses and remained feeble and pathetic. Then she bent over, reached him, and he groaned.

"Ah!" she exclaimed suddenly, rising, "at last I have heard you cry!"

He lay, broken in body and spirit, incapable of thinking two thoughts in sequence. His brain seemed to whir, undone, in his skull.

He collected himself, however, rose and went into the other room to dress and let her do the same.

Through the drawn portiere separating the two rooms he saw a little pinhole of light which came from the wax candle placed on the mantel opposite the curtain. Hyacinthe, going back and forth, would momentarily intercept this light, then it would flash out again.

"Ah," she said, "my poor darling, you have a child."

"The shot struck home," said he to himself, and aloud, "Yes, a little girl."

"How old?"

"She will soon be six," and he described her as flaxen-haired, lively, but in very frail health, requiring multiple precautions and constant care.

"You must have very sad evenings," said Mme. Chantelouve, in a voice of emotion, from behind the curtain.

"Oh yes! If I were to die tomorrow, what would become of those two unfortunates?"

His imagination took wing. He began himself to believe the mother and her. His voice trembled. Tears very nearly came to his eyes.

"He is unhappy, my darling is," she said, raising the curtain and returning, clothed, into the room. "And that is why he looks so sad, even when he smiles!"

He looked at her. Surely at that moment her affection was not feigned. She really clung to him. Why, oh, why, had she had to have those rages of lust? If it had not been for those they could probably have been good comrades, sin moderately together, and love each other better than if they wallowed in the sty of the senses. But no, such a relation was impossible with her, he concluded, seeing those sulphurous eyes, that ravenous, despoiling mouth.

She had sat down in front of his writing table and was playing with a penholder. "Were you working when I came in? Where are you in your history of Gilles de Rais?"

"I am getting along, but I am hampered. To make a good study of the Satanism of the Middle Ages one ought to get really into the environment, or at least fabricate a similar environment, by becoming acquainted with the practitioners of Satanism all about us—for the psychology is the same, though the operations differ." And looking her straight in the eye, thinking the story of the child had softened her, he hazarded all on a cast, "Ah! if your husband would give me the information he has about Canon Docre!"

She stood motionless, but her eyes clouded over. She did not answer.

"True," he said, "Chantelouve, suspecting our liaison—"

She interrupted him. "My husband has no concern with the relations which may exist between you and me. He evidently suffers when I go out, as tonight, for he knows where I am going; but I admit no right of control either on his part or mine. He is free, and I am free, to go wherever we please. I must keep house for him, watch out for his interests, take care of him, love him like a devoted companion, and that I do, with all my heart. As to being responsible for my acts, they're none of his business, no more his than anybody else's."

She spoke in a crisp, incisive tone.

"The devil;" said Durtal. "You certainly reduce the importance of the role of husband."

"I know that my ideas are not the ideas of the world I live in, and they appear not to be yours. In my first marriage they were a source of trouble and disaster—but I have an iron will and I bend the people who love me. In addition, I despise deceit, so when a few years after marriage I became smitten on a man I quite frankly told my husband and confessed my fault."

"Dare I ask you in what spirit he received this confidence?"

"He was so grieved that in one night his hair turned white. He could not bear what he called—wrongly, I think—my treason, and he killed himself."

"Ah!" said Durtal, dumbfounded by the placid and resolute air of this woman, "but suppose he had strangled you first?"

She shrugged her shoulders and picked a cat hair off her skirt.

"The result," he resumed after a silence, "being that you are now almost free, that your second husband tolerates—"

"Let us not discuss my second husband. He is an excellent man who deserves a better wife. I have absolutely no reason to speak of Chantelouve otherwise than with praise, and then—oh, let's talk of something else, for I have had sufficient botheration on this subject from my confessor, who interdicts me from the Holy Table."

He contemplated her, and saw yet another Hyacinthe, a hard, pertinacious woman whom he had not known. Not a sign nor an accent of emotion, nothing, while she was describing the suicide of her first husband—she did not even seem to imagine that she had a crime on her conscience. She remained pitiless, and yet, a moment ago, when she was commiserating him because of his fictitious parenthood, he had thought she was trembling. "After all, perhaps she is acting a part—like myself."

He remained awed by the turn the conversation had taken. He sought, mentally, a way of getting back to the subject from which Hyacinthe had diverted him, of the Satanism of Canon Docre.

"Well, let us think of that no more," she said, coming very near. She smiled, and was once more the Hyacinthe he knew.

"But if on my account you can no longer take communion—"

She interrupted him. "Would you be sorry if I did not love you?" and she kissed his eyes. He squeezed her politely in his arms, but he felt her trembling, and from motives of prudence he got away.

"Is he so inexorable, your confessor?"

"He is an incorruptible man, of the old school. I chose him expressly."

"If I were a woman it seems to me I should take, on the contrary, a confessor who was pliable and caressible and who would not violently pillory my dainty little sins. I would have him indulgent, oiling the hinges of confession, enticing forth with beguiling gestures the misdeeds that hung back. It is true there would be risk of seducing a confessor who perhaps would be defenceless—"

"And that would be incest, because the priest is a spiritual father, and it would also be sacrilege, because the priest is consecrated.—Oh," speaking to herself, "I was mad, mad—" suddenly carried away.