"

"And I," said he, with solemn voice. "I invite you to the holy supper.
No grandee of this earth will there sit at table with us, but we shall
be assembled in Jesus' name, and he will be in the midst of us. All of
us, some hundreds in number, with our wives and children, celebrate
this morning the holy sacrament in my mill near the Carmelite gate."

I was terrified, and exclaimed: "What presumption! Do you not know
that the mareschale is in Nismes?"

"We know it, and the Almighty God is there also."

"Will you then designedly plunge yourselves into misery and a dungeon?
The law forbids most strictly all meetings of this kind, and threatens
death."

"What law? The law of the mortal king? Thou shalt obey God rather
than man."

In this way my uncle knew how to surmount all my objections, by
biblical quotations, and the more I urged the unlawfulness and danger
of such meetings, and the more vividly I described the probable
consequences, the more zealous he became.

"When Jesus was betrayed," he exclaimed, "and when the traitor stood
near him, and when he knew they were preparing to take him, then, oh!
Colas, surrounded by the danger of certain death, he instituted the
holy sacrament. And should we, who would be the disciples of Jesus,
tremble? No, never; if all hell were in arms it should not terrify us."

I could not bring my uncle to his senses; he called me an apostate, a
hypocrite, a papist, and left me in a rage.

I returned to Clementine. She had seen my uncle, and the vexation
expressed in all his gestures; she inquired the cause which I dared not
disclose to her. Amidst her innocent caresses, my fear and uneasiness
gradually left me. She told me that her mother agreed to all my
wishes; this cheered me still more. On Clementine's bosom I dreamed of
the peaceful happiness of the future.

Withdrawn from the tumult of the world and its passions, I proposed to
live alone with my young wife, surrounded by blooming nature, by love
and friendship, and in the pursuit of science.

How happy we were both in these moments! "Oh! Clementine," said I, "no
throne is indeed required to make others happy, but only the will. We
may be useful even in a small and insignificant sphere. We will visit
the abodes of poverty. I shall again defend the cause of accused
innocence, and a kiss shall be my reward when I have succeeded in
accomplishing any good. Our library furnishes an inexhaustible store
for the mi