tupid idiots! or rather, the
kind, blessed, adorable idiots! They think they have crushed us, when
they say to us men of the church: 'You take the spiritual, but we will
keep the temporal!'--Oh, their conscience or their modesty inspires them
well, when it bids them not meddle with spiritual things! They abandon
the spiritual! they despise it, they will have nothing to do with
it--oh, the venerable asses! they do not see, that, even as they go
straight to the mill, it is by the spiritual that we go straight to
the temporal. As if the mind did not govern the body! They leave us
the spiritual--that is, command of the conscience, soul, heart, and
judgment--the spiritual--that is, the distribution of heaven's rewards,
and punishments, and pardons--without check, without control, in the
secrecy of the confessional--and that dolt, the temporal, has nothing
but brute matter for his portion, and yet rubs his paunch for joy. Only,
from time to time, he perceives, too late, that, if he has the body, we
have the soul, and that the soul governs the body, and so the body ends
by coming with us also--to the great surprise of Master Temporal, who
stands staring with his hands on his paunch, and says: 'Dear me! is it
possible?'"

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

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