Maurice possessed the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Doubting
whether a man hath any profit of all his labour which he taketh under
the sun he never put himself out about anything. From his earliest
childhood this young hopeful's sole concern with work had been
considering how he might best avoid it, and it was through his remaining
ignorant of the teaching of the _Ecole de Droit_ that he became a doctor
of law and a barrister at the Court of Appeal.

He neither pleaded nor practised. He had no knowledge and no desire to
acquire any; wherein he conformed to his genius whose engaging fragility
he forbore to overload; his instinct fortunately telling him that it was
better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.

As Monsieur l'Abbe Patouille expressed it, Maurice had received from
Heaven the benefits of a Christian education. From his childhood piety
was shown to him in the example of his home, and when on leaving college
he was entered at the _Ecole de Droit_, he found the lore of the
doctors, the virtues of the confessors, and the constancy of the nursing
mothers of the Church assembled around the paternal hearth. Admitted to
social and political life at the time of the great persecution of the
Church of France, Maurice did not fail to attend every manifestation of
youthful Catholicism; he lent a hand with his parish barricades at the
time of the Inventories, and with his companions he unharnessed the
archbishop's horses when he was driven out from his palace. He showed on
all these occasions a modified zeal; one never saw him in the front
ranks of the heroic band exciting soldiers to a glorious disobedience or
flinging mud and curses at the agents of the law.

He did his duty, nothing more; and if he distinguished himself on the
occasion of the great pilgrimage of 1911 among the stretcher-bearers at
Lourdes, we have reason to fear it was but to please Madame de la
Verdeliere, who admired men of muscle. Abbe Patouille, a friend of the
family and deeply versed in the knowledge of souls, knew that Maurice
had only moderate aspirations to martyrdom. He reproached him with his
lukewarmness, and pulled his ear, calling him a bad lot. Anyway, Maurice
remained a believer.

Amid the distractions of youth his faith remained intact, since he left
it severely alone. He had never examined a single tenet. Nor had he
enquired a whit more closely into the ideas of morality current in the
grade of society to which he belonged. He