shame to allow you to stagnate in this way. I shall reproach
Monseigneur severely for it.

--It is the fault of the Grand-Vicar Gobin, said Ridoux; he had taken a
dislike to my nephew.

--I have known that. He was a very harsh and a very tiresome man. Too
frozen virtue which has melted, I am told. I do not want to believe it. He
is the talk of the town. It is abominable, but I do not pity him. That is
what comes of not making religion amiable. Although we are old, Monsieur
Marcel, we are of the new school; we firmly believe that religion and
agreeable gaiety ought to proceed in harmony. We want conciliatory and
amiable priests. In this way the women let themselves be won over. I may
confess it to you, I who am double your age; and in so far as we shall
have the women, the world is ours.

While asking himself, what influence this more than middle-aged lady could
exercise over the Bishop's decisions, Marcel quickly perceived that in
order to be successful, he had only to be in the good graces of this
estimable dowager, and, in spite of the remembrance of Suzanne, he tried to
be amiable and witty.

But soon his ideas of ambition returned to him in this sumptuous
drawing-room, surrounded with comfort and luxury: he thought that he had
only to wish it, in order to become himself too, one of the great of the
earth, and it appeared to him that the Comtesse do Montluisant ought to be
the instrument of a rapid fortune.

The old lady was one of those women, very numerous in the world, who make
of religion a convenient chaperone for their intrigues and their affairs of
gallantry. When they are old, and can scarcely _venture_ any longer on
their own account, they generously place their experience and their small
talents at another's service, and willingly assist the intrigues of others.
That is called _lending the hand_, and more than once the old lady had
countenanced, through perfectly Christian charity, the secret interviews of
sweet sheep with their tender pastor.

The deduction must not be made from this that all the devout are courtesans
when they are young and procuresses in their ripened age.

Whatever may be said, all are not hypocritical and vicious. Vice usually
comes in the long run, and hypocrisy, which oozes from the old arches of
the temples, and from the antique wainscoting of the sacristies, falls at
length upon their shoulders like an unwholesome drizzling rain, but for the
most part they begin with convict