e attributed the
great joy which filled his soul. How despicable appeared all the good
things of the earth! How thankfully he recognised his poverty! When he
entered into holy orders, after losing on the same day both his father
and his mother through a tragedy the fearful details of which were even
now unknown to him,* he had relinquished all his share of their property
to an elder brother. His only remaining link with the world was
his sister; he had undertaken the care of her, stirred by a kind of
religious affection for her feeble intelligence. The dear innocent was
so childish, such a very little girl, that she recalled to him the poor
in spirit to whom the Gospel promises the kingdom of heaven. Of late,
however, she had somewhat disturbed him; she was growing too lusty, too
full of health and life. But his discomfort was yet of the slightest.
His days were spent in that inner life he had created for himself, for
which he had relinquished all else. He closed the portals of his senses,
and sought to free himself from all bodily needs, so that he might be
but a soul enrapt in contemplation. To him nature offered only snares
and abominations; he gloried in maltreating her, in despising her, in
releasing himself from his human slime. And as the just man must be
a fool according to the world, he considered himself an exile on this
earth; his thoughts were solely fixed upon the favours of Heaven,
incapable as he was of understanding how an eternity of bliss could be
weighed against a few hours of perishable enjoyment. His reason
duped him and his senses lied; and if he advanced in virtue it was
particularly by humility and obedience. His wish was to be the last of
all, one subject to all, in order that the divine dew might fall upon
his heart as upon arid sand; he considered himself overwhelmed with
reproach and with confusion, unworthy of ever being saved from sin. He
no longer belonged to himself--blind, deaf, dead to the world as he was.
He was God's thing. And from the depth of the abjectness to which he
sought to plunge, Hosannahs suddenly bore him aloft, above the happy and
the mighty into the splendour of never-ending bliss.

* This forms the subject of M. Zola's novel, _The Conquest of
Plassans_. ED.

Thus, at Les Artaud, Abbe Mouret had once more experienced, each time he
read the 'Imitation,' the raptures of the cloistered life which he had
longed for at one time so ardently. As yet he had not had to fig