."

"Come, now," thought Lucien, "he can play _bouillotte_."

"And what do you do?" continued the priest; "do you practise openness,
that fairest of virtues? Not merely do you hide your tactics, but you
do your best to make others believe that you are on the brink of ruin
as soon as you are sure of winning the game. In short, you dissemble,
do you not? You lie to win four or five louis d'or. What would you
think of a player so generous as to proclaim that he held a hand full
of trumps? Very well; the ambitious man who carries virtue's precepts
into the arena when his antagonists have left them behind is behaving
like a child. Old men of the world might say to him, as card-players
would say to the man who declines to take advantage of his trumps,
'Monsieur, you ought not to play at _bouillotte_.'

"Did you make the rules of the game of ambition? Why did I tell you to
be a match for society?--Because, in these days, society by degrees
has usurped so many rights over the individual, that the individual is
compelled to act in self-defence. There is no question of laws now,
their place has been taken by custom, which is to say grimacings, and
forms must always be observed."

Lucien started with surprise.

"Ah, my child!" said the priest, afraid that he had shocked Lucien's
innocence; "did you expect to find the Angel Gabriel in an Abbe loaded
with all the iniquities of the diplomacy and counter-diplomacy of two
kings? I am an agent between Ferdinand VII. and Louis XVIII.,
two--kings who owe their crowns to profound--er--combinations, let us
say. I believe in God, but I have a still greater belief in our Order,
and our Order has no belief save in temporal power. In order to
strengthen and consolidate the temporal power, our Order upholds the
Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, which is to say, the doctrines
which dispose the world at large to obedience. We are the Templars of
modern times; we have a doctrine of our own. Like the Templars, we have
been dispersed, and for the same reasons; we are almost a match for the
world. If you will enlist as a soldier, I will be your captain. Obey
me as a wife obeys her husband, as a child obeys his mother, and I
will guarantee that you shall be Marquis de Rubempre in less than six
months; you shall marry into one of the proudest houses in the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, and some day you shall sit on a bench with
peers of France. What would you have been at this moment if I had not
amu