ut emotion, at the door of the Carmelites.

The retreat chosen by the Trappist was of those innumerable mendicant
societies which France supported at that time. Though its rules
were ostensibly most austere, this monastery was rich and devoted to
pleasure. In that age of scepticism the small number of the monks was
entirely out of proportion to the wealth of the establishment which
had been founded for them; and the friars who roamed about the vast
monasteries in the most remote parts of the provinces led the easiest
and idlest lives they had ever known, in the lap of luxury, and entirely
freed from the control of opinion, which always loses its power when man
isolates himself. But this isolation, the mother of the "amiable vices,"
as they used to phrase it, was dear only to the more ignorant. The
leaders were a prey to the painful dreams of an ambition which had been
nurtured in obscurity and embittered by inaction. To do something, even
in the most limited sphere and with the help of the feeblest machinery;
to do something at all costs--such was the one fixed idea of the priors
and abbes.

The prior of the Carmelites whom I was about to see was the
personification of this restless impotence. Bound to his great arm-chair
by the gout, he offered a strange contrast to the venerable chevalier,
pale and unable to move like himself, but noble and patriarchal in his
affliction. The prior was short, stout, and very petulant. The upper
part of his body was all activity; he would turn his head rapidly from
side to side; he would brandish his arms while giving orders. He was
sparing of words, and his muffled voice seemed to lend a mysterious
meaning to the most trivial things. In short, one-half of his person
seemed to be incessantly striving to drag along the other, like the
bewitched man in the Arabian Nights, whose robe hid a body that was
marble up to the waist.

He received me with exaggerated attention, got angry because they did
not bring me a chair quickly enough, stretched out his fat, flabby hand
to draw this chair quite close to his own, and made a sign to a tall,
bearded satyr, whom he called the Brother Treasurer, to go out; then,
after overwhelming me with questions about my journey, and my return,
and my health, and my family, while his keen restless little eyes
were darting glances at me from under eyelids swollen and heavy from
intemperance, he came to the point.

"I know, my dear child," he said, "what brin