hour, that
you might aid me in rendering a great service to several people, in
preventing a very great misfortune, perhaps."

"I can help you to prevent a very great misfortune?" repeated Montfanon.

"Yes," replied Dorsenne, "but this is not the place in which to explain
to you the details of the long and terrible adventure.... At what hour
is the ceremony? I will wait for you, and tell it to you on leaving
here."

"It does not begin until five o'clock-five-thirty," said Montfanon,
looking at his watch, "and it is now fifteen minutes past four. Let us
leave the catacomb, if you wish, and you can repeat your story to me up
above. A very great misfortune? Well," he added, pressing the hand of
the young man whom, personally, he liked as much as he detested his
views, "rest assured, my dear child, we will prevent it!"

There was in the manner in which he uttered those words the tranquillity
of a mind which knows not uneasiness, that of a believer who feels sure
of always accomplishing all that he wishes to do. It would not have been
Montfanon, that is to say, a species of visionary, who loved to argue
with Dorsenne, because he knew that in spite of all he was understood,
if he had not continued, as they walked along the lighted corridor,
while remounting toward daylight:

"If it is all the same to you, sir apologist of the modern world, I
should like to pause here and ask you frankly: Do you not feel yourself
more contemporary with all the dead who slumber within these walls than
with a radical elector or a free-mason deputy? Do you not feel that if
these martyrs had not come to pray beneath these vaults eighteen hundred
years ago, the best part of your soul would not exist? Where will you
find a poetry more touching than that of these symbols and of these
epitaphs? That admirable De Rossi showed me one at Saint Calixtus last
year. My tears flow as I recall it. 'Pete pro Phoebe et pro virginio
ejus'. Pray for Phoebus and for--How do you translate the word
'virginius', the husband who has known only one wife, the virgin husband
of a virgin spouse? Your youth will pass, Dorsenne. You will one day
feel what I feel, the happiness which is wanting on account of bygone
errors, and you will comprehend that it is only to be found in Christian
marriage, whose entire sublimity is summed up in thus prayer: 'Pro
virginio ejus'.... You will be like me then, and you will find in this
book," he held up 'l'Eucologe', which he clasped