our preference, for no respectable man
could acknowledge that he enjoys the honour of sitting at your
excellency's table only because he eats twice as much as any other man."

The senator understood the truth of my argument, and asked the curate to
bring me to dinner on the following day. He found my practice even better
than my theory, and I became his daily guest.

This man, who had given up everything in life except his own self,
fostered an amorous inclination, in spite of his age and of his gout. He
loved a young girl named Therese Imer, the daughter of an actor residing
near his mansion, her bedroom window being opposite to his own. This
young girl, then in her seventeenth year, was pretty, whimsical, and a
regular coquette. She was practising music with a view to entering the
theatrical profession, and by showing herself constantly at the window
she had intoxicated the old senator, and was playing with him cruelly.
She paid him a daily visit, but always escorted by her mother, a former
actress, who had retired from the stage in order to work out her
salvation, and who, as a matter of course, had made up her mind to
combine the interests of heaven with the works of this world. She took
her daughter to mass every day and compelled her to go to confession
every week; but every afternoon she accompanied her in a visit to the
amorous old man, the rage of whom frightened me when she refused him a
kiss under the plea that she had performed her devotions in the morning,
and that she could not reconcile herself to the idea of offending the God
who was still dwelling in her.

What a sight for a young man of fifteen like me, whom the old man
admitted as the only and silent witness of these erotic scenes! The
miserable mother applauded her daughter's reserve, and went so far as to
lecture the elderly lover, who, in his turn, dared not refute her maxims,
which savoured either too much or too little of Christianity, and
resisted a very strong inclination to hurl at her head any object he had
at hand. Anger would then take the place of lewd desires, and after they
had retired he would comfort himself by exchanging with me philosophical
considerations.

Compelled to answer him, and not knowing well what to say, I ventured one
day upon advising a marriage. He struck me with amazement when he
answered that she refused to marry him from fear of drawing upon herself
the hatred of his relatives.

"Then make her the offer of a la