Since the unlucky moment in which the Abbe de Voisenon had been balked
of his morning's sport, he had lost--for he had at times his intervals
of superstitious terror--the proud determination he had formed of not
believing himself ill on that day. But then, what signs of evil augury
had greeted him! He had tripped and fallen on leaving home; he had seen
flocks of crows; a weeping girl had dragged him to the bedside of a
terrified sinner--even now they were repeating the prayers for the dying
around him. The Abbe de Voisenon was overcome; his former temerity oozed
palpably away, he felt sick at heart, his ears tingled, his asthma
groaned within his chest.

"I am ill," thought he. "I was in the wrong to come out; why did I not
take my old servant's advice, and remain at home?"

Finally he lent an ear to the old man's confession.

"You were born the same day as myself!" exclaimed the abbe, at the
patient's first confidential communication; "you were born the same day
as myself!"

The old man continued, and here a new terror arose for our abbe.

"You have never heard mass to the end! And I," thought he, "have never
heard even the beginning for these last thirty years!"

The penitent continued:--

"I have committed, monseigneur, the great sin that you know."

"The great sin that I know! I know so many," thought the abbe. "What
sin, my friend?"

"Yea, the great sin--although married--"

"Ah! I understand!" Then, _sotto voce_, "My great sin, although a
priest."

A deplorable fatality, if it was a fatality, had so willed it that the
vassal should have fallen into the same snares as had his lord, who was
now called to judge him at his last hour.

When the confession was ended, the Abbe de Voisenon consulted his own
heart with inward terror, and after some hesitation he remitted his
penitent's sins, inwardly avowing to himself that the dying man ought,
at least, out of gratitude, to render him the same service.

The ceremony over, the abbe rose to depart: but his limbs failed him,
and they were actually obliged to carry him home, where he arrived in a
state of prostration that seriously alarmed his household. During the
remainder of that day he spoke to no one; wrapped up in the silence of
his own melancholy thoughts, he opened his lips only to cough. The night
was bad; icy shiverings passed over his frame: the image of this man, of
the same age, and burdened with the same sins as he himself had
committed, would no