privilege. Her
fierce foe, the Jesuit Sabatier, came into her cell, and formed a new
and startling scheme to win her by a bribe of the holy wafer. The
bargaining began. They offered her terms: she should communicate if
she would only acknowledge herself a slanderer, unworthy of
communicating. In her excessive humbleness she might have done so.
But, while ruining herself, she would also have ruined the Carmelite
and her own brethren.

Reduced to Pharisaical tricks, they took to expounding her speeches.
Whatever she uttered in a mystic sense they feigned to accept in its
material hardness. To free herself from such snares she displayed,
what they had least expected, very great presence of mind.

A yet more treacherous plan for robbing her of the public sympathy and
setting the laughers against her, was to find her a lover. They
pretended that she had proposed to a young blackguard that they should
set off together and roam the world.

The great lords of that day, being fond of having children and little
pages to wait on them, readily took in the better-mannered of their
peasant's sons. In this way had the bishop dealt with the boy of one
of his tenants. He washed his face, as it were; made him tidy.
Presently, when the favourite grew up, he gave him the tonsure,
dressed him up like an abbe, and dubbed him his chaplain at the age of
twenty. This person was the Abbe Camerle. Brought up with the footmen
and made to do everything, he was, like many a half-scrubbed country
youth, a sly, but simple lout. He saw that the prelate since his
arrival at Toulon had been curious about Cadiere and far from friendly
to Girard. He thought to please and amuse his master by turning
himself, at Ollioules, into a spy on their suspected intercourse. But
after the bishop changed through fear of the Jesuits, Camerle became
equally zealous in helping Girard with active service against Cadiere.

He came one day, like another Joseph, to say that Mdlle. Cadiere had,
like Potiphar's wife, been tempting him, and trying to shake his
virtue. Had this been true, it was all the more cowardly of him thus
to punish her for a moment's weakness, to take so mean an advantage of
some light word. But his education as page and seminarist was not such
as to bring him either honour or the love of women.

She extricated herself with spirit and success, covering him with
shame. The two angry commissioners saw her making so triumphant an
answer, that they cut