my
obedience? Why should you give me everything? What is your share?"

The Spaniard looked at Lucien, and a smile came over his face.

"Let us wait till we come to the next hill; we can walk up and talk out
in the open. The back seat of a traveling carriage is not the place for
confidences."

They traveled in silence for sometime; the rapidity of the movement
seemed to increase Lucien's moral intoxication.

"Here is a hill, father," he said at last awakening from a kind of
dream.

"Very well, we will walk." The Abbe called to the postilion to stop, and
the two sprang out upon the road.

"You child," said the Spaniard, taking Lucien by the arm, "have you ever
thought over Otway's _Venice Preserved_? Did you understand the profound
friendship between man and man which binds Pierre and Jaffier each to
each so closely that a woman is as nothing in comparison, and all social
conditions are changed?--Well, so much for the poet."

"So the canon knows something of the drama," thought Lucien. "Have you
read Voltaire?" he asked.

"I have done better," said the other; "I put his doctrine in practice."

"You do not believe in God?"

"Come! it is I who am the atheist, is it?" the Abbe said, smiling. "Let
us come to practical matters, my child," he added, putting an arm round
Lucien's waist. "I am forty-six years old, I am the natural son of a
great lord; consequently, I have no family, and I have a heart. But,
learn this, carve it on that still so soft brain of yours--man dreads
to be alone. And of all kinds of isolation, inward isolation is the most
appalling. The early anchorite lived with God; he dwelt in the spirit
world, the most populous world of all. The miser lives in a world of
imagination and fruition; his whole life and all that he is, even his
sex, lies in his brain. A man's first thought, be he leper or convict,
hopelessly sick or degraded, is to find another with a like fate to
share it with him. He will exert the utmost that is in him, every power,
all his vital energy, to satisfy that craving; it is his very life. But
for that tyrannous longing, would Satan have found companions? There
is a whole poem yet to be written, a first part of _Paradise Lost_;
Milton's poem is only the apology for the revolt."

"It would be the Iliad of Corruption," said Lucien.

"Well, I am alone, I live alone. If I wear the priest's habit, I have
not a priest's heart. I like to devote myself to some one; that is my
weakness