At last it was over--I was a priest. Never did face of woman
wear an expression of such anguish as hers. The girl whose
lover drops lifeless at her side, the mother by her dead
child's cradle, Eve at the gate of paradise, the miser who
finds his buried treasure replaced by a stone, the poet
whose greatest work has perished in the flames, have not a
more desolate air. The blood left her countenance, and it
became as of marble; her arms fell by her side, as if their
muscles had become flaccid; and she leant against a pillar,
for her limbs refused to support her. As for me, with a
livid face bathed as if in the dews of death, I bent my
tottering steps towards the church door. The air seemed to
stifle me, the vaulted roof settled on my shoulders, and on
my head seemed to rest the whole crushing weight of the
dome. As I was on the point of crossing the threshold a hand
touched mine suddenly--a woman's hand--a touch how new to
me! It was as cold as the skin of a serpent, yet the contact
burnt like the brand of a hot iron. "Unhappy wretch! What
have you done?" she said to me in a low voice, and then
disappeared in the crowd.

On the way to the seminary, whither a comrade has to support him, for
his emotion is evident to all, a page, unnoticed, slips into Romuald's
hand a tablet with the simple words, "Clarimonde. At the Concini
Palace." He passes some days in a state almost of delirium, now forming
wild plans of escape, now shocked at his sinful desires, but always
regretting the world he has renounced, and still more Clarimonde.

I do not know how long I remained in this condition, but, as
in one of my furious writhings I turned on my bed, I saw the
Father Serapion standing in the middle of the cell gazing
steadily at me. Shame seized me, and I hid my face with my
hands. "Romuald," said he, at the end of a few minutes,
"something extraordinary has come on you. Your conduct is
inexplicable. You, so pious, so gentle, you pace your cell
like a caged beast. Take heed, my brother, of the
suggestions of the Evil One, for he is wroth that you have
given yourself to the Lord, and lurks round you like a
ravening wolf, if haply a last effort may make you his."

Then, bidding him redouble his pious exercises, and telling him that he
has been presented by the bishop to a countr