d not
think you would have approved of Pere Hyacinth; truly, I am astonished."

_Monsieur le Cure_! It was the first time Suzanne had called him _Monsieur
le Cure_. That name wounded him like an affront. He remembered what he was,
and what he must not cease to be in the eyes of the young girl: the Cure!
nothing but the Cure.

And he was sick at heart for several days.

But one fine morning, on coming out from Mass, his countenance lit up, he
uttered a cry of joy and fell into the arms of Abbe Ridoux.

LXII.

THE HAPPY CURE

"Such was Socrates said to have
been, because the outside beholders,
and those estimating him by his external
appearance, would not have given the
slice of an onion, so plain was he in
his person, and ridiculous in his bearing ...
simple in habits, poor in fortune,
unfortunate with women, unfit
for all the offices of the republic,
always laughing, always drinking with
one or another, always sporting, always
concealing his divine wisdom."

RABELAIS (_Gargantua_).

Monsieur Ridoux was a very good fellow, but he was not handsome. A big
nose, a big belly, blinking eyes, an enormous mouth, hair on end, the arm
of a chimpanzee, and the legs of a Greenlander. At first sight, he gave me
the impression of a monkey with young.

But what is a man's outward form? The vessel, more or less regular, filled
with a baneful or beneficent liquid, and you all know that the shape of the
flagon has no influence on the quality of the wine.

The outward form is the wrapper of the goods: very often that wrapper is
brilliant and gilded, of satin or watered silk, and the goods are
adulterated and spoiled. At other times the wrapper is rough and coarse,
but it enfolds precious commodities.

The stamp of genius is usually found only on countenances with fantastic
features. Have you ever seen on the fair insipid faces of our _young
swells_ the imprint of a powerful and fertile intelligence?

The body nearly always is adorned at the expense of the mind.

Of all the deformities of nature, the hunchbacks are intellectual in
proportion as the handsome men are not.

Enquire of the army its opinion on its pre-eminently _fine man_, the
drum-major.

Vincent Voiture, who had, as he confessed himself, the silly face of a
dreaming sheep, used to say that nature usually likes to place the most
precious souls in ill-favoured, puny bodies, as jewellers set the richest
diamonds in a smal