ires ... these ... that was all.

Was this then life?

Was it for this that God had created him, that his mother had drawn him
painfully forth from her entrails, that nature had one day counted one
intelligent being the more?

Ah! he felt full well it was not so. He felt full well it was not so by his
thirst for emotions and enjoyment, by his altered lips, by his aspirations
for an unknown world. He was in haste to strip off for once at least this
old man's shell which enveloped him, this black, hideous, hardened covering
of the bad priest, beneath which he felt his vitality, his youth, his
strength, his heart of thirty, bounding, boiling, roaring, like burning
lava.

The next day be remembered that though it was nearly six months since he
had taken possession of his cure, his pastoral visits were not yet
completed.

In fact, he had gone everywhere, even to Captain Durand's. Only, he had
found the door closed and, after the information he received, he had fully
resolved not to go there again.

[Footnote 1: The Antigone of Soto.]

XIV.

THE CAPTAIN.

"The disposition of a man of sixty
is nearly always the happy or sad
reflection of his life. Young people
are such as Nature has made them;
old men have been fashioned by the
often awkward hands of society."

ED. ABOUT (_Trente et Quarante_).

The old Captain was in fact a bad parishioner, as his servant had told him,
and had only one good quality in the eyes of that careful housekeeper,
"that he was always shining like a new halfpenny."

Durand, in fact, was what is called in a regiment "a smart soldier," which
means to say "a clean soldier." And still, one of his most important
occupations was to brush his things. The son of peasants, without
patronage, fortune or backstairs influence, he had raised himself, a rare
and difficult thing nowadays; therefore he was proud of himself, and would
say to anyone who would listen to him: "I am the son of my own deeds."

He had been one of those serious-minded officers of whom Jules Noriac
speaks, who instead of dividing their many spare hours between the goddess
of play and the goddess of the bar, employ themselves in regimental
reforms.

The dimensions of a spur-rowel, the length and thickness of a
trouser-strap, the improvement of a whitening for belts which does not
fall off, were questions which had more importance and interest for him
than a question of State.

The slave of his duties