ng to God than all the prayers. There are
people who in order to pray neglect their home duties, their duties as wife
and as mother. To them, I say of a truth, God remains deaf. He wills,
before aught else, that you should fulfil your duties to your own. Every
prayer which causes another to suffer is an impiety." Such was pretty near
the essence of his sermons: they were short and simple. No great sonorous
words, no pompous digressions, no Latin quotations which no one would have
understood, no declamations on Our Lady of Lourdes or of La Salotte, on the
miracle of Roses or the Immaculate Conception.

Thus he placed himself on a level with the simple souls who heard him,
addressed himself only to their good sense and to their heart, and did not
waste their time. He thought that after having worked hard throughout the
week, it was well to spend the Sunday in rest and not in fresh fatigue.

But that which struck me most in him was his intelligent and expressive
countenance, and I was astonished that a man hall-marked with such
originality, should consent to vegetate, obscure and future-less, in the
care of a poor village.

They said he was chaste. In truth that must be a task more arduous for him
than for any other, for he bore on his face the impress of ardent passions.
A disciple of Lavater would doubtless have sought for and found the secret
of hidden dramas in the fine pale face. From his looks, now full of
feverish ardour, now laden with sweet caresses, like the limpid eyes of a
bride, the desires of the flesh in rebellion against deadly duty, seemed to
burst forth with bold prolific thoughts.

One saw at times that his thoughts escaped in moments of forgetfulness from
the clerical fetter.

Wild, wandering and licentious, they plunged with delight into the ocean of
reverie. They left far behind them on the misty shore our conventions, our
prejudices and our follies, and all those toils of spider-web which beset
and catch and destroy so well the silly crowd, and which we call social
rules, opinion and propriety.

Then the priest was gone; the man alone remained, the man of thirty, robust
and full of life and yearning for all the joys of life. And beneath his
gold-embroidered chasuble, near that altar laden with lustres and with
flowers, amidst the floods of light and the floods of perfume, in that
atmosphere saturated with the intoxicating waves of incense and the breath
of maidens; surrounded by all those women,