indler. If Monseigneur Troubert
had kept Mademoiselle Gamard's property he would have found it difficult
to make the ecclestiastical authorities censure Birotteau.

At the moment when Monseigneur Hyacinthe, Bishop of Troyes, drove along
the quay Saint-Symphorien in a post-chaise on his way to Paris poor
Birotteau had been placed in an armchair in the sun on a terrace above
the road. The unhappy priest, smitten by the archbishop, was pale and
haggard. Grief, stamped on every feature, distorted the face that was
once so mildly gay. Illness had dimmed his eyes, formerly brightened by
the pleasures of good living and devoid of serious ideas, with a veil
which simulated thought. It was but the skeleton of the old Birotteau
who had rolled only one year earlier so vacuous but so content along the
Cloister. The bishop cast one look of pity and contempt upon his victim;
then he consented to forget him, and went his way.

There is no doubt that Troubert would have been in other times a
Hildebrand or an Alexander the Sixth. In these days the Church is no
longer a political power, and does not absorb the whole strength of
her solitaries. Celibacy, however, presents the inherent vice of
concentrating the faculties of man upon a single passion, egotism, which
renders celibates either useless or mischievous. We live at a period
when the defect of governments is to make Man for Society rather than
Society for Man. There is a perpetual struggle going on between the
Individual and the Social system which insists on using him, while he is
endeavoring to use it to his own profit; whereas, in former days, man,
really more free, was also more loyal to the public weal. The round in
which men struggle in these days has been insensibly widened; the soul
which can grasp it as a whole will ever be a magnificent exception;
for, as a general thing, in morals as in physics, impulsion loses
in intensity what it gains in extension. Society can not be based on
exceptions. Man in the first instance was purely and simply, father;
his heart beat warmly, concentrated in the one ray of Family. Later,
he lived for a clan, or a small community; hence the great historical
devotions of Greece and Rome. After that he was a man of caste or of
a religion, to maintain the greatness of which he often proved himself
sublime; but by that time the field of his interests became enlarged by
many intellectual regions. In our day, his life is attached to that of
a vast co