ons
most opposed to the rector of the town, and who had hitherto supported
the minister of Saint-Leonard, began to tremble as she thought of the
inflexible Catholic doctrines professed by her own party. After
placing her son's body in its shroud with her own hands, thinking of
the mother of the Saviour, she went, with a soul convulsed by anguish,
to the house of the hated rector. There she found the modest priest in
an outer room, engaged in putting away the flax and yarns with which
he supplied poor women, in order that they might never be wholly out
of work,--a form of charity which saved many who were incapable of
begging from actual penury. The rector left his yarns and hastened to
take Madame Granson into his dining-room, where the wretched mother
noticed, as she looked at his supper, the frugal method of his own
living.

"Monsieur l'abbe," she said, "I have come to implore you--" She burst
into tears, unable to continue.

"I know what brings you," replied the saintly man. "I must trust to
you, madame, and to your relation, Madame du Bousquier, to pacify
Monseigneur the Bishop at Seez. Yes, I will pray for your unhappy
child; yes, I will say the masses. But we must avoid all scandal, and
give no opportunity for evil-judging persons to assemble in the
church. I alone, without other clergy, at night--"

"Yes, yes, as you think best; if only he may lie in consecrated
ground," said the poor mother, taking the priest's hand and kissing
it.

Toward midnight a coffin was clandestinely borne to the parish church
by four young men, comrades whom Athanase had liked the best. A few
friends of Madame Granson, women dressed in black, and veiled, were
present; and half a dozen other young men who had been somewhat
intimate with this lost genius. Four torches flickered on the coffin,
which was covered with crape. The rector, assisted by one discreet
choirboy, said the mortuary mass. Then the body of the suicide was
noiselessly carried to a corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden
cross, without inscription, was all that indicated its place hereafter
to the mother. Athanase lived and died in shadow. No voice was raised
to blame the rector; the bishop kept silence. The piety of the mother
redeemed the impiety of the son's last act.

Some months later, the poor woman, half beside herself with grief, and
moved by one of those inexplicable thirsts which misery feels to steep
its lips in the bitter chalice, determined to see