provoking
merriment!"

Pierre listened with dolorous astonishment in his heart. Since he had
been at Rome and had seen the Fathers of the Grotto saluted and feared
there, holding an authoritative position, thanks to the large alms which
they contributed to the Peter's Pence, he had felt that they were behind
the proceedings instituted against him, and realised that he would have
to pay for a certain page of his book in which he had called attention to
an iniquitous displacement of fortune at Lourdes, a frightful spectacle
which made one doubt the very existence of the Divinity, a continual
cause of battle and conflict which would disappear in the truly Christian
society of to-morrow. And he could also now understand that his delight
at the loss of the temporal power must have caused a scandal, and
especially that the unfortunate expression "a new religion" had alone
been sufficient to arm _delatores_ against him. But that which amazed and
grieved him was to learn that Cardinal Bergerot's letter was looked upon
as a crime, and that his (Pierre's) book was denounced and condemned in
order that adversaries who dared not attack the venerable pastor face to
face might, deal him a cowardly blow from behind. The thought of
afflicting that saintly man, of serving as the implement to strike him in
his ardent charity, cruelly grieved Pierre. And how bitter and
disheartening it was to find the most hideous questions of pride and
money, ambition and appetite, running riot with the most ferocious
egotism, beneath the quarrels of those leaders of the Church who ought
only to have contended together in love for the poor!

And then Pierre's mind revolted against that supremely odious and idiotic
Index. He now understood how it worked, from the arrival of the
denunciations to the public posting of the titles of the condemned works.
He had just seen the Secretary of the Congregation, Father Dangelis, to
whom the denunciations came, and who then investigated the affair,
collecting all documents and information concerning it with the passion
of a cultivated authoritarian monk, who dreamt of ruling minds and
consciences as in the heroic days of the Inquisition. Then, too, Pierre
had visited one of the consultive prelates, Monsignor Fornaro, who was so
ambitious and affable, and so subtle a theologian that he would have
discovered attacks against the faith in a treatise on algebra, had his
interests required it. Next there were the infreque