all dining-room on the ground floor and a whole corridor of
cells similar to mine upstairs. I have stupidly forgotten the board for
a regular _retraitant_; but it was somewhere between three and five
francs a day, and I think most probably the first. Chance visitors like
myself might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing
was demanded. I may mention that when I was going away Father Michael
refused twenty francs as excessive. I explained the reasoning which led
me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
he would not accept it with his own hand. "I have no right to refuse for
the monastery," he explained, "but I should prefer if you would give it
to one of the brothers."

I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
other guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
solitude and prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted
cassock, through the bleak hills of Gevaudan. The other was a short,
grizzling, thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed
with a knitted spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his
button-hole. This last was a hard person to classify. He was an old
soldier, who had seen service and risen to the rank of commandant; and
he retained some of the brisk decisive manners of the camp. On the other
hand, as soon as his resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady
of the Snows as a boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways,
had decided to remain as a novice. Already the new life was beginning to
modify his appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and
smiling air of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a
Trappist, but partook of the character of each. And certainly here was a
man in an interesting nick of life. Out of the noise of cannon and
trumpets, he was in the act of passing into this still country bordering
on the grave, where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like
phantoms, communicate by signs.

At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in
France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on
the example of Polan