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to arrest a young girl accused of infanticide. Greatly concerned by this

scandal, the diocesan authorities had forced Abbe Rose to close his

shelter, and had removed him from the church of Ste. Marguerite to that

of St. Pierre of Montmartre, where he now again acted as curate. Truth to

tell, it was not a disgrace but a removal to another spot. However, he

had been scolded and was watched, as he said; and he was much ashamed of

it, and very unhappy at being only able to give alms by stealth, much

like some harebrained prodigal who blushes for his faults.

Pierre took the three francs. "I promise to execute your commission, my

friend, oh! with all my heart," he said.

"You will go after your mass, won't you? His name is Laveuve, he lives in

the Rue des Saules in a house with a courtyard, just before reaching the

Rue Marcadet. You are sure to find it. And if you want to be very kind

you will tell me of your visit this evening at five o'clock, at the

Madeleine, where I am going to hear Monseigneur Martha's address. He has

been so good to me! Won't you also come to hear him?"

Pierre made an evasive gesture. Monseigneur Martha, Bishop of Persepolis

and all powerful at the archiepiscopal palace, since, like the genial

propagandist he was, he had been devoting himself to increasing the

subscriptions for the basilica of the Sacred Heart, had indeed supported

Abbe Rose; in fact, it was by his influence that the abbe had been kept

in Paris, and placed once more at St. Pierre de Montmartre.

"I don't know if I shall be able to hear the address," said Pierre, "but

in any case I will go there to meet you."

The north wind was blowing, and the gloomy cold penetrated both of them

on that deserted summit amidst the fog which changed the vast city into a

misty ocean. However, some footsteps were heard, and Abbe Rose, again

mistrustful, saw a man go by, a tall and sturdy man, who wore clogs and

was bareheaded, showing his thick and closely-cut white hair. "Is not

that your brother?" asked the old priest.

Pierre had not stirred. "Yes, it is my brother Guillaume," he quietly

responded. "I have found him again since I have been coming occasionally

to the Sacred Heart. He owns a house close by, where he has been living

for more than twenty years, I think. When we meet we shake hands, but I

have never even been to his house. Oh! all is quite dead between us, we

have nothing more in common, we are parted by worlds."

Abbe Rose's tender smile again appeared, and he waved his hand as if to

say that one must never despair of love. Guillaume Froment, a savant of

lofty intelligence, a chemist who lived apart from others, like one who

rebelled against the social system, was now a parishioner of the abbe's,

and when the latter passed the house where Guillaume lived with his three

sons--a house all alive with work--he must often have dreamt of leading

him back to God.

"But, my dear child," he resumed, "I am keeping you here in this dark

cold, and you are not warm. Go and say your mass. Till this evening, at

the Madeleine." Then, in entreating fashion, after again making sure that

none could hear them, he added, still with the air of a child at fault:

"And not a word to anybody about my little commission--it would again be

said that I don't know how to conduct myself."

Pierre watched the old priest as he went off towards the Rue Cartot,

where he lived on a damp ground-floor, enlivened by a strip of garden.

The veil of disaster, which was submerging Paris, now seemed to grow

thicker under the gusts of the icy north wind. And at last Pierre entered

the basilica, his heart upset, overflowing with the bitterness stirred up

by the recollection of Abbe Rose's story--that bankruptcy of charity, the

frightful irony of a holy man punished for bestowing alms, and hiding

himself that he might still continue to bestow them. Nothing could calm

the smart of the wound reopened in Pierre's heart--neither the warm

peacefulness into which he entered, nor the silent solemnity of the

broad, deep fabric, whose new stonework was quite bare, without a single

painting or any kind of decoration; the nave being still half-barred by

the scaffoldings which blocked up the unfinished dome. At that early hour

the masses of entreaty had already been said at several altars, under the

grey light falling from the high and narrow windows, and the tapers of

entreaty were burning in the depths of the apse. So Pierre made haste to

go to the sacristy, there to assume his vestments in order that he might

say his mass in the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul.

But the floodgates of memory had been opened, and he had no thought but

for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites

and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years

previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on

man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a

first experiment: he had gone to Lourdes, there to seek the innocent

belief of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young

nations bending beneath the terror born of ignorance; but he had rebelled

yet more than ever in presence of what he had witnessed at Lourdes: that

glorification of the absurd, that collapse of common sense; and was

convinced that salvation, the peace of men and nations nowadays, could

not lie in that puerile relinquishment of reason. And afterwards, again

yielding to the need of loving whilst yet allowing reason, so hard to

satisfy, her share in his intellect, he had staked his final peace on a

second experiment, and had gone to Rome to see if Catholicism could there

be renewed, could revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity and

become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world,

upheaving and in danger of death, was awaiting in order to calm down and

live. And he had found there naught but ruins, the rotted trunk of a tree

that could never put forth another springtide; and he had heard there

naught but the supreme rending of the old social edifice, near to its

fall. Then it was, that, relapsing into boundless doubt, total negation,

he had been recalled to Paris by Abbe Rose, in the name of their poor,

and had returned thither that he might forget and immolate himself and

believe in them--the poor--since they and their frightful sufferings

alone remained certain. And then it was too, that for three years he came

into contact with that collapse, that very bankruptcy of goodness itself:

charity a derision, charity useless and flouted.

Those three years had been lived by Pierre amidst ever-growing torments,

in which his whole being had ended by sinking. His faith was forever

dead; dead, too, even his hope of utilising the faith of the multitudes

for the general salvation. He denied everything, he anticipated nothing

but the final, inevitable catastrophe: revolt, massacre and

conflagration, which would sweep away a guilty and condemned world.

Unbelieving priest that he was, yet watching over the faith of others,

honestly, chastely discharging his duties, full of haughty sadness at the

thought that he had been unable to renounce his mind as he had renounced

his flesh and his dream of being a saviour of the nations, he withal

remained erect, full of fierce yet solitary grandeur. And this

despairing, denying priest, who had dived to the bottom of nothingness,

retained such a lofty and grave demeanour, perfumed by such pure

kindness, that in his parish of Neuilly he had acquired the reputation of

being a young saint, one beloved by Providence, whose prayers wrought

miracles. He was but a personification of the rules of the Church; of the

priest he retained only the gestures; he was like an empty sepulchre in

which not even the ashes of hope remained; yet grief-stricken weeping

women worshipped him and kissed his cassock; and it was a tortured mother

whose infant was in danger of death, who had implored him to come and ask

that infant's cure of Jesus, certain as she felt that Jesus would grant

her the boon in that sanctuary of Montmartre where blazed the prodigy of

His heart, all burning with love.

Clad in his vestments, Pierre had reached the chapel of St. Vincent de

Paul. He there ascended the altar-step and began the mass; and when he

turned round with hands spread out to bless the worshippers he showed his

hollow cheeks, his gentle mouth contracted by bitterness, his loving eyes

darkened by suffering. He was no longer the young priest whose

countenance had glowed with tender fever on the road to Lourdes, whose

face had been illumined by apostolic fervour when he started for Rome.

The two hereditary influences which were ever at strife within him--that

of his father to whom he owed his impregnable, towering brow, that of his

mother who had given him his love-thirsting lips, were still waging war,

the whole human battle of sentiment and reason, in that now ravaged face

of his, whither in moments of forgetfulness ascended all the chaos of

internal suffering. The lips still confessed that unquenched thirst for

love, self-bestowal and life, which he well thought he could nevermore

content, whilst the solid brow, the citadel which made him suffer,

obstinately refused to capitulate, whatever might be the assaults of

error. But he stiffened himself, hid the horror of the void in which he

struggled, and showed himself superb, making each gesture, repeating each

word in sovereign fashion. And gazing at him through her tears, the

mother who was there among the few kneeling women, the mother who awaited

a supreme intercession from him, who thought him in communion with Jesus

for the salvation of her child, beheld him radiant with angelic beauty

like some messenger of the divine grace.

When, after the offertory, Pierre uncovered the chalice he felt contempt

for himself. The shock had been too great, and he thought of those things

in spite of all. What puerility there had been in his two experiments at

Lourdes and Rome, the _naivete_ of a poor distracted being, consumed by

desire to love and believe. To have imagined that present-day science

would in his person accommodate itself to the faith of the year One

Thousand, and in particular to have foolishly believed that he, petty

priest that he was, would be able to indoctrinate the Pope and prevail on

him to become a saint and change the face of the world! It all filled him

with shame; how people must have laughed at him! Then, too, his idea of a

schism made him blush. He again beheld himself at Rome, dreaming of

writing a book by which he would violently sever himself from Catholicism

to preach the new religion of the democracies, the purified, human and

living Gospel. But what ridiculous folly! A schism? He had known in Paris

an abbe of great heart and mind who had attempted to bring about that

famous, predicted, awaited schism. Ah! the poor man, the sad, the

ludicrous labour in the midst of universal incredulity, the icy

indifference of some, the mockery and the reviling of others! If Luther

were to come to France in our days he would end, forgotten and dying of

hunger, on a Batignolles fifth-floor. A schism cannot succeed among a

people that no longer believes, that has ceased to take all interest in

the Church, and sets its hope elsewhere. And it was all Catholicism, in

fact all Christianity, that would be swept away, for, apart from certain

moral maxims, the Gospel no longer supplied a possible code for society.

And this conviction increased Pierre's torment on the days when his

cassock weighed more heavily on his shoulders, when he ended by feeling

contempt for himself at thus celebrating the divine mystery of the mass,

which for him had become but the formula of a dead religion.

Having half filled the chalice with wine from the vase, Pierre washed his

hands and again perceived the mother with her face of ardent entreaty.

Then he thought it was for her that, with the charitable leanings of a

vow-bound man, he had remained a priest, a priest without belief, feeding

the belief of others with the bread of illusion. But this heroic conduct,

the haughty spirit of duty in which he imprisoned himself, was not

practised by him without growing anguish. Did not elementary probity

require that he should cast aside the cassock and return into the midst

of men? At certain times the falsity of his position filled him with

disgust for his useless heroism; and he asked himself if it were not

cowardly and dangerous to leave the masses in superstition. Certainly the

theory of a just and vigilant Providence, of a future paradise where all

these sufferings of the world would receive compensation, had long seemed

necessary to the wretchedness of mankind; but what a trap lay in it, what

a pretext for the tyrannical grinding down of nations; and how far more

virile it would be to undeceive the nations, however brutally, and give

them courage to live the real life, even if it were in tears. If they

were already turning aside from Christianity was not this because they

needed a more human ideal, a religion of health and joy which should not

be a religion of death? On the day when the idea of charity should

crumble, Christianity would crumble also, for it was built upon the idea

of divine charity correcting the injustice of fate, and offering future

rewards to those who might suffer in this life. And it was crumbling; for

the poor no longer believed in it, but grew angry at the thought of that

deceptive paradise, with the promise of which their patience had been

beguiled so long, and demanded that their share of happiness should not

always be put off until the morrow of death. A cry for justice arose from

every lip, for justice upon this earth, justice for those who hunger and

thirst, whom alms are weary of relieving after eighteen hundred years of

Gospel teaching, and who still and ever lack bread to eat.

When Pierre, with his elbows on the altar, had emptied the chalice after

breaking the sacred wafer, he felt himself sinking into yet greater