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Monsieur le Cure, I believe, approves of those I make for him. He has a good figure, however." "You refuse to identify yourself?" asked the Abbe, with asperity. "I am not aware that you possess any right to ask me to do so." The Abbe's thin lips clipped-to like shears. He turned again towards the officers.
"Oh," said he to Durtal, who lamented over the rain, "the weather will clear up all in good time; at any rate, as you had not put me off I was determined not to keep you waiting." They sat chatting by the fire; and the room took the Abbé's fancy, no doubt, for he settled himself at his ease. He threw himself back in an arm-chair, tucking his hands into his cincture.
In spite of the abbe's quickness of perception, he could not understand such assertions on the part of the baroness; he thought that sorrow and terror must have destroyed her reason. "Ah! Madame," he exclaimed, "the baron had nothing to do with this movement; far from it " He paused; all this was passing in the court-yard, in the glare of the torches which had been lighted up by the servants.
Withdrawing his eyes from the semi-circle of men, who did not seem to be aware of his, the Abbé's, presence, and who ceased not in their blasphemies, he turned them slowly around, and as he did so they fell upon a newcomer, a thirteenth, who seemed to spring into existence from the air before his very eyes.
They ran down and disappeared." But that was not the end of the Abbé's trouble. He was presently sent for to the German Headquarters, at the Hotel du Grand Cerf, where the table spread for thirty people, by the order of M. Odent, was still waiting for its guests. The conversation here between the Curé and the officer of high rank who spoke to him is worth repeating.
To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this smiling, demoniacal tutor. But a too villainous curiosity was not the Abbé's capital sin.
"She lives at Salerno," said he, "with her daughter the Marchioness C ." I was delighted to hear the news; if it had not been for the abbe's visit, I should never have heard what had become of these ladies. I asked him if he knew the Marchioness C . "I only know the marquis," he replied, "he is old and very rich." That was enough for me.
From this part of the Abbe's work to the latter end, I find several expressions which appear to me to start, with a cynical complexion, from the path of liberal thinking, or at least they are so involved as to lose many of the beauties which distinguish other parts of the performance.
Thus the men, already inflamed with envy, were still more excited by the incessant urgency of their wives, who, maddened by the abbe's sermons, poured their curses on that band of atheists, who might bring down so many misfortunes upon them and their children.
And Pierre felt a pang at the thought of what his mother's grief would be on learning that he had gone on the abbe's expedition. His heart smote him bitterly to think he should have to leave without a word of explanation or farewell; but he knew that if his mother should get so much as a hint of his undertaking, her fears would ruin all.
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