It is true that AbbÉ Guitrel, professor of sacred rhetoric at the high seminary of…, was intimately connected with M. le prÉfet Worms-Clavelin and with Madame Worms-Clavelin, nÉe Coblentz. But AbbÉ Lantaigne was wrong in believing that M. Guitrel frequented the drawing-rooms of the prefecture, where his presence would have been equally disquieting to the Archbishop and to the masonic lodges, since the prÉfet was master of the lodge “The Rising Sun.” It was in the confectioner’s shop kept by Dame Magloire in the Place Saint-ExupÈre, where he went every Saturday at five o’clock to buy two little three-sou cakes, one for his servant and the other for himself, that the priest had met the prÉfet’s wife, while she was eating babas there in the company of Madame Lacarelle, wife of M. le prÉfet’s private secretary.

By his demeanour, at once obsequious and discreet, which inspired entire confidence and removed all apprehensions, the professor of sacred rhetoric had instantly gained the good graces of Madame Worms-Clavelin, to whom he suggested the mind, the face, and almost the sex of those old-clothes women, the guardian angels of her youth in the difficult days of Batignolles and the Place Clichy, when NoÉmi Coblentz had finished growing up and was beginning to fade in the business office kept by her father Isaac in the midst of distress-sales and police-raids. One of these dealers in second-hand clothes, a Madame Vacherie, who esteemed her, had acted as go-between for her and an active and promising young barrister, M. ThÉodore Worms-Clavelin, who, finding her seriously-minded and practically useful, had married her after the birth of their daughter Jeanne, and she in return had cleverly pushed him in the administration. AbbÉ Guitrel was very much like Madame Vacherie. They had the same look, the same voice, the same gestures. This propitious likeness had aroused in Madame Worms-Clavelin a sudden sympathy. Besides, she had always revered the Catholic clergy as one of the powers of this world. She constituted herself M. Guitrel’s advocate in her husband’s good graces. M. Worms-Clavelin, who recognised in his wife a quality that remained him a deep mystery, the quality of tact, and who knew her to be clever, received AbbÉ Guitrel courteously the first time he met him in the jeweller’s shop kept by Rondonneau junior in the Rue des Tintelleries.

He had gone there to see the designs for the cups ordered by the State to be given as prizes in the races organised by the Society for the Improvement of Horse-breeding. After that visit he frequently returned to the goldsmith’s, drawn by an innate taste for precious metals. On his side, AbbÉ Guitrel contrived frequent occasions for visiting the show-rooms of Rondonneau the younger, maker of sacred vessels: candlesticks, lamps, pyxes, chalices, patens, monstrances, and tabernacles. The prÉfet and the priest were not ill-pleased at these meetings in the first-storey show-rooms, out of sight of prying eyes, in front of a counter loaded with bullion and amidst the vases and statuettes that M. Worms-Clavelin called bondieuseries.[C] Stretched out in Rondonneau junior’s one arm-chair, M. Worms-Clavelin sent a little wave of his hand to M. Guitrel, who, black and fat, stole along by the glass cases like a great rat.

“Good-day, monsieur l’abbÉ. Delighted to see you!”

And it was true. He vaguely felt that, in contact with this ecclesiastic of peasant stock, as French in priestly character and in type as the blackened stones of Saint-ExupÈre and the old trees on the Mall, he was frenchifying himself, naturalising himself, stripping off the ponderous remnants of his German and Semitic descent. Intimacy with a priest was flattering to the Jewish official. In it he tasted, without actually acknowledging it to himself, the pride of revenge. To browbeat, to patronise one of those tonsured heads entrusted for eighteen centuries, both by heaven and earth, with the excommunication and extermination of the circumcised, was for the Jew a keen and flattering success. And besides, this dirty, threadbare, yet respected, cassock that bowed before him entered chÂteaux where the prÉfet was not received. The aristocratic women of the department revered this garb now humiliated before the official uniform. Deference from one of the clergy was almost equivalent to deference from that rural nobility that had not completely come over, and of whose scornful coldness the Jew, though by no means sensitive, had had painful experiences. M. Guitrel, humble, yet with finesse, made his deference appreciated.

Being honoured as a powerful master by this ecclesiastical politician, the head of the department returned in patronage what he received in deference, and flung conciliatory speeches at AbbÉ Guitrel:

“Doubtless there are good, devoted, and intelligent priests. When the clergy takes its stand upon its privileges…” And AbbÉ Guitrel bowed.

M. Worms-Clavelin went on:

“The Republic does not wage systematic war on the parish priests. And, if the fraternities had submitted to the law, many of their difficulties would have been avoided.”

And M. Guitrel protested:

“It is a matter of principle. I should have decided in favour of the fraternities. It is also a matter of business. The fraternities did a great deal of good.”

The prÉfet summed up from out of the cloud of his cigar-smoke.

“Harking back over what has been done is useless. But the new spirit is a spirit of conciliation.”

And again M. Guitrel bowed, while Rondonneau junior bent over his account books his bald head where the flies pitched.

One day, being asked to give her opinion about a vase that the prÉfet was to present with his own hand to the winner in the race for draught-horses, Madame Worms-Clavelin came to Rondonneau junior’s with her husband. She found M. Guitrel in the jeweller’s office. He made a feint to leave the place. But they begged him to remain. They even consulted him as to the nymphs who formed, by their bending figures, the handles of the cup. The prÉfet would have preferred them to be Amazons. “Amazons, doubtless,” murmured the professor of sacred rhetoric.

Madame Worms-Clavelin would have liked centauresses.

“Centauresses, yes, yes,” said the priest; “or rather centaurs.”

Meanwhile Rondonneau junior was holding up the wax model in his fingers in front of the spectators and smiling in admiration.

“Monsieur l’abbÉ,” asked the prÉfet, “does the Church always ban the nude in art?”

M. Guitrel replied:

“The Church has never absolutely proscribed nude studies; but she has always judiciously restrained their employment.”

Madame Worms-Clavelin looked at the priest and thought how remarkably like Madame Vacherie he was. She confided to him that she had a passion for curios, that she was mad about brocades, stamped velvets, gold fringes, embroidery and lace. She disclosed to him the covetous desires accumulated in her mind since the days when she used to trail in her youth and poverty in front of the shop-windows of the second-hand dealers in the Quartier BrÉda. She told him that she had dreams of a salon with old copes and old chasubles, and that she was also collecting antique jewels.

He answered that in truth the ornaments of the priests provided precious models for artists, and that there we had a proof that the Church was no enemy to art.

From that day forward M. Guitrel began to hunt in the country sacristies for splendid antiques, and scarcely a week passed that he did not carry into Rondonneau junior’s, under his great-coat, a chasuble or a cope, adroitly pillaged from some innocent priest. M. Guitrel was, moreover, very scrupulous in remitting to the rifled vestry-board the hundred-sou piece with which the prÉfet paid for the silk, the brocade, the velvet and the lace.

In six months’ time Madame Worms-Clavelin’s drawing-room had become like a cathedral treasury; a clinging odour of incense lingered round it.

One summer day in that year, M. Guitrel, according to custom, mounted the goldsmith’s stairs, and found M. Worms-Clavelin puffing away merrily in the shop. For the day before the prÉfet had succeeded in getting his candidate, a cattle-breeder, and young turn-coat royalist, returned; and he was counting on the approval of the minister, who secretly preferred the new to the old republicans as being less exacting and more humble. In the elation of his boisterous satisfaction, he slapped the priest on the shoulder:

“Monsieur l’abbÉ, what we want is many priests like you, enlightened, tolerant, free from prejudices—for you haven’t any prejudices, not you!—priests who recognise the needs of the present day and the requirements of a democratic society. If the episcopate, if the French clergy would only catch the progressive yet conservative sentiments that the Republic professes, they would still have a fine part to play.”

Then, amidst the smoke of his big cigar, he expounded ideas on religion which testified to an ignorance that filled M. Guitrel with inward dismay. The prÉfet, however, declared himself to be more Christian than many Christians, and in the language of the masonic lodge he extolled the moral teaching of Jesus, while he rejected indiscriminately local superstitions and fundamental dogmas, the needles thrown into the piscina of Saint Phal by marriageable girls, and the real presence in the Eucharist.

M. Guitrel, an easy-going soul, but incapable of yielding a point as to dogma, stammered out:

“One must make a distinction, monsieur le prÉfet, one must make a distinction.”

In order to make a diversion, he drew out from a pocket of his great-coat a roll of parchment which he opened on the counter. It was a large page of plain-chant, with Gothic text under the four-line divisions, with rubrics and a decorated initial.

The prÉfet fixed his great, lamp-globe eyes on the page. Rondonneau junior, stretching out his rosy bald head, said: “The miniature in the initial is rather fine. It’s Saint Agatha, isn’t it?”

“The martyrdom of Saint Agatha,” said M. Guitrel. “Here are seen the executioners torturing the breasts of the saint.”

And he added in a voice which flowed as sweetly as thick syrup:

“According to authentic records, such was in fact the torment inflicted on Saint Agatha of blessed memory by the proconsul. A page from an antiphonary, Monsieur le prÉfet—a trifle, a mere trifle, which perhaps will find a little niche in the collections of Madame Worms-Clavelin, so devoted to our Christian antiquities. This page gives us a fragment of the proper of the saint.”

And he deciphered the Latin text, marking the tonic accent energetically:

“Dum torqueretur beata Agata in mamill graviter dixit ad judicem: ‘Impie, crudelis et dire tyranne, non es confusus amputare in femin quod ipse in matre suxisti? Ego habeo mamillas integras intus in anim quas Domino consecravi.’”[D]

The prÉfet, who was a graduate, half understood, and in his desire to appear Gallic, remarked that it was piquant.

“NaÏve,” answered AbbÉ Guitrel gently, “naÏve.”

M. Worms-Clavelin granted that the language of the Middle Ages had, in fact, a certain naÏvetÉ.

“It has also sublimity,” said M. Guitrel.

But the prÉfet was rather inclined to seek in Church Latin for the piquancy of broad humour, and it was with a sly little laugh of obstinacy that he crammed the parchment into his pocket, with many thanks to his dear Guitrel for this discovery.

Then, pushing the AbbÉ into the window-recess, he whispered in his ear:

“My dear Guitrel, when the chance comes, I will do something for you.”