My successes were as gall and wormwood to him, for he quite saw that all this store of Latin was dead against him, and that it would convert me into a pillar of the Church which he disliked.  He never lost an opportunity of airing before me his favourite phrase, “a donkey loaded with Latin.”  Afterwards, when my writings were published, he had his triumph.  I sometimes reproach myself for having contributed to the triumph of M. Homais over his priest.  But it cannot be helped, for M. Homais is right.  But for M. Homais we should all be burnt at the stake.  But as I have said, when one has been at great pains to learn the truth, it is irritating to have to allow that the frivolous, who could never be induced to read a line of St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, are the true sages.  It is hard to think that Gavroche and M. Homais attain without an effort the alpine heights of philosophy.

My young compatriot and friend, M. Quellien, a Breton poet full of raciness and originality, the only man of the present day whom I have known to possess the faculty of creating myths, has described this phase of my destiny in a very ingenious style.  He says that my soul will dwell, in the shape of a white sea-bird, around the ruined church of St. Michel, an old building struck by lightning which stands above Treguier.  The bird will fly all night with plaintive cries around the barricaded door and windows, seeking to enter the sanctuary, but not knowing that there is a secret door.  And so through all eternity my unhappy spirit will moan, ceaselessly upon this hill.  “It is the spirit of a priest who wants to say mass,” one peasant will observe.—­“He will never find a boy to serve it for him,” will rejoin another.  And that is what I really am—­an incomplete priest.  Quellien has very clearly discerned what will always be lacking in my church—­the chorister boy.  My life is like a mass which has some fatality hanging over it, a never-ending Introibo ad altare Dei with no one to respond:  Ad Deum qui loetificat juventutem meam.  There is no one to serve my mass for me.  In default of any one else I respond for myself, but it is not the same thing.

Thus everything seemed to make for my having a modest ecclesiastical career in Brittany.  I should have made a very good priest, indulgent, fatherly, charitable, and of blameless morals.  I should have been as a priest what I am as a father, very much loved by my flock, and as easy-going as possible in the exercise of my authority.  What are now defects would have been good qualities.  Some of the errors which I profess would have been just the thing for a man who identifies himself with the spirit of his calling.  I should have got rid of some excrescences which, being only a layman, I have not taken the trouble to remove, easy as it would have been for me to do so.  My career would have been as follows:  at two-and-twenty professor at the College of Treguier, and at about fifty canon, or perhaps grand vicar at