had long been in the habit of taking her nephew to Mass every Sunday, she was not “pious.”  Most likely she confounded in one common detestation the luxury of the rich and the pomps of the Church service.  She had more than once been overheard informing one of the cronies she used to meet on the boulevards that she was a religious woman, but she could not abide priests, that she said her prayers at home, and these were every bit as good as the fine ladies’ who flaunted their crinolines in church.  His father was more in sympathy with the lad’s new-found zeal; he was interested and even a little impressed.  He undertook to bind a missal with his own hands against the ceremony.

When the days arrived for retreats and general confessions, Jean swelled with pride and vague aspirations.  He looked for something out of the ordinary to happen.  Coming out at evening from Saint-Sulpice with two or three of his schoolfellows, he would feel an atmosphere of miracle about him; some divine interposition must be forthcoming.  The lads used to tell each other strange stories, pious legends they had read in one of their little books of devotion.  Now it was a phantom monk who had stepped out of the grave, showing the stigmata on hands and feet and the pierced side; now a nun, beautiful as the veiled figures in the Church pictures, expiating in the fires of hell mysterious sins.  Jean had his favourite tale.  Shuddering, he would relate how St. Francis Borgia, after the death of Queen Isabella, who was lovely beyond compare, must have the coffin opened wherein she lay at rest in her robe embroidered with pearls; in imagination he pictured the dead Queen, invested her form with all the magic hues of the unknown, traced in her lineaments the enchantments of a woman’s beauty in the dark gulf of death.  And as he told the tale, he could hear, in the twilight gloom, a murmur of soft voices sighing in the plane trees of the Luxembourg.

The great day arrived.  The bookbinder, who attended the ceremony with his sister, thought of his wife and wept.

He was most favourably impressed by the cure’s homily, in which a young man without faith was compared to an unbridled charger that plunges over precipices.  The simile struck his fancy, and he would quote it years after with approbation.  He made up his mind to read the Bible, as he had read Voltaire, “to get the hang of things.”

Jean withdrew from the houselling cloth, wondering to be just the same as ever and already disillusioned.  He was never again to recover the first fervent rapture.

VII

The holidays were near.  An noon of a blazing hot day Jean was seated in the shade on the dwarf-wall that bounded the school count towards the headmaster’s garden, He was playing languidly at shovel-board with a schoolfellow, a lad as pretty as a girl with his curls and his jacket of white duck.