“As you are on the books of the police, a cipher outside the pale of social beings,” the priest went on, unmoved.  “If love, seen as it swept past, led you to believe three months since that you were then born, you must feel that since that day you have been really an infant.  You must, therefore, be led as if you were a child; you must be completely changed, and I will undertake to make you unrecognizable.  To begin with, you must forget Lucien.”

The words crushed the poor girl’s heart; she raised her eyes to the priest and shook her head; she could not speak, finding the executioner in the deliverer again.

“At any rate, you must give up seeing him,” he went on.  “I will take you to a religious house where young girls of the best families are educated; there you will become a Catholic, you will be trained in the practice of Christian exercises, you will be taught religion.  You may come out an accomplished young lady, chaste, pure, well brought up, if——­” The man lifted up a finger and paused.

“If,” he went on, “you feel brave enough to leave the ‘Torpille’ behind you here.”

“Ah!” cried the poor thing, to whom each word had been like a note of some melody to which the gates of Paradise were slowly opening.  “Ah! if it were possible to shed all my blood here and have it renewed!”

“Listen to me.”

She was silent.

“Your future fate depends on your power of forgetting.  Think of the extent to which you pledge yourself.  A word, a gesture, which betrays La Torpille will kill Lucien’s wife.  A word murmured in a dream, an involuntary thought, an immodest glance, a gesture of impatience, a reminiscence of dissipation, an omission, a shake of the head that might reveal what you know, or what is known about you for your woes——­”

“Yes, yes, Father,” said the girl, with the exaltation of a saint.  “To walk in shoes of red-hot iron and smile, to live in a pair of stays set with nails and maintain the grace of a dancer, to eat bread salted with ashes, to drink wormwood,—­all will be sweet and easy!”

She fell again on her knees, she kissed the priest’s shoes, she melted into tears that wetted them, she clasped his knees, and clung to them, murmuring foolish words as she wept for joy.  Her long and beautiful light hair waved to the ground, a sort of carpet under the feet of the celestial messenger, whom she saw as gloomy and hard as ever when she lifted herself up and looked at him.

“What have I done to offend you?” cried she, quite frightened.  “I have heard of a woman, such as I am, who washed the feet of Jesus with perfumes.  Alas! virtue has made me so poor that I have nothing but tears to offer you.”

“Have you not understood?” he answered, in a cruel voice.  “I tell you, you must be able to come out of the house to which I shall take you so completely changed, physically and morally, that no man or woman you have ever known will be able to call you ‘Esther’ and make you look round.  Yesterday your love could not give you strength enough so completely to bury the prostitute that she could never reappear; and again to-day she revives in adoration which is due to none but God.”