“Who obliged you to look at it?”

“I did not look at it; the devil, the enemy of God, made me see it in spite of myself.”

“Then you should have mutilated yourself like Origen.  Your generative organs, believe me, are not so valuable as the picture you have ruined.”

“Sir, you insult me.”

“Not at all, I have no intention of doing so.”

That young priest shewed me the door with such brusqueness that I felt sure he would inform against me to the Inquisition.  I knew he would have no difficulty in finding out my name, so I resolved to be beforehand with him.

Both my fear and my resolve were inspired by an incident which I shall mention as an episode.

A few days before, I had met a Frenchman named Segur, who had just come out of the prisons of the Inquisition.  He had been shut up for three years for committing the following crime: 

In the hall of his house there was a fountain, composed of a marble basin and the statue of a naked child, who discharged the water in the same way as the well-known statue of Brussels, that is to say, by his virile member.  The child might be a Cupid or an Infant Jesus, as you pleased, but the sculptor had adorned the head with a kind of aureole; and so the fanatics declared that it was a mocking of God.

Poor Segur was accused of impiety, and the Inquisition dealt with him accordingly.

I felt that my fault might be adjudged as great as Segur’s, and not caring to run the risk of a like punishment I called on the bishop, who held the office of Grand Inquisitor, and told him word for word the conversation I had had with the iconoclast chaplain.  I ended by craving pardon, if I had offended the chaplain, as I was a good Christian, and orthodox on all points.

I had never expected to find the Grand Inquisitor of Madrid a kindly and intelligent, though ill-favoured, prelate; but so it was, and he did nothing but laugh from the beginning to the end of my story, for he would not let me call it a confession.

“The chaplain,” he said, “is himself blameworthy and unfit for his position, in that he has adjudged others to be as weak as himself; in fact, he has committed a wrong against religion.  Nevertheless, my dear son, it was not wise of you to go and irritate him.”  As I had told him my name he shewed me, smilingly, an accusation against me, drawn up by someone who had witnessed the fact.  The good bishop gently chid me for having called the friar-confessor of the Duke of Medina an ignoramus.  He had refused to admit that a priest might say mass a second time on a high festival, after breaking his fast, on the command of his sovereign prince, who, by the hypothesis, had not heard mass before.

“You were quite right in your contention,” said the Inquisitor, “but yet every truth is not good to utter, and it was wrong to call the man an ignoramus in his presence.  For the future you would do well to avoid all idle discussion on religious matters, both on dogma and discipline.  And I must also tell you, in order that you may not leave Spain with any harsh ideas on the Inquisition, that the priest who affixed your name to the church-door amongst the excommunicated has been severely reprimanded.  He ought to have given you a fatherly admonition, and, above all, enquired as to your health, as we know that you were seriously ill at the time.”