“Second, without complaint or protest Abbé Guitrel allows the rumour to spread and grow that his elevation to the vacant bishopric of Tourcoing is favoured by the President of the Council, the Minister for Justice and Religion. Now this rumour is prejudicial to the minister, for, although a freethinker and a freemason, he ought to be too careful of the interests of the Church over which he has been appointed civil overseer to place in the seat of the blessed Loup a priest such as M. Guitrel. And if this invention were to be traced to its source, it is to be feared that in M. Guitrel himself would be found the first and foremost contriver of it.
“Third, having formerly occupied his leisure in translating into French verse the Bucolics of that Latin poet called Calpurnius, whom the best critics agree in relegating to the lowest class of insipid babblers, Abbé Guitrel, with a carelessness which I would fain believe to be quite unintentional, has allowed this work of his youth to circulate privately. A copy of the Bucolics was addressed to the freethinking radical paper of the district, le Phare, which published extracts from it; among them there occurred in particular this line, which I blush to put before the paternal eyes of Your Eminence:
“And our heaven of bliss is a well-loved breast. (“Notre ciel à nous, c’est un sein chéri.”)
“This quotation was accompanied in le Phare by the most derogatory comments on the private character, as well as the literary taste, of Abbé Guitrel. And the editor, whose ill-will is only too well known to Your Eminence, took this wretched line as a pretext for charges of wanton thoughts and dishonourable intentions generally against all professors of the high seminary, and even against all the priests in the diocese. This is why, without inquiring whether as a scholar M. Guitrel had any excuse for translating Calpurnius, I deplore the publication of his work as the cause of a scandal which, I am sure, was more bitter to your benevolent heart, Monseigneur, than gall and wormwood.
“Fourth, M. Guitrel is in the habit of going every day at five o’clock in the afternoon to the confectioner’s shop kept by Dame Magloire, in the Place Saint-Exupère. And there, leaning over the sideboards, counters and tables, he examines with deep interest and careful diligence the dainties piled up on plates and dishes. Then, stopping at the spot where are arranged the kinds of cakes which they tell me are called éclairs and babas, he touches first one and then another of these pastries with the tip of his finger, and afterward has these dainty morsels wrapped up in a sheet of paper. Far be it from me to bring a charge of sensuality against him on account of this ridiculously careful choice of a few cream-cakes or sugar-pasties. But if one reflects that he goes to Dame Magloire’s at the very moment when the shop is thronged with fashionable folk of both sexes, and that he makes himself a butt for the jests of worldlings, one will ask oneself whether the professor of rhetoric at the high seminary does not leave some part of his dignity behind him in the confectioner’s shop. In fact, the choice of two cakes has not escaped the ill-natured comment of observers, and it is said, either rightly or wrongly, that M. Guitrel keeps one for himself and gives the other to his servant. He may doubtless, without incurring any blame, share any dainties with the woman attached to his service, especially if that woman has attained the canonical age. But malicious gossip interprets this intimacy and familiarity in the most shameful sense, and I should never dare to repeat to Your Eminence the remarks which are made in the town as to the relations between M. Guitrel and his domestic. I do not wish to entertain these charges. Nevertheless, Your Eminence will see that M. Guitrel is not easily to be excused for having given a show of truth to the calumny by his mischievous behaviour. I have related the facts. It now remains for me only to conclude.
“I have the honour to propose that Your Eminence should cancel the appointment of M. Guitrel (Joachim) as professor of sacred rhetoric at the high seminary of... in accordance with your spiritual powers as recognized by the State (decree of 17th March, 1808).
“Vouchsafe, Monseigneur, to continue your paternal kindness towards one who, being placed in command of your seminary, has no dearer, wish than to give you proofs of his complete devotion and of the profound respect with which he has the honour to be,
“Monseigneur,
“The most humble and obedient servant
of Your-Eminence,
“LANTAIGNE.”
Having written this letter, M. Lantaigne sealed it with his seal.
IV
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 vases and statuettes that M. Worms-Clavelin called bondieuseries. 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 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 mamillâ graviter dixit ad judicem:— ‘Impie, crudelis et dire tyranne, non es confusus amputare in feminâ quod ipse in matre surfisti? Ego habeo mamillas intégras in tus in animâ quas Domino consecravi.’”(“While the blessed Agatha was being cruelly tortured in the breast, she said to the judge: ‘Oh, wicked, cruel, and savage tyrant, art thou not ashamed to mutilate in a woman that with which your mother fed you? Within my soul I have breasts undesecrated which I have sanctified to God.’”)
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.”
V
THERE was one party in the town which openly declared that Abbé Lantaigne, principal of the high semi
nary, was a priest worthy of a bishopric and fitted to fill the vacant see of Tourcoing honourably, until the time when Monseigneur Chariot’s death should enable him, cross in hand and amethyst on finger, to assume the mitre in the town that had witnessed his labours and his merits. This was the scheme of the venerable M. Cassignol, ex-president in chief, and a State pensioner of twenty-five years’ standing. With these plans were associated M. Lerond, deputy attorney-general at the time of the decrees, (The coup d’état of 1851.) now a barrister practising at..., and Abbé de Lalonde, formerly an Army chaplain, and now chaplain to the Dames du Salut. These, belonging to the most respected, but not to the most influential, class in the town, made up practically the whole of Abbé Lantaigne’s party. The head of the high seminary had been invited to dine with M. Cassignol, the chief president, who said to him, in the presence of M. de Lalonde and M. Lerond:
“Monsieur l’abbé, put yourself forward as a candidate. When it shall come to a choice between Abbé Lantaigne, who has so nobly served both religion and Christian France by pen and tongue, who has protected the oft-betrayed cause of the rights of the French Church within the Catholic Church with the force of his mental endowments and high character, and M. Guitrel, none will have the effrontery to hesitate. And since it seems that this time the honour of supplying a bishop for the town of Tourcoing is to fall to our city, the faithful of the diocese are willing to lose you for a time for the good of the episcopate as well as of Christendom.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 114