"For you should desire them, and it should come from you rather than from Him; be sure that sooner or later you will thirst for Penance, hunger for the Eucharist. Well, when unable to restrain yourself longer, you ask for pardon and entreat to be allowed to approach the Holy Table, we shall see, we will ask Him what way He will choose to take, in order to save you."

"But there are not, I presume, several ways of confessing and communicating?"

"Certainly not, that is just what I meant to say ... but ..."

And the priest hesitated, at a loss for words.

"It is quite certain," he began again, "that art has been the princ.i.p.al means which the Saviour has used to make you absorb the Faith. He has taken you on your weak side--or strong side, if you like that better. He has infused into your nature the chief mystical works; he has persuaded and converted you, less by the way of reason than the way of the senses; and indeed those are the special conditions you have to take into account.

"On the other hand your soul is not humble and simple, you are a sort of 'sensitive,' whom the least imprudence, the least stupidity of a confessor would at once repel.

"Therefore that you may not be at the mercy of a troublesome impression, certain precautions must be taken. In the state of weakness and feebleness in which you are, a disagreeable face, an unlucky word, antipathetic surroundings, a mere nothing would be enough to rout you--is it not so?"

"Alas!" sighed Durtal, "I am obliged to answer that you are right; but, Monsieur l'Abbe, I do not think I shall have to fear such disillusions if when the moment you predict has come you will allow me to make my confession to you."

The priest was silent for a while; then said,

"No doubt, since I have met you, I may probably be useful to you, but I have an idea that my part will be confined to pointing out the road to you; I shall be a connecting link, and nothing more, you will end as you have begun, without help, alone." The abbe remained in thought, then shook his head, and went on: "Let us leave the subject, however, for we cannot antic.i.p.ate the designs of G.o.d; to sum up, try to stifle in prayer your attacks of the flesh, it is a less matter not to be overcome at the moment, than to direct all your efforts not to be so."

Then the priest added gently to rouse the spirits of Durtal, whom he saw to be depressed,

"If you fall do not despair, and throw the handle after the hatchet. Say to yourself, that, after all l.u.s.t is not the most unpardonable of faults, that it is one of two sins for which the human being pays cash, and which are consequently expiated in part at least before death. Say to yourself that wantonness and avarice refuse all credit and will not wait; and in fact, whoever unlawfully commits a fleshly act is almost always punished in his lifetime. For some there are b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to provide for, sickly wives, low connections, broken careers, abominable deceptions on the part of those they have loved. On whichever side we turn when women are concerned we have to suffer, for she is the most powerful instrument of sorrow which G.o.d has given to man.

"It is the same with the pa.s.sion for gain. Every being who allows himself to be overcome by that hateful sin, pays for it as a rule before his death. Look at the Panama business. Cooks, housekeepers, small proprietors who till then had lived in peace, seeking no inordinate gains, no illicit profit, threw themselves like madmen into that business. They had one only thought, to gain money; the chastis.e.m.e.nt of their cupidity was, as you know, sudden."

"Yes," said Durtal, laughing, "the de Lesseps were the agents of providence, when they stole the savings of fools, who had moreover got them probably by thieving."

"In a word," said the abbe, "I repeat my last advice: do not be at all discouraged if you sink. Do not despise yourself too much; have the courage to enter a church afterwards; for the devil catches you by cowardice, the false shame, the false humility he suggests, nourish, maintain, solidify your wantonness in some measure.

"Well! no good-bye; come and see me soon again."

Durtal found himself in the street a little confused. "It is evident,"

he murmured, as he stalked along, "that the Abbe Gevresin is a clever spiritual watchmaker. He has dexterously taken to pieces the movement of my pa.s.sions, and made the hours of idleness and weariness strike, but, after all, his advice comes only to this: stew in your own juice and wait.

"Indeed he is right; if I had come to the point I should not have gone to him to chatter, but really to confess. What is strange is that he does not at all seem to think he will have to put me through the wash-tub; and to whom does he mean me to go--to the first comer who will wind about me his spool of commonplaces, and stroke me with his big hands without seeing clearly?

"Well, well ... what is the time?" He looked at his watch. "Six o'clock, and I do not care to go home. What shall I do till dinner?"

He was near St. Sulpice. He went in and sat down, to clear his thoughts a little, taking a place in the Chapel of Our Lady, which at that hour was almost empty.

He felt no wish to pray, and rested there, looking at the great arch of marble and gold, like a scene in a theatre, where the Virgin, the only figure in the light, advances towards the faithful, as from a decorated grotto, on plaster clouds.

Meanwhile two Little Sisters of the Poor came and knelt not far from him, and meditated, their heads between their hands.

He thought as he looked at them,--

"Those souls are to be envied who can thus be abstracted in prayer. How do they manage it? For, in fact, it is not easy, if one thinks of the sorrows of the world, to praise the vaunted mercy of G.o.d. It is all very fine to believe that He exists, to be certain that He is good; in fact, we do not know Him--we are ignorant of Him. He is, and, in fact, He can only be, immanent, permanent, and inaccessible. He is we know not what, and at most we know what He is not. Try to imagine Him, and the senses fail, for He is above, about, and in each one of us. He is three and He is one; He is each and He is all; He is without beginning, and He will be without end; He is above all and for ever incomprehensible. If we try to picture Him to ourselves and give Him a human wrappage, we come back to the simple conception of the early times, we represent Him under the features of an ancestor. Some old Italian model, some old Father Tourgeneff, with a long beard, and we cannot but smile, so childish is the likeness of G.o.d the Father.

"He is, in fact, so absolutely above the imagination and the senses, that He comes only nominally into prayer, and the impulses of humanity ascend especially to the Son, Who only can be addressed, because He became man, and is to us somewhat of an elder brother, because, having wept in human form, we think He will hear us more readily, and be more compa.s.sionate to our sorrows.

"As to the third Person, He is even more disconcerting than the first.

He is especially the unknowable. How can we imagine this G.o.d formless and bodiless, this Substance equal to the two others, who, as it were, breathe Him forth? We think of Him as a brightness, a fluid, a breath; we cannot even lend to Him as to the Father the face of a man, since on the two occasions that He took to Himself a body, He showed Himself under the likenesses of a dove and of tongues of fire, and these two different aspects do not help to a suggestion of the new appearance He might a.s.sume.

"Certainly the Trinity is terrible, and makes the brain reel. Ruysbrock has moreover said admirably, 'Let those who would know and study what G.o.d is, know that it is forbidden; they will go mad.'

"So," he continued, looking at the two Little Sisters, who were now telling their beads, "these good women are right not to try to understand, and to confine themselves to praying with all their heart to the Mother and the Son.

"Moreover, in all the lives of the saints which they have read, they have made certain that Jesus and Mary always appeared to the elect to console and strengthen them.

"In fact, how stupid I am. To pray to the Son is to pray to the two others, for in praying to one among them I pray at the same time to the three, since the three make but one. And the Substances are, however, special, because if the divine Essence is one and simple, it is so in the threefold distinction of the Persons; but, again, what is the use of fathoming the Impenetrable?

"Yet," he continued, remembering the interview he had just had with the priest, "how will all this end? If the abbe be right, I no longer belong to myself; I am about to enter the unknown, which frightens me.

If only the sound of my vices consents to be silent, but I feel that they rise furiously within me. Ah, that Florence"--and he thought of a woman to whose vagaries he was riveted--"continues to walk about in my brain. I see her behind the lowered curtain of my eyes, and when I think of her I am a terrible coward."

He endeavoured once more to put her away, but his will was overcome at the sight of her.

He hated, despised, and even cursed her, but the madness of his illusions excited him; he left her disgusted with her and with himself; he swore he would never see her again, but did not keep his resolve.

He saw her now in vision extend her hand to him.

He recoiled, struggling to free himself; but his dream continued mingling her with the form of one of the sisters whose gentle profile he saw.

Suddenly he started, returned to the real world, and saw that he was at St. Sulpice, in the chapel. "It is disgusting that I should come here to soil the church with my horrible dreams; I had better go."

He went out in confusion, thinking, "Perhaps if I visit Florence once again, I may perhaps put an end to this haunting sense of her presence, seeing and knowing the reality."

And he was obliged to answer himself that he was becoming idiotic, for he knew by experience that past desire grows in proportion as it is nourished. "No, the abbe was right; I have to become and to remain penitent. But how? Pray? How can I pray, when evil imaginations pursue me even in church? Evil dreams followed me to La Glaciere; here they appear again, and smite me to the ground. How can I defend myself? for indeed it is frightful to be thus alone, to know nothing and have no proof, to feel the prayers which one tears out of oneself fall into the silence and the void without a gesture to answer, without a word of encouragement, without a sign. I do not even know if He be there, and if He listens. The abbe tells me to wait an indication, an order from on high; but, alas! they come to me from below."

CHAPTER VI.

Many months pa.s.sed. Durtal continued his alternation of wanton and pious ideas. Without power to resist, he saw himself slipping. "All this is far from clear," he cried, one day, in a rage, when, less apathetic than usual, he forced himself to take stock. "Now, Monsieur l'Abbe, what does this mean? Whenever my sensual obsessions are weaker, so also are my religious impressions."

"That means," said the priest, "that your adversary is holding out to you the most treacherous of his baits. He seeks to persuade you that you will never attain to anything unless you will give yourself up to the most repugnant excesses. He tries to convince you that satiety and disgust of these acts alone will bring you back to G.o.d; he incites you to commit them that they may, so to speak, bring about your deliverance; he leads you into sin under pretext of delivering you from it. Have a little energy, despise these sophistries and resist him."

He went to see the Abbe Gevresin every week. He liked the patient discretion of the old priest, who let him talk when he was in a confidential humour, listened to him carefully, manifested no surprise at his frequent temptations and his falls. Only the abbe always returned to his first advice, insisted on regular prayer, and that Durtal should each day, if possible, visit a church. He also now said, "The hour is important for the success of these practices. If you wish that the chapels should be favourable to you, get up in time to be present at daybreak at the first ma.s.s, the servants' ma.s.s, and also be very often in the sanctuaries at nightfall."

The priest had evidently formed a plan; Durtal did not yet wholly understand it, but he was bound to admit that this discipline of temporizing, this constant call to thought always directed to G.o.d, by his daily visits to the churches, acted upon him at last, and little by little softened his soul. One fact proved it: that he who for so long a time had been unable to meditate in the morning, now prayed as soon as he awoke. Even in the afternoon he found himself on some days seized with the need of speaking humbly with G.o.d, with an irresistible desire to ask His pardon and implore His help.

It seemed then that the Lord knocked at his door with gentle touches, wishing so to recall his attention, and draw him to Him; but when, softened and troubled, Durtal would enter into himself to seek G.o.d, he wandered vaguely, not knowing what he said, and thinking of other things while speaking to Him.

He complained of these wanderings and distractions to the priest, who answered,--

"You are on the threshold of the probationary life; you cannot yet experience the sweet and familiar friendship of prayer. Do not sadden yourself because you cannot close behind you the gate of your senses.

Watch and wait; pray badly if you can do nothing else, but pray all the same.