“I see,” said M. Lantaigne, “that again this week a hoard of sweetmeats has been discovered in a pupil’s room. Such infractions are far too often repeated.”
In fact, the students of the seminary made a practice of hiding cakes of chocolate among their school-books. This was what they called theology _Menier_. They used to meet in a room at night, by twos or threes, to discuss it.
M. Lantaigne begged the master of method to use unfaltering severity.
“This disorder is deplorable in that it may involve the most serious misconduct.”
He asked for the register of the rhetoric class. But when M. Perruque had handed it to him, he looked away from it. His heart swelled at the idea that sacred rhetoric was taught by this Guitrel, a man with neither morals nor learning. He sighed within himself:
“When will the scales fall from the Cardinal-Archbishop’s eyes, that he may see the unworthiness of this priest?”
Then, tearing himself from this bitter thought only to plunge into the bitterness of another:
For two years Firmin Piédagnel had caused incessant anxiety to the head of the seminary. The only son of a cobbler who kept his stall between two buttresses of Saint-Exupère, he was, through the brightness of his intelligence, the most brilliant pupil in the house. Of placid temperament, he had a very fair report for conduct. The timidity of his character and the weakness of his constitution seemed a good safeguard for his moral purity. But he had neither the instinct for theology nor the vocation for the priesthood. His very faith was unstable. With his great spiritual knowledge, M. Lantaigne had no inordinate fear of those violent crises among his young Levites, which, often salutary, are to be allayed by grace. He dreaded, on the contrary, the indifference of a placidly intractable mind. He almost despaired of a soul to whom doubt was light and bearable and whose thoughts flowed to irreligion by a natural inclination. Such a one the shoemaker’s clever son showed himself to be. M. Lantaigne had one day unexpectedly chanced, by one of those brusque wiles which were natural to him, to plumb the depths of this nature, double-faced through its courtesy. He perceived with consternation that from the teaching at the seminary Firmin had only acquired an elegant Latin style, skill in sophistry, and a kind of sentimental mysticism. From that time Firmin had appeared to him as a being weak and formidable, pitiable and noxious. Yet he loved this lad, loved him tenderly, to infatuation. In spite of his disappointment it pleased him that he should be the honour, the glory of the seminary. He loved in Firmin the charm of his mind, the subtle harmony of his style, and even the tenderness of those pale, short-sighted eyes, like bruises under the quivering eyelids. He sometimes took pleasure in seeing in him one of the victims of this Abbé Guitrel, whose intellectual and moral poverty must (so he firmly believed) injure and depress an intelligent and quick-sighted pupil. He flattered himself that, if better trained in the future, Firmin, although too weak ever to give to the Church one of those powerful leaders whom she so much needs, would at least produce for religion, perhaps, a Péreyve or a Gerbet, one of those priests who carry into the priesthood the heart of a young mother. But, incapable of long self-flattery, M. Lantaigne speedily rejected this unlikely hope and saw in this lad a Guéroult, a Renan. And the sweat of anguish chilled his forehead. His fear was lest, in rearing such pupils, he might be training formidable enemies of the truth.