The Brotherhood of Consolation Part 7

I ended, where I ought to have begun, by resolving to make some investigations as to my friend Mongenod, who had given me his address,--written on the back of a playing card! I did not choose, as a matter of delicacy, to go and see him the next day; he might have thought there was distrust in such promptness, as, indeed, there would have been. The second day I had certain matters to attend to which took all my time, and it was only at the end of two weeks that, not seeing or hearing of Mongenod, I went one morning from the Croix-Rouge, where I was then living, to the rue des Moineaux, where he lived. I found he was living in furnished lodgings of the lowest cla.s.s; but the landlady was a very worthy woman, the widow of a magistrate who had died on the scaffold; she was utterly ruined by the Revolution, and had only a few louis with which to begin the hazardous trade of taking lodgers."

Here Monsieur Alain interrupted himself to explain. "I knew her later,"

he said; "she then had seven houses in Saint-Roch, and was making quite a little fortune.

"'The citizen Mongenod is not at home,' the landlady said to me; 'but there is some one there.' This remark excited my curiosity. I went up to the fifth story. A charming person opened the door,--oh, such a pretty young woman! who looked at me rather suspiciously and kept the door half closed. 'I am Alain, a friend of Mongenod's,' I said. Instantly the door opened wide, and I entered a miserable garret, which was, nevertheless, kept with the utmost neatness. The pretty young woman offered me a chair before a fireplace where were ashes but no fire, at the corner of which I saw a common earthen foot-warmer. 'It makes me very happy, monsieur,'

she said, taking my hand and pressing it affectionately, 'to be able to express to you my grat.i.tude. You have indeed saved us. Were it not for you I might never have seen Mongenod again. He might,--yes, he would have thrown himself in the river. He was desperate when he left me to go and see you.' On examining this person I was surprised to see her head tied up in a foulard, and along the temples a curious dark line; but I presently saw that her head was shaved. 'Have you been ill?' I asked, as I noticed this singularity. She cast a glance at a broken mirror in a shabby frame and colored; then the tears came into her eyes. 'Yes, monsieur,' she said, 'I had horrible headaches, and I was obliged to have my hair cut off; it came to my feet.' 'Am I speaking to Madame Mongenod?' I asked. 'Yes, monsieur,' she answered, giving me a truly celestial look. I bowed to the poor little woman and went away, intending to make the landlady tell me something about them; but she was out. I was certain that poor young woman had sold her hair to buy bread.

I went from there to a wood merchant and ordered half a cord of wood, telling the cartman and the sawyer to take the bill, which I made the dealer receipt to the name of citizen Mongenod, and give it to the little woman.

"There ends the period of what I long called _my foolishness_," said Monsieur Alain, clasping his hands and lifting them with a look of repentance.

G.o.defroid could not help smiling. He was, as we shall see, greatly mistaken in that smile.

"Two days later," resumed the worthy man, "I met one of those men who are neither friends nor strangers, with whom we have relations from time to time, and call acquaintances,--a certain Monsieur Barillaud, who remarked accidentally, _a propos_ of the 'Peruviens,' that the author was a friend of his. 'Then you know citizen Mongenod?' I said.

"In those days we were obliged by law to call each other 'citizen,'"

said Monsieur Alain to G.o.defroid, by way of parenthesis. Then he continued his narrative:--

"The citizen looked at me, exclaiming, 'I wish I never had known him; for he has several times borrowed money of me, and shown his friends.h.i.+p by not returning it. He is a queer fellow,--good-hearted and all that, but full of illusions! always an imagination on fire! I will do him this justice,--he does not mean to deceive; but as he deceives himself about everything, he manages to behave like a dishonest man.' 'How much does he owe you?' I asked. 'Oh! a good many hundred francs. He's a basket with a hole in the bottom. n.o.body knows where his money goes; perhaps he doesn't know himself.' 'Has he any resources?' 'Well, yes,' said Barillaud, laughing; 'just now he is talking of buying land among the savages in the United States.' I carried away with me the drop of vinegar which casual gossip thus put into my heart, and it soured all my feelings. I went to see my old master, in whose office Mongenod and I had studied law; he was now my counsel. When I told him about my loan to Mongenod and the manner in which I had acted,--'What!' he cried, 'one of my old clerks to behave in that way! You ought to have put him off till the next day and come to see me. You would then have found out that I have forbidden my clerks to let Mongenod into this office. Within the last year he has borrowed three hundred francs of me in silver,--an enormous sum at present rates. Three days before he breakfasted with you I met him on the street, and he gave such a piteous account of his poverty that I let him have two louis.' 'If I have been the dupe of a clever comedian,' I said to Bordin, 'so much the worse for him, not for me. But tell me what to do.' 'You must try to get from him a written acknowledgment; for a debtor, however, insolvent he may be, may become solvent, and then he will pay.' Thereupon Bordin took from a tin box a case on which I saw the name of Mongenod; he showed me three receipts of a hundred francs each. 'The next time he comes I shall have him admitted, and I shall make him add the interest and the two louis, and give me a note for the whole. I shall, at any rate, have things properly done, and be in a position to obtain payment.' 'Well,' said I to Bordin, 'can you have my matter set right so far, as well as yours? for I know you are a good man, and what you do will be right.' 'I have remained master of my ground,' he said; 'but when persons behave as you have done they are at the mercy of a man who can snap his fingers at them. As for me, I don't choose that any man should get the better of me,--get the better of a former attorney to the Chatelet!--ta-ra-ra! Every man to whom a sum of money is lent as heedlessly as you lent yours to Mongenod, ends, after a certain time, by thinking that money his own. It is no longer your money, it is _his_ money; you become his creditor,--an inconvenient, unpleasant person. A debtor will then try to get rid of you by some juggling with his conscience, and out of one hundred men in his position, seventy-five will do their best never to see or hear of you again.' 'Then you think only twenty-five men in a hundred are honest?' 'Did I say that?' he replied, smiling maliciously. 'The estimate is too high?'"

Monsieur Alain paused to put the fire together; that done, he resumed:--

"Two weeks later I received a letter from Bordin asking me to go to his office and get my receipt. I went. 'I tried to get fifty of your louis for you,' he said, 'but the birds had flown. Say good-by to your yellow boys; those pretty canaries are off to other climes. You have had to do with a sharper; that's what he is. He declared to me that his wife and father-in-law had gone to the United States with sixty of your louis to buy land; that he intended to follow, for the purpose, he said, of making a fortune and paying his debts; the amount of which, carefully drawn up, he confided to me, requesting me to keep an eye on what became of his creditors. Here is a list of the items,' continued Bordin, showing me a paper from which he read the total,--'Seventeen thousand francs in coin; a sum with which a house could be bought that would bring in two thousand francs a year.' After replacing the list in the case, Bordin gave me a note for a sum equivalent to a hundred louis in gold, with a letter in which Mongenod admitted having received my hundred louis, on which he owed interest. 'So now I am all right,' I said to Bordin. 'He cannot deny the debt,' replied my old master; 'but where there are no funds, even the king--I should say the Directory--can't enforce rights.' I went home. Believing that I had been robbed in a way intentionally screened from the law, I withdrew my esteem from Mongenod, and resigned myself philosophically.

"If I have dwelt on these details, which are so commonplace and seem so slight," said the worthy man, looking at G.o.defroid, "it is not without good reason. I want to explain to you how I was led to act, as most men act, in defiance of the rules which savages observe in the smallest matters. Many persons would justify themselves by the opinion of so excellent a man as Bordin; but to-day I know myself to have been inexcusable. When it comes to condemning one of our fellows, and withdrawing our esteem from him, we should act from our own convictions only. But have we any right to make our heart a tribunal before which we arraign our neighbor? Where is the law? what is our standard of judgment? That which in us is weakness may be strength in our neighbor.

So many beings, so many different circ.u.mstances for every act; and there are no two beings exactly alike in all humanity. Society alone has the right over its members of repression; as for punishment, I deny it that right. Repression suffices; and that, besides, brings with it punishment enough.

"So," resumed Monsieur Alain, continuing his history, having drawn from it that n.o.ble teaching, "after listening to the gossip of the Parisian, and relying on the wisdom of my old master, I condemned Mongenod. His play, 'Les Peruviens,' was announced. I expected to receive a ticket from Mongenod for the first representation; I established in my own mind a sort of claim on him. It seemed to me that by reason of my loan my friend was a sort of va.s.sal of mine, who owed me a number of things besides the interest on my money. We all think that. Mongenod not only did not send me a ticket, but I saw him from a distance coming towards me in that dark pa.s.sage under the Theatre Feydeau, well dressed, almost elegant; he pretended not to see me; then, after he had pa.s.sed and I turned to run after him, my debtor hastily escaped through a transverse alley. This circ.u.mstance greatly irritated me; and the irritation, instead of subsiding with time, only increased, and for the following reason: Some days after this encounter, I wrote to Mongenod somewhat in these terms: 'My friend, you ought not to think me indifferent to whatever happens to you of good or evil. Are you satisfied with the success of 'Les Peruviens'? You forgot me (of course it was your right to do so) for the first representation, at which I should have applauded you. But, nevertheless, I hope you found a Peru in your Peruvians, for I have found a use for my funds, and shall look to you for the payment of them when the note falls due. Your friend, Alain.' After waiting two weeks for an answer, I went to the rue des Moineaux. The landlady told me that the little wife really did go away with her father at the time when Mongenod told Bordin of their departure. Mongenod always left the garret very early in the morning and did not return till late at night.

Another two weeks, I wrote again, thus: 'My dear Mongenod, I cannot find you, and you do not reply to my letters. I do not understand your conduct. If I behaved thus to you, what would you think of me?' I did not subscribe the letter as before, 'Your friend,' I merely wrote, 'Kind regards.'

"Well, it was all of no use," said Monsieur Alain. "A month went by and I had no news of Mongenod. 'Les Peruviens' did not obtain the great success on which he counted. I went to the twentieth representation, thinking to find him and obtain my money. The house was less than half full; but Madame Scio was very beautiful. They told me in the foyer that the play would run a few nights longer. I went seven different times to Mongenod's lodging and did not find him; each time I left my name with the landlady. At last I wrote again: 'Monsieur, if you do not wish to lose my respect, as you have my friends.h.i.+p, you will treat me now as a stranger,--that is to say, with politeness; and you will tell me when you will be ready to pay your note, which is now due. I shall act according to your answer. Your obedient servant, Alain.' No answer. We were then in 1799; one year, all but two months, had expired. At the end of those two months I went to Bordin. Bordin took the note, had it protested, and sued Mongenod for me. Meantime the disasters of the French armies had produced such depreciation of the Funds that investors could buy a five-francs dividend on seven francs capital. Therefore, for my hundred louis in gold, I might have bought myself fifteen hundred francs of income. Every morning, as I took my coffee and read the paper, I said to myself: 'That cursed Mongenod! if it were not for him I should have three thousand francs a year to live on.' Mongenod became by _bete-noire_; I inveighed against him even as I walked the streets.

'Bordin is there,' I thought to myself; 'Bordin will put the screws on, and a good thing, too.' My feelings turned to hatred, and my hatred to imprecations; I cursed the man, and I believed he had every vice. 'Ah!

Monsieur Barillaud was very right,' thought I, 'in all he told me!'"

Monsieur Alain paused reflectively.

"Yes," he said again, "I thought him very right in all he told me. At last, one morning, in came my debtor, no more embarra.s.sed than if he didn't owe me a sou. When I saw him I felt all the shame he ought to have felt. I was like a criminal taken in the act; I was all upset.

The eighteenth Brumaire had just taken place. Public affairs were doing well, the Funds had gone up. Bonaparte was off to fight the battle of Marengo. 'It is unfortunate, monsieur,' I said, receiving Mongenod standing, 'that I owe your visit to a sheriff's summons.' Mongenod took a chair and sat down. 'I came to tell you,' he said, 'that I am totally unable to pay you.' 'You made me miss a fine investment before the election of the First Consul,--an investment which would have given me a little fortune.' 'I know it, Alain,' he said, 'I know it. But what is the good of suing me and crus.h.i.+ng me with bills of costs? I have nothing with which to pay anything. Lately I received letters from my wife and father-in-law; they have bought land with the money you lent me, and they send me a list of things they need to improve it. Now, unless some one prevents it, I shall sail on a Dutch vessel from Flus.h.i.+ng, whither I have sent the few things I am taking out to them. Bonaparte has won the battle of Marengo, peace will be signed, I may safely rejoin my family; and I have need to, for my dear little wife is about to give birth to a child.' 'And so you have sacrificed me to your own interests?' said I.

'Yes,' he answered, 'for I believed you my friend.' At that moment I felt myself inferior to Mongenod, so sublime did he seem to me as he said those grand words. 'Did I not speak to you frankly,' he said, 'in this very room? I came to you, Alain, as the only person who would really understand me. I told you that fifty louis would be lost, but a hundred I could return to you. I did not bind myself by saying when; for how could I know the time at which my long struggle with disaster would end? You were my last friend. All others, even our old master Bordin, despised me for the very reason that I borrowed money of them. Oh! you do not know, Alain, the dreadful sensation which grips the heart of an honest man when, in the throes of poverty, he goes to a friend and asks him for succor,--and all that follows! I hope you never may know it; it is far worse than the anguish of death. You have written me letters which, if I had written them to you in a like situation, you would have thought very odious. You expected of me that which it was out of my power to do. But you are the only person to whom I shall try to justify myself. In spite of your severity, and though from being a friend you became a creditor on the day when Bordin asked for my note on your behalf (thus abrogating the generous compact you had made with me there, on that spot, when we clasped hands and mingled our tears),--well, in spite of all that, I have remembered that day, and because of it I have come here to say to you, You do not know misery, therefore do not judge it. I have not had one moment when I could answer you. Would you have wished me to come here and cajole you with words? I could not pay you; I did not even have enough for the bare necessities of those whose lives depended on me. My play brought little. A novice in theatrical ways, I became a prey to musicians, actors, journalists, orchestras. To get the means to leave Paris and join my family, and carry to them the few things they need, I have sold "Les Peruviens" outright to the director, with two other pieces which I had in my portfolio. I start for Holland without a sou; I must reach Flus.h.i.+ng as best I can; my voyage is paid, that is all. Were it not for the pity of my landlady, who has confidence in me, I should have to travel on foot, with my bag upon my back. But, in spite of your doubts of me, I, remembering that without you I never could have sent my wife and father-in-law to New York, am forever grateful to you. No, Monsieur Alain, I shall not forget that the hundred louis d'or you lent me would have yielded you to-day fifteen hundred francs a year.' 'I desire to believe you, Mongenod,' I said, shaken by the tone in which he made this explanation. 'Ah, you no longer say _monsieur_ to me!' he said quickly, with a tender glance. 'My G.o.d! I shall quit France with less regret if I can leave one man behind me in whose eyes I am not half a swindler, nor a spendthrift, nor a man of illusions! Alain, I have loved an angel in the midst of my misery. A man who truly loves cannot be despicable.' At those words I stretched out my hand to him. He took it and wrung it. 'May heaven protect you!' I said.

'Are we still friends?' he asked. 'Yes,' I replied. 'It shall never be that my childhood's comrade and the friend of my youth left me for America under the feeling that I was angry with him.' Mongenod kissed me, with tears in his eyes, and rushed away."

Monsieur Alain stopped in his narrative for an instant and looked at G.o.defroid. "I remember that day with some satisfaction," he said. Then he resumed:

"A week or so later I met Bordin and told him of that interview. He smiled and said: 'I hope it was not a pretty bit of comedy. Didn't he ask for anything?' 'No,' I answered. 'Well, he came to see me the same day. I was almost as touched as you; and he asked me for means to get food on his journey. Well, well, time will show!' These remarks of Bordin made me fear I had foolishly yielded to mistaken sensibility.

'Nevertheless,' I said to myself, 'he, the old lawyer, did as I did.'

I do not think it necessary to explain to you how I lost all, or nearly all, my property. I had placed a little in the Funds, which gave me five hundred francs a year; all else was gone. I was then thirty-four years old. I obtained, through the influence of Monsieur Bordin, a place as clerk, with a salary of eight hundred francs, in a branch office of the Mont-de-piete, rue des Augustins.[*] From that time I lived very modestly. I found a small lodging in the rue des Marais, on the third floor (two rooms and a closet), for two hundred and fifty francs a year.

I dined at a common boarding-house for forty francs a month. I copied writings at night. Ugly as I was and poor, I had to renounce marriage."

[*] The Mont-de-Piete and its branches are p.a.w.n-shops under control of the government.--TR.

As G.o.defroid heard this judgment which the poor man pa.s.sed upon himself with beautiful simplicity and resignation, he made a movement which proved, far more than any confidence in words could have done, the resemblance of their destinies; and the goodman, in answer to that eloquent gesture, seemed to expect the words that followed it.

"Have you never been loved?" asked G.o.defroid.

"Never!" he said; "except by Madame, who returns to us all the love we have for her,--a love which I may call divine. You must be aware of it.

We live through her life as she lives through ours; we have but one soul among us; and such pleasures, though they are not physical, are none the less intense; we exist through our hearts. Ah, my child!" he continued, "when women come to appreciate moral qualities, they are indifferent to others; and they are then old--Oh! I have suffered deeply,--yes, deeply!"

"And I, in the same way," said G.o.defroid.

"Under the Empire," said the worthy man, resuming his narrative, "the Funds did not always pay their dividends regularly; it was necessary to be prepared for suspensions of payment. From 1802 to 1814 there was scarcely a week that I did not attribute my misfortune to Mongenod.

'If it were not for Mongenod,' I used to say to myself, 'I might have married. If I had never known him I should not be obliged to live in such privation.' But then, again, there were other times when I said, 'Perhaps the unfortunate fellow has met with ill luck over there.' In 1806, at a time when I found my life particularly hard to bear, I wrote him a long letter, which I sent by way of Holland. I received no answer.

I waited three years, placing all my hopes on that answer. At last I resigned myself to my life. To the five hundred francs I received from the Funds I now added twelve hundred from the Mont-de-piete (for they raised my salary), and five hundred which I obtained from Monsieur Cesar Birotteau, perfumer, for keeping his books in the evening. Thus, not only did I manage to get along comfortably, but I laid by eight hundred francs a year. At the beginning of 1814 I invested nine thousand francs of my savings at forty francs in the Funds, and thus I was sure of sixteen hundred francs a year for my old age. By that time I had fifteen hundred a year from the Mont-de-piete, six hundred for my book-keeping, sixteen hundred from the Funds; in all, three thousand seven hundred francs a year. I took a lodging in the rue de Seine, and lived a little better. My place had brought me into relations with many unfortunates.

For the last twelve years I had known better than any man whatsoever the misery of the poor. Once or twice I had been able to do a real service.

I felt a vivid pleasure when I found that out of ten persons relieved, one or two households had been put on their feet. It came into my mind that benevolence ought not to consist in throwing money to those who suffered. 'Doing charity,' to use that common expression, seemed to me too often a premium offered to crime. I began to study the question. I was then fifty years of age, and my life was nearly over. 'Of what good am I?' thought I. 'To whom can I leave my savings? When I have furnished my rooms handsomely, and found a good cook, and made my life suitable in all respects, what then?--how shall I employ my time?' Eleven years of revolution, and fifteen years of poverty, had, as I may say, eaten up the most precious parts of my life,--used it up in sterile toil for my own individual preservation. No man at the age of fifty could spring from that obscure, repressed condition to a brilliant future; but every man could be of use. I understood by this time that watchful care and wise counsels have tenfold greater value than money given; for the poor, above all things, need a guide, if only in the labor they do for others, for speculators are never lacking to take advantage of them. Here I saw before me both an end and an occupation, not to speak of the exquisite enjoyments obtained by playing in a miniature way the role of Providence."

"And to-day you play it in a grand way, do you not?" asked G.o.defroid, eagerly.

"Ah! you want to know everything," said the old man. "No, no! Would you believe it," he continued after this interruption, "the smallness of my means to do the work I now desired to do brought back the thought of Mongenod. 'If it were not for Mongenod,' I kept saying to myself, 'I could do so much more. If a dishonest man had not deprived me of fifteen hundred francs a year I could save this or that poor family.' Excusing my own impotence by accusing another, I felt that the miseries of those to whom I could offer nothing but words of consolation were a curse upon Mongenod. That thought soothed my heart. One morning, in January, 1816, my housekeeper announced,--whom do you suppose?--Mongenod! Monsieur Mongenod! And whom do you think I saw enter my room? The beautiful young woman I had once seen,--only now she was thirty-six years old,--followed by her three children and Mongenod. He looked younger than when he went away; for prosperity and happiness do shed a halo round their favorites.

Thin, pale, yellow, shrivelled, when I last saw him, he was now plump, sleek, rosy as a prebendary, and well dressed. He flung himself into my arms. Feeling, perhaps, that I received him coldly, his first words were: 'Friend, I could not come sooner. The ocean was not free to pa.s.senger s.h.i.+ps till 1815; then it took me a year to close up my business and realize my property. I have succeeded, my friend. When I received your letter in 1806, I started in a Dutch vessel to bring you myself a little fortune; but the union of Holland with the French Empire caused the vessel to be taken by the English and sent to Jamaica, from which island I escaped by mere chance. When I reached New York I found I was a victim to the bankruptcy of others. In my absence my poor Charlotte had not been able to protect herself against schemers. I was therefore forced to build up once more the edifice of my fortunes.

However, it is all done now, and here we are. By the way those children are looking at you, you must be aware that we have often talked to them of their father's benefactor.' 'Oh, yes, yes, monsieur!' said the beautiful Mongenod, 'we have never pa.s.sed a single day without remembering you. Your share has been set aside in all our affairs. We have looked forward eagerly to the happiness we now have in returning to you your fortune, not thinking for a moment that the payment of these just dues can ever wipe out our debt of grat.i.tude.' With those words Madame Mongenod held out to me that magnificent box you see over there, in which were one hundred and fifty notes of a thousand francs each."

The old man paused an instant as if to dwell on that moment; then he went on:--

"Mongenod looked at me fixedly and said: 'My poor Alain, you have suffered, I know; but we did divine your sufferings; we did try every means to send the money to you, and failed in every attempt. You told me you could not marry,--that I had prevented it. But here is our eldest daughter; she has been brought up in the thought of becoming your wife, and she will have a dowry of five hundred thousand francs.' 'G.o.d forbid that I should make her miserable!' I cried hastily, looking at the girl, who was as beautiful as her mother when I first saw her. I drew her to me to kiss her brow. 'Don't be afraid, my beautiful child!' I said. 'A man of fifty to a girl of seventeen?--never! and a man as plain and ugly as I am?--never!' I cried. 'Monsieur,' she said, 'my father's benefactor could not be ugly for me.' Those words, said spontaneously, with simple candor, made me understand how true was all that Mongenod had said. I then gave him my hand, and we embraced each other again. 'My friend,'

I said, 'I have done you wrong. I have often accused you, cursed you.' 'You had the right to do so, Alain,' he replied, blus.h.i.+ng; 'you suffered, and through me.' I took Mongenod's note from my desk and returned it to him. 'You will all stay and breakfast with me, I hope?' I said to the family. 'On condition that you dine with us,' said Mongenod.

'We arrived yesterday. We are going to buy a house; and I mean to open a banking business between Paris and North America, so as to leave it to this fellow here,' he added, showing me his eldest son, who was fifteen years old. We spent the rest of the day together and went to the play; for Mongenod and his family were actually hungry for the theatre. The next morning I placed the whole sum in the Funds, and I now had in all about fifteen thousand francs a year. This fortune enabled me to give up book-keeping at night, and also to resign my place at the Mont-de-piete, to the great satisfaction of the underling who stepped into my shoes. My friend died in 1827, at the age of sixty-three, after founding the great banking-house of Mongenod and Company, which made enormous profits from the first loans under the Restoration. His daughter, to whom he subsequently gave a million in dowry, married the Vicomte de Fontaine.

The eldest son, whom you know, is not yet married; he lives with his mother and brother. We obtain from them all the sums we need. Frederic (his father gave him my name in America),--Frederic Mongenod is, at thirty-seven years of age, one of the ablest, and most upright, bankers in Paris. Not very long ago Madame Mongenod admitted to me that she had sold her hair, as I suspected, for twelve francs to buy bread. She gives me now twenty-four cords of wood a year for my poor people, in exchange for the half cord which I once sent her."

"This explains to me your relations with the house of Mongenod," said G.o.defroid,--"and your fortune."

Again the goodman looked at G.o.defroid with a smile, and the same expression of kindly mischief.

"Oh, go on!" said G.o.defroid, seeing from his manner that he had more to tell.

"This conclusion, my dear G.o.defroid, made the deepest impression on me.

If the man who had suffered so much, if my friend forgave my injustice, I could not forgive myself."

"Oh!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed G.o.defroid.

"I resolved to devote all my superfluous means--about ten thousand francs a year--to acts of intelligent benevolence," continued Monsieur Alain, tranquilly. "About this time it was that I made the acquaintance of a judge of the Lower Civil Court of the Seine named Popinot, whom we had the great grief of losing three years ago, and who practised for fifteen years an active and most intelligent charity in the quartier Saint-Marcel. It was he, with the venerable vicar of Notre-Dame and Madame, who first thought of founding the work in which we are now co-operating, and which, since 1825, has quietly done much good. This work has found its soul in Madame de la Chanterie, for she is truly the inspiration of this enterprise. The vicar has known how to make us more religious than we were at first, by showing us the necessity of being virtuous ourselves in order to inspire virtue; in short, to preach by example. The farther we have advanced in our work, the happier we have mutually found ourselves. And so, you see, it really was the repentance I felt for misconceiving the heart of my friend which gave me the idea of devoting to the poor, through my own hands, the fortune he returned to me, and which I accepted without objecting to the immensity of the sum returned in proportion to the sum lent. Its destination justified my taking it."

This narration, made quietly, without a.s.sumption, but with a gentle kindliness in accent, look, and gesture, would have inspired G.o.defroid to enter this n.o.ble and sacred a.s.sociation if his resolution had not already been taken.

"You know the world very little," he said, "if you have such scruples about a matter that would not weigh on any other man's conscience."

"I know only the unfortunate," said Monsieur Alain. "I do not desire to know a world in which men are so little afraid of judging one another.

But see! it is almost midnight, and I still have my chapter of the 'Imitation of Jesus Christ' to meditate upon! Good-night!"

G.o.defroid took the old man's hand and pressed it, with an expression of admiration.