filled with youthful vitality —an ardent lover, an
ardent Christian. On the one hand stood a girl with
an innocent face and eyes that had never looked upon
sorrow; on the other stood a God with a bleeding
brow and eyes that were heavy and dim with suffering.
And each of these two appeared to be calling — to
be calling to him, the young Antoine Martel, as
though his youth and vitality were to them a thing
of momentous importance, so that he turned now
this way, now that, from suffering to joy, from joy
back to suffering.
The Cure Martel remembered long nights spent
half in agonized and self-abased prayer, and half
in agonized yet arrogant longing. And as he fingered
the shabby old book in which he had ventured to
write many things that a riper discretion must
have omitted, he grew lonely and quite illogically
sad because he could no longer feel that anguish.
Going to his table he found pen and paper, then a
cheap envelope which he carefully addressed to a
certain Madame la Comtesse de Berac.
'Chere Genevieve/ he wrote in his clerical hand,
*It is now many years since you and I met, but always
I have been your sincere well-wisher, and always I
have remembered you in my prayers, as I hope that
you have remembered me . . .* The writing paused,
then went on more quickly: 6But let me come at once
to the point of this letter. Were I going to ask a
favour entirely for myself I should hesitate, since why
should you grant it? It is not entirely for myself that
I ask, it is also for a little boy in this town who I
hope may become a brilliant student. His name is Jan
Roustan; his mother is a widow who runs a humble
drapery business, and he himself was a posthumous
child and has thus never known the love of a father.
'The excuse for my importunity is this: the boy is
anxious to enter the priesthood, and, as always, we