X.
In a students' hotel near the Odéon, where a few Scandinavians lived, I became acquainted with two or three young lawyers and more young abbés and priests. If you went in when the company were at table in the dining room, the place rang again with their noisy altercations. The advocates discussed politics, literature and religion with such ardour that the air positively crackled. They were apparently practising to speak one day at the Bar or in the Chamber. It was from surroundings such as these that Gambetta emerged.
The young abbés and priests were very good fellows, earnest believers, but so simple that conversations with them were only interesting because of their ignorance and lack of understanding. Scandinavians in Paris who knew only Roman Catholic priests from Tartufe at the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet. Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one of these three types. But my ecclesiastical acquaintances were as free from hypocrisy as from fanaticism. They were good, honest children of the commonalty, with, not the cunning, but the stupidity, of peasants.
Many a day I spent exploring the surroundings of Paris in their company. We went to St. Cloud and Sèvres, to Versailles and St. Germain, to Saint Denis, to Montmorency and Enghien, or to Monthléry, a village with an old tower from the thirteenth century, and then breakfasted at Longjumeau, celebrated for its postillion. There Abbé Leboulleux declared himself opposed to cremation, for the reason that it rendered the resurrection impossible, since God himself could not collect the bones again when the body had been burnt. It was all so amiable that one did not like to contradict him. At the same meal another was giving a sketch of the youth of Martin Luther; he left the church--on se demande encore pourquoi. In the innocence of his heart this abbé regarded the rebellion of Luther less as an unpermissible than as an inexplicable act.