LXXXII.
THE CHURCH-WOMAN.
"Devotion is the sole resource of coquettes: when they are become old, God becomes the last resource of all women who know not aught else to do."
MME. DE REUX.
As his uncle had foreseen, the young Curé pleased the old lady greatly. She examined him with satisfaction and predicted that he would make his way.
—You have not deceived me, she said to Ridoux, here is a priest such as we require. We are encumbered with awkward, ridiculous, red-raced men, who bring religion into disrepute. Why not send all those peasants back to their village, and select men like Monsieur l'Abbé? It is a shame, an absolute shame to allow you to stagnate in this way. I shall reproach Monseigneur severely for it.
—It is the fault of the Grand-Vicar Gobin, said Ridoux; he had taken a dislike to my nephew.
—I have known that. He was a very harsh and a very tiresome man. Too frozen virtue which has melted, I am told. I do not want to believe it. He is the talk of the town. It is abominable, but I do not pity him. That is what comes of not making religion amiable. Although we are old, Monsieur Marcel, we are of the new school; we firmly believe that religion and agreeable gaiety ought to proceed in harmony. We want conciliatory and amiable priests. In this way the women let themselves be won over. I may confess it to you, I who am double your age; and in so far as we shall have the women, the world is ours.
While asking himself, what influence this more than middle-aged lady could exercise over the Bishop's decisions, Marcel quickly perceived that in order to be successful, he had only to be in the good graces of this estimable dowager, and, in spite of the remembrance of Suzanne, he tried to be amiable and witty.
But soon his ideas of ambition returned to him in this sumptuous drawing-room, surrounded with comfort and luxury: he thought that he had only to wish it, in order to become himself too, one of the great of the earth, and it appeared to him that the Comtesse do Montluisant ought to be the instrument of a rapid fortune.
The old lady was one of those women, very numerous in the world, who make of religion a convenient chaperone for their intrigues and their affairs of gallantry. When they are old, and can scarcely venture any longer on their own account, they generously place their experience and their small talents at another's service, and willingly assist the intrigues of others. That is called lending the hand, and more than once the old lady had countenanced, through perfectly Christian charity, the secret interviews of sweet sheep with their tender pastor.
The deduction must not be made from this that all the devout are courtesans when they are young and procuresses in their ripened age.
Whatever may be said, all are not hypocritical and vicious. Vice usually comes in the long run, and hypocrisy, which oozes from the old arches of the temples, and from the antique wainscoting of the sacristies, falls at length upon their shoulders like an unwholesome drizzling rain, but for the most part they begin with conviction and good faith.
They attend church frequently, not only because it is good form, not only through want of occupation and through habit, but from inclination.
The melodies of the organ, the odour of incense, the singing of the choir, the meditation and silence, the flowers, the wax-tapers, the gilding, the pictures, the mysterious light which filters through the stained-glass windows, the radiant face of the Virgin, the sweet and pale countenance of Christ, the statues of the saints, the niches, the old pillars, the small chapels, all this mystic poetry pleases them, everything enchants and intoxicates them, even to the sanctimonious and hypocritical face of the beadle and the sacristan.
It is their element, their centre, their world. They attach themselves to the old nave as sailors attach themselves to their ship.
They know all the little corners and recesses of the temple. They have knelt at all the chapels and burnt tapers before all the saints. But there is always one place which they have an affection for, and where they are invariably to be found. Why? Mystery! What do they do there? Mystery again. They remain there for whole hours, motionless, dreaming, their eyes fixed on vacancy, their thoughts one knows not where, and in their hands a book of prayers which they open from time to time as if to recall themselves to reality.
A young priest passes by. He recognizes them. He bows and smiles to them like old acquaintances. In fact, he sees them there every day at the same place. Godly sheep! They look at him passing by, and, while pretending to read their psalms, they follow him with that deep, undefinable, mysterious look, which inspires fear.
What connection is there between their prayers and reveries, and the lively behaviour of this red-faced Abbé?
How he must laugh, and how he must inwardly despise these women, who can find no better employment for the day than to mutter Paternosters, devoid of meaning, before an image of wood or stone, or to remain in the vague sanctimonious contemplation of a mysterious unknown.
Poor women! who, better led, better instructed in their duties and mission in life, would have become excellent mothers, might have been the light and joy of some hearth which now remains deserted, and who, lost and misled by a false education and a detestable system of morality, fall into wasting mysticism, hysterical ecstasies, a contemplative and useless existence, into degrading practices and shameful superstitions, and instead of being the fruitful animating springs of moral and social progress, become the passive instruments, the unfruitful things of the priest, that is to say the agents of reaction.
It is they who have caused thinkers to doubt the noble part which woman is called to fulfil; who have compelled Proudhon to say: "Woman is the desolation of the just," and that other apostle of socialism, Bebel, that she is incapable of helping in the reconstitution of Society:
"Slave of every prejudice, affected by every moral and physical malady, she will be the stumbling-block of progress. With her must be used, morally certainly, perhaps physically, the peremptory reason to the slaves of the old race: The Stick!" We are far from the divine book of Michelet, Love.
No, do not let us beat woman, even with a rose, as the Arab proverb says. She is a sick child, foolishly spoiled, who requires only to be cured and reformed by another education. The Comtesse was not like this. Skilful and intelligent, she knew what talking meant, and how to read in wise men's eyes and between the lines of letters. Therefore, she had learnt in good time, how to bring together two things which the profane suppose to be so opposed to one another, and which form the secret of the Temple: Religion and pleasure.
"And she was quite right," Veronica would have said, "for how can pleasure hurt God."