of Your Eminence,
“Lantaigne.”
Having written this letter, M. Lantaigne sealed it with his seal.
[B] “Notre ciel à nous, c’est un sein chéri.”
IV
It is true that Abbé Guitrel, professor of sacred rhetoric at the high seminary of …, was intimately connected with M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin and with Madame Worms-Clavelin, née Coblentz. But Abbé Lantaigne was wrong in believing that M. Guitrel frequented the drawing-rooms of the prefecture, where his presence would have been equally disquieting to the Archbishop and to the masonic lodges, since the préfet was master of the lodge “The Rising Sun.” It was in the confectioner’s shop kept by Dame Magloire in the Place Saint-Exupère, where he went every Saturday at five o’clock to buy two little three-sou cakes, one for his servant and the other for himself, that the priest had met the préfet’s wife, while she was eating babas there in the company of Madame Lacarelle, wife of M. le préfet’s private secretary.
By his demeanour, at once obsequious and discreet, which inspired entire confidence and removed all apprehensions, the professor of sacred rhetoric had instantly gained the good graces of Madame Worms-Clavelin, to whom he suggested the mind, the face, and almost the sex of those old-clothes women, the guardian angels of her youth in the difficult days of Batignolles and the Place Clichy, when Noémi Coblentz had finished growing up and was beginning to fade in the business office kept by her father Isaac in the midst of distress-sales and police-raids. One of these dealers in second-hand clothes, a Madame Vacherie, who esteemed her, had acted as go-between for her and an active and promising young barrister, M. Théodore Worms-Clavelin, who, finding her seriously-minded and practically useful, had married her after the birth of their daughter Jeanne, and she in return had cleverly pushed him in the administration. Abbé Guitrel was very much like Madame Vacherie. They had the same look, the same voice, the same gestures. This propitious likeness had aroused in Madame Worms-Clavelin a sudden sympathy. Besides, she had always revered the Catholic clergy as one of the powers of this world. She constituted herself M. Guitrel’s advocate in her husband’s good graces. M. Worms-Clavelin, who recognised in his wife a quality that remained him a deep mystery, the quality of tact, and who knew her to be clever, received Abbé Guitrel courteously the first time he met him in the jeweller’s shop kept by Rondonneau junior in the Rue des Tintelleries.
He had gone there to see the designs for the cups ordered by the State to be given as prizes in the races organised by the Society for the Improvement of Horse-breeding. After that visit he frequently returned to the goldsmith’s, drawn by an innate taste for precious metals. On his side, Abbé Guitrel contrived frequent occasions for visiting the show-rooms of Rondonneau the younger, maker of sacred vessels: candlesticks, lamps, pyxes, chalices, patens, monstrances, and tabernacles. The préfet and the priest were not ill-pleased at these meetings in the first-storey show-rooms, out of sight of prying eyes, in front of a counter loaded with bullion and amidst the vases and statuettes that M. Worms-Clavelin called bondieuseries.[C] Stretched out in Rondonneau junior’s one arm-chair, M. Worms-Clavelin sent a little wave of his hand to M. Guitrel, who, black and fat, stole along by the glass cases like a great rat.