[C] Lit. good-goderies—i.e., pious gimcrackeries.
“Good-day, monsieur l’abbé. Delighted to see you!”
And it was true. He vaguely felt that, in contact with this ecclesiastic of peasant stock, as French in priestly character and in type as the blackened stones of Saint-Exupère and the old trees on the Mall, he was frenchifying himself, naturalising himself, stripping off the ponderous remnants of his German and Semitic descent. Intimacy with a priest was flattering to the Jewish official. In it he tasted, without actually acknowledging it to himself, the pride of revenge. To browbeat, to patronise one of those tonsured heads entrusted for eighteen centuries, both by heaven and earth, with the excommunication and extermination of the circumcised, was for the Jew a keen and flattering success. And besides, this dirty, threadbare, yet respected, cassock that bowed before him entered châteaux where the préfet was not received. The aristocratic women of the department revered this garb now humiliated before the official uniform. Deference from one of the clergy was almost equivalent to deference from that rural nobility that had not completely come over, and of whose scornful coldness the Jew, though by no means sensitive, had had painful experiences. M. Guitrel, humble, yet with finesse, made his deference appreciated.
Being honoured as a powerful master by this ecclesiastical politician, the head of the department returned in patronage what he received in deference, and flung conciliatory speeches at Abbé Guitrel:
“Doubtless there are good, devoted, and intelligent priests. When the clergy takes its stand upon its privileges …”
M. Worms-Clavelin went on:
“The Republic does not wage systematic war on the parish priests. And, if the fraternities had submitted to the law, many of their difficulties would have been avoided.”
And M. Guitrel protested:
“It is a matter of principle. I should have decided in favour of the fraternities. It is also a matter of business. The fraternities did a great deal of good.”