“Assuredly, Monsieur Lantaigne. … Monsieur de Goulet, was there not one arm of the hanged man which projected from the porch and jutted into the church?”
M. de Goulet replied with a blush and some incoherent syllables.
“I feel certain,” replied Monseigneur, “that the arm went beyond, or, at any rate, part of the arm.”
M. Lantaigne concluded from this that the church of Saint-Exupère was profaned. He quoted precedents and described the proceedings after the dastardly assassination of the Archbishop of Paris, in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. He travelled up the ages, passed through the Revolution, when the churches were transformed into armouries, referred to Thomas Becket and the impious Heliodorus.
“What scholarship! What sound doctrine!” said Monseigneur.
He rose and stretched out his hand for the priest to kiss.
“It is a priceless service that you have rendered me, Monsieur Lantaigne; be assured that I have a great esteem for your scholarship and accept my pastoral benediction. Farewell.”
And M. Lantaigne, dismissed, perceived that he had not been able to say a single word about the important business on which he had come. But, with the echoes of his own words all round him, full of his learning and his application of it, and much flattered, he descended the grand staircase still turning over in his own mind the matter of the suicide of Saint-Exupère and the urgent need for the purification of the parish church. Outside he was still thinking of it.
As he was descending the winding street of the Tintelleries, he met the curé of Saint-Exupère, the venerable M. Laprune, who, standing in front of cooper Lenfant’s shop, was examining the corks.
His wine had been turning sour, and this deterioration he attributed to the defective way in which his bottles were corked.