“Oh!” replied M. Laprune, suddenly reassured, “Monseigneur wanted to amuse himself. He loves a jest. He is a capital hand at it, and knows how to keep within the bounds of seemliness. He has so much wit!”
But Abbé Lantaigne, raising heavenwards his fiery, sombre glance, exclaimed:
“The Archbishop has deceived me! This man will, then, never speak the truth, save when on the steps of the altar, taking the consecrated host in his hands, he pronounces the words: Domine, non sum dignus!”
VI
Now that he was no longer inclined to the saddle and liked to keep his room, General Cartier de Chalmot had reduced his division to cards in small cardboard boxes, which he placed every morning on his desk, and which he arranged every evening on the white deal shelves above his iron bedstead. He marshalled his cards day by day with scrupulous exactitude, in an order which filled him with satisfaction. Every card represented a man. The symbol by which he henceforth thought of his officers, non-commissioned officers and men, satisfied his craving for method and suited his natural bent of mind. Cartier de Chalmot had always been noted as an excellent officer. General Parroy, under whom he had served, said of him: “In Captain de Chalmot the capacity for obedience is exactly balanced by the power of command. A rare and priceless quality of the true military spirit.”
Cartier de Chalmot had always been scrupulous in the performance of his duty. Being upright, diffident, and an excellent penman, he had at last hit upon a system which fitted in with his abilities, and, in command of his division of cards, he applied his method with the utmost vigour.
On this particular day, having risen according to his custom at five o’clock in the morning, he had passed from his tub to his work-table; and, whilst the sun was mounting with solemn slowness above the elms of the Archbishop’s palace, the general was organising manœuvres by manipulating the boxes of cards that symbolised reality, and that were actually identical with reality to an intelligence which, like his, was excessively reverent towards everything symbolic.
For more than three hours he had been poring over his cards with a mind and face as wan and melancholy as the cards themselves, when his servant announced the Abbé de Lalonde. Then he took off his glasses, wiped his work-reddened eyes, rose, and half smiling, turned towards the door a countenance which had once been handsome and which in old age remained quite simple in its lineaments. He stretched out to the visitor who entered a large hand the palm of which had scarcely any lines, and said good-day to the priest in a gruff, yet hesitating voice, which revealed at the same time the diffidence of the man and the infallibility of the commander.