“All ecclesiastics, unfortunately, are not of this kind.”
“Nor are all soldiers,” said the general, smiling a very wan smile.
And the two men exchanged a sympathetic glance, in their common hatred of intrigue and falsity.
Abbé de Lalonde, who was, however, capable of a little guile, wound up his eulogy of Abbé Lantaigne with this touch:
“He is an excellent priest, and if he had been a soldier he would have made an excellent soldier.”
But the general demanded brusquely:
“Well! what can I do for him?”
“Help him to slip on the violet stockings, which he has richly deserved, general. He is an admitted candidate for the vacant bishopric of Tourcoing. I beg you to support him with the Minister of Justice and Religion, whom, I am told, you know personally.”
The general shook his head. In fact, he had never asked anything of the Government. Cartier de Chalmot, as a royalist and a Christian, regarded the Republic with a disapproval that was complete, silent and whole-hearted. Reading no newspapers and talking with no one, he undervalued on principle a civil power of whose doings he knew nothing. He obeyed and held his tongue. He was admired in the châteaux of the neighbourhood for his melancholy resignation, inspired by the sentiment of duty, strengthened by a profound scorn for everything which was not military, intensified by a growing difficulty in thought and speech rendered obvious and affecting by the progress of an affection of the liver.
It was well known that General Cartier de Chalmot remained a faithful royalist in the depths of his heart. It was not so well known that one day in the year 1893 his heart had received one of those shocks which can only be compared with what Christians describe as the workings of grace, and which bring with the force of a thunderbolt deep and unlooked-for peace to a man’s innermost being. This event took place at five o’clock in the evening of the 4th of June in the drawing-rooms of the prefecture. There, among the flowers that Madame Worms-Clavelin had herself arranged, President Carnot, on his way through the town, had received the officers of the garrison. General Cartier de Chalmot, being present with his staff, saw the President for the first time, and instantly, for no apparent reason, on no explicable grounds, was pierced through and through by a terrible admiration. In a second, before the gentle gravity and honest inflexibility of the head of the State, all his prejudices fell away. He forgot that this sovereign was a civilian. He revered and loved him. He suddenly felt himself bound with ties of sympathy and respect to this man, sad and sallow like himself, but august and serene like a ruler. He uttered with a soldierly stutter the official compliment which he had learnt by heart. The President answered him: “I thank you in the name of the Republic and of our country which you loyally serve.” At this, all the devotion to an absent prince which General Cartier de Chalmot had stored up for twenty-five years welled forth from his heart towards the President, whose quiet face remained surprisingly immobile, and who spoke in a melancholy voice with no movement of cheek or lips, on which his black beard set a seal. On this waxen face, in these slow, honest eyes, on this feeble breast, across which blazed the broad red ribbon of his order, in the whole figure of this suffering automaton, the general perceived both the dignity of the leader, and the affliction of the ill-fated man who has never laughed. With his admiration there was mingled a strain of tenderness.