The unexpected announcement of a call to the deathbed of one of his poorest penitents, was not quite the most desirable thing for our dear young friend, at such an hour. But he knew too well his duty to grumble. He said to us: “Go before me and tell Mrs. Buteau that I will be in time to get my share of the oysters.”
By chance, the sick house was on the way and not far from Mr. Buteau’s splendid mansion. He left us to run to the altar and take the “Good God” with him. We started for the soiree, but not without sympathizing with our dear Mr. Parent, who would lose the most interesting part, for the administration of the viaticum. The extreme unction, with the giving of indulgences, in articulo mortis, and the exhortation to the dying, and the people gathered from the neighborhood to witness those solemn rites, could not take much less than three quarters, or even an hour of his time. But, to my great surprise, we had not yet been ten minutes in the magnificent parlor of our host, when I saw Mr. Parent, who like a newborn butterfly, flying from flower to flower, was running from lady to lady, joking, laughing, surpassing himself with his inimitable, lovely and refined manners. I said to myself, how is it possible that he has so quickly got rid of his unpalatable task with his dying penitent! and I wanted an opportunity of being alone with him, to satisfy my curiosity on that point. But it was pretty late in the evening, when I had a chance to say to him; “We all feared lest your dying patient might deprive us of the pleasure of your company the greater part of the soiree!”
“Oh! Oh!” answered he, with a hearty laugh, “that intelligent woman had the good common sense to die just two minutes before I entered her house. I suppose that her guardian angel, knowing all about this incomparable party, had dispatched the good soul to heaven a little sooner than she expected, in my behalf.” I could not but smile at his answer, which was given in a manner to make a stone laugh. “But,” said I, “what have you done with the ‘Good God’ you carried with you?”
“Ah! ah! the Good God,” he replied in a jocose and subdued tone. “Well, well! the ‘Good God’? He stands very still in my vest pocket. And if he enjoys this princely festivity as well as we all do, he will surely thank me for having brought him here, even en survenant. But do not say a word of his presence here; it would spoil everything.”
That priest, who was only one year younger than myself, was one of my dearest friends. Though his words rather smelt of the unbeliever and blasphemer, I preferred to attribute them to the sweet champagne he had drunk than to a real want of faith.
But I must confess that, though I had laughed very heartily at first, his last utterance pained me so much that, from that moment to the end of the soiree, I felt uneasy and confounded. My firm belief that my Saviour Jesus Christ was there in person, kept a prisoner in my young friend’s vest pocket, going to and fro from one young lady to the other, witnessing the constant laughing, hearing the idle words, the light and funny songs, made my whole soul shudder, and my heart sunk within me. By times I wished I could fall on my knees to adore my Saviour, whom I believed to be there. However, a mysterious voice was whispering in my ear: “Are you not a fool to believe that you can make a God with a wafer; and that Jesus Christ your Saviour and your God, can be kept a prisoner, in spite of himself, in the vest pocket of a man? Do you not see that your friend Parent, who has much more brains and intelligence than you, does not believe a word of that dogma of transubstantiation? Have you forgotten the unbeliever’s smile which you saw on the lips of the bishop himself only a few days ago? Was not that laugh the infallible proof that he also does not believe a particle of that ridiculous dogma?”
With superhuman effort I tried, and succeeded partly, to stifle that voice. But that struggle could not last long within my soul without leaving its exterior marks on my face. Evidently a sad cloud was over my eyes, for several of my most respectable friends, with Mr. and Mrs. Buteau, kindly asked if I were sick.
At last I felt so confused at the repetition of the same suggestion by so many, that I felt that I was only making a fool of myself by remaining any longer in their midst. Angry with myself for my want of moral strength in this hour of trial, I respectfully asked pardon from my kind host for leaving their party before the end, on account of a sudden indisposition.
The next day there was only one voice in Quebec, saying that young Parent had been the lion of that brilliant soiree, and that the poor young priest Chiniquy had been its fool.