'All right, my dear, I'll try.... I have some worries with the Justice of the Peace, so I will go inside and give two francs. And if the Saint doesn't help me to win the suit, I will show him my displeasure.'
'That's it, my dear! Tie a stone to his neck, or wrap him up in some dirty linen. He doesn't like that at all. It will make him do the right thing.'
Marc could not help smiling in spite of his bitter feelings. He continued listening, and heard a group of serious looking men—among whom he recognised Philis, the Municipal Councillor and clerical rival of Mayor Darras—deploring the fact that not a parish of the arrondissement had yet consecrated itself to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. That was another clever invention, more dangerous still than the base trafficking in St. Antony of Padua. True, the poorer classes as yet remained indifferent to it, as it lacked the attraction of a miraculous and a gambling element. None the less, there was a grave peril in that idolatrous worship of the Sacred Heart, a real, red, bleeding heart torn away amid a last palpitation, and portrayed like the heart of some animal in a butcher's shop. The endeavour was to make that gory picture the emblem of modern France, to print it in purple, to embroider it in silk and gold on the national flag, so that the whole country might become a mere dependency of the Church which invented that repulsive fetich worship. Here again one found the same manœuvre, the same attempt to lay the grip of priestcraft on the nation, to win over the multitude by means of superstition and legend, in the hope of steeping it once more in ignorance and bondage. And in the case of the Sacred Heart, as in that of St. Antony of Padua, it was particularly the Jesuits who were at work, disorganising the olden Catholicism with their evil power, and reducing religion to a level with the carnal practices of savage tribes.
Marc hurried away. He again felt suffocated, he longed for solitude and space. Geneviève, desirous of spending an afternoon with her parents, had accompanied him to Maillebois that Sunday. Madame Duparque, being attacked by gout, was confined to her arm-chair, and had been prevented therefore from attending the ceremony at the chapel. As Marc no longer visited his wife's relations, he had agreed with Geneviève that he would meet her outside the railway station in time for the four o'clock train. It was now scarcely more than three, and so he walked mechanically to the tree-planted square where the railway station stood, and sank upon a bench there amid the solitude. He was still pondering, still absorbed in a great, decisive, mental battle.
All at once light flashed upon his mind. The extraordinary spectacle he had just beheld, the things he had seen and heard, filled him with glowing certainty. If the nation were passing through such a frightful crisis; if it were becoming divided into two hostile Frances, ready to devour one another, it was simply because Rome had carried her battle into French territory. France was the last great Roman Catholic power that remained;[6] she alone still possessed the men and the money, the strength needed to impose Roman Catholicism on the world. It was logical, therefore, that her territory should have been chosen for the supreme battle of Rome, who was so frantically desirous of recovering her temporal power, as that alone could lead her to the realisation of her ancient dream of universal domination. Thus all France had become like those frontier plains, those fertile ploughlands, vineyards, and orchards where two armies meet and contend to decide some mighty quarrel. The crops are ravaged by cavalry charges, the vineyards and orchards are ripped open by galloping batteries of artillery; shells blow up the villages, grape-shot cuts down the trees, and changes the plain into a lifeless desert. And, in like way, the France of to-day is devastated and ruined by the warfare which the Church there wages against the Revolution, an exterminating warfare without truce or mercy, for the Church well understands that, if she does not slay the Revolution, by which is symbolised the spirit of liberty and justice, the Revolution will slay her. Thence comes the desperate struggle on every field, among every class—a struggle poisoning every question that arises, fomenting civil war, transforming the motherland into a field of massacre, where perhaps only ruins will soon remain. And therein lies the mortal danger, a certainty of death if the Church should triumph and cast France once more into the darkness and wretchedness of the past, making of her also one of those fallen nations which expire in the misery and nothingness with which Roman Catholicism has stricken every land where she has reigned.
[6] Austria, the reader may be reminded, is in great straits, held together merely by the prestige of its reigning monarch; Italy is hostile to the temporal claims of the papacy; Spain has been killed by its priests; Portugal slumbers in insignificance; even the prosperity of Belgium has been largely affected by the blighting influence of its religious Orders.—Trans.
Reflections, which previously had filled Marc with much perplexity, now came to him afresh, illumined by new light. He pictured the subterranean work of the Church during the last fifty years: the clever manœuvres of the Teaching Orders to win future power by influencing the children; and the policy followed by Leo XIII., his crafty acceptance of the Republic for the sole purpose of worming his way into it and subduing it. But if the France of Voltaire and Diderot, the France of the Revolution and the Three Republics, had become the poor, misled, distracted France of to-day, which almost reverted to the past instead of marching towards the future, it was more particularly because the Jesuits and the other teaching Orders had set their grip on the children, trebling the number of their pupils in thirty years, spreading their powerful establishments over the entire land. And, all at once, impelled thereto by events, and compelled moreover to take up position, the triumphant Church unmasked her work, and defiantly acknowledged that she meant to be the sovereign of the nation.
All the various conquests hitherto achieved arose before the scared eyes of the onlookers: The high positions in the army, the magistrature, the civil and political services were in the hands of men formed by the Church; the once liberal, unbelieving, railing middle class had been won back to the retrograde Church-spirit from the fear of being dispossessed by the rising tide of the masses; the latter themselves were poisoned with gross superstitions, held in crass ignorance and falsehood in order that they might remain the human cattle whom the master fleeces and slaughters. And the Church, no longer hiding her designs, impudently pursued her work of conquest, setting up St. Antony's collection boxes with a great display of puffery on all sides, distributing flags adorned with the gory emblem of the Sacred Heart to the villages, opening congregational schools in competition to every secular one, and even seizing on the latter, where the teachers often became creatures of her own, and did her work either from cowardice or interest.
She, the Roman Catholic Church, was now openly at war with civil society. She raised money expressly to carry on her work of conquest; many of the religious congregations had taken to industry and trade; one alone, that of the Good Pastor, realising some twelve millions of francs profit[7] every year by exploiting the forty-seven thousand work-girls who slaved in its two hundred and seven establishments. And the Church sold all kinds of things: alcoholic liqueurs and shoes, medicines and furniture, miraculous waters and embroidered nightgowns for women of bad character. She turned everything into money, she levied the heaviest tribute on public stupidity and credulity by her spurious miracles and her everlasting exploitation of religion. Her wealth amounted to thousands of millions of francs, her estates were immense, and she disposed of enough ready cash to buy parties, hurl them one upon the other, and triumph amid the blood and ruin of civil war. The struggle appeared terrible and immediate to Marc, who had never previously felt how very necessary it was that France should slay that Church if she did not wish to be slain by her.