Karvel—"I know not whether you have any children. But you have a wife. Your mother still lives or has died. Think of her, you pious servant of the Church! Montfort, unconquerable warrior, you certainly loved your mother?"
Montfort (with emotion)—"Oh, yes—I loved her dearly!"
Karvel—"And yet you would mercilessly order a woman to be burned who was a model of a wife, and is a model of a mother?"
Montfort (with a sinister smile)—"And that surprises you? You take me for a ferocious man? Oh, my God! how can you do otherwise, seeing that you have no faith. If you had you would understand that, on the contrary, I act with humanity by bringing the sword and the fagot into your country."
Karvel—"Humanity in burning and massacring the heretics, and in authorizing rape and butchery?"
Montfort—"Listen, and now it will be my turn to say: Answer with sincerity. You have a wife, a mother, children, friends. You love them dearly. In your country there is a province that is a permanent hot-bed of a contagion that threatens to invade the neighboring districts, to attack your own family, your friends and the whole population. Will you, under such circumstances hesitate one instant to purify that corner of your country, even if you have to do it with fire and sword? In the very name of that humanity that you speak about, will you hesitate to sacrifice a thousand, twenty thousand infected beings in order to save millions of other human beings from the incurable pestilence? No! no! You will strike, and strike hard, and strike again. Your arm would never rest until the last one of the execrable and infected beings is dead, and has carried the last germ of the frightful disease into his tomb. And you will have performed an act of humanity."
Karvel (listens to Montfort's words with increasing emotion and intensity. For a moment he stands petrified by the sincere savagery of the chief of the Crusade. The Perfect then cries out with painful indignation)—"Oh, Catholic priests! Your infernal astuteness is such that, in order to insure the triumph of your unbridled ambition, you know how to exploit even the generous promptings of a man's heart and turn them to your own purpose!"
Montfort—"What is that you say! Impious blasphemer! Retract those infamous words!"
Karvel—"It is not you, blind and convinced fanatic, that I accuse. You said so, and you expressed your convictions. Yes, you consider yourself humane. Yes, if you slay children, it is in order to despatch them to Paradise! If you exterminate us mercilessly, it is because according to your convictions our belief damns the souls of men forever! But, good God, what a religion is that! It is a monstrous, a frightful prodigy! It so wholly dethrones man's reason and upsets his sense of right and wrong that you and your accomplices verily believe you are doing an act of piety when you carry ferocity beyond even the bounds of possibility!"
Having finished her orisons, Alyx of Montmorency rises. She overhears Karvel's last words, approaches the count and says to him in a tone of mingled terror and pain while pointing her trembling finger at the Perfect "Oh! How many souls may not that hardened sinner forever lead astray! Let him die!"