"The second is freedom from participation in the works of the Holy Church, such as fasts, prayers, pilgrimages and macerations of all nature.
"The third—listen carefully, my brothers, pay particular attention to the last words, as the saying is—this indulgence exceeds all that the most faithful believers can wish for!"
"Listen," whispered Fra Girard to Hervé; "listen, and repent your having doubted the resources of the faith."
"Oh, I doubt no longer, and yet I hardly dare to hope," murmured the son of Christian with bated breath, while the Dominican proceeded to announce aloud:
"The third favor, my brothers, gives you the right to choose a confessor, who, every time that you fear you are about to die, will be bound—by virtue of the letter of absolution that you will have purchased and which you will display before him—to give you absolution not only for your ordinary sins, but also for those greater crimes the remission of which is reserved to the apostolic See, to wit, bestiality, the crime against nature, parricide and incest."
The Dominican had hardly pronounced these words when Hervé's features became frightful to behold. The lad's eyes shot fire, and a smile of the damned curled his lips as Fra Girard stooped down to him and whispered in his ear:
"Did I deceive you? The indulgence is absolute, even for incest."
"Finally, my brothers," the Apostolic Commissioner proceeded to say, "the fourth favor consists in redeeming souls from purgatory. For this favor, my brothers, it is not necessary, as for the three first ones, to be contrite of heart and to confess. No, no! It is enough if you drop your offerings in this coffer. You will thereby snatch the souls of the dead from the tortures that they are undergoing; and you will be moreover contributing towards the holy work of restoring the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul at Rome. Now, then, my brothers," he added, thumping anew upon the coffer, "come forward with your money! Come forward with your ducats! Come!"
Upon this last exhortation the railing of the choir was thrown open. The small number of the charitably disposed who wished to deliver the souls in pain began filing before the coffer into which they dropped their offerings after making the sign of the cross; the confessionals, however, in which the pontifical penitentiaries took their seats, ready to issue letters of absolution, were immediately besieged by a mob of men and women, anxious to obtain impunity in the eyes of heaven and of their own conscience for sins ranging from the most venial up to monstrous deeds that cause nature to shudder. It was a frightful sight, the spectacle presented by the mob around these confessionals crowding to the quarry of impunity for crime.
Good God! Your vicars order and exploit the traffic! Behold human conscience upturned, shaken at its very foundation, losing even the sense of discrimination between vice and virtue! The moral sense is perverted, it is smothered by sacrilegious superstition! Mankind is lashed to a vertigo of folly and evil by the assurance of impunity, feeling certain, Oh, God of justice! of having You for an accomplice! Souls, until then innocent, no longer recoil before any passion however execrable, the bare thought of which is a crime! Does not the Pope of Rome absolve for all eternity, in exchange for a few gold crowns, even parricide and incest? If only its faith is strong enough the incestuous or parricidal heart knows, feels itself absolved! Oh, in honor at least to the religious sentiment—the divine gift implanted in man's heart, whatever the dogma may be in which it is wrapped—there are Catholic priests of austere morals who, despite their intolerance, have, in these accursed times, indignantly repudiated the monstrous idolatries and savage fetichism that even ancient paganism knew nothing of! No! No! Christ, your celestial gospel is and will remain the most scathing condemnation of the horrors that are committed in your venerated name. Those papal penitentiaries in the confessionals emblazoned with the pontifical arms, those new dealers in merchandise in the Temple dare to sell for cash patents of salvation! Alas! After a few hurried words exchanged with Fra Girard, Hervé was one of the first to hurry to the confessionals and kneel down; he did not long remain there; those near him heard the papal penitentiary first utter a cry of surprise; silence ensued, broken by the intermittent sobs of the lad; the chinking of the money that was being counted out to the priest in the confessional announced the close of the absolutional conversation. Hervé issued out of the tribunal of penitence holding a parchment with a convulsive clutch, closely followed by Fra Girard; he cleaved the compact mass of people, and withdrew to one of the lateral chapels; there he knelt down before a sanctuary of the Virgin that a lamp illumined, and by its light read the letter of absolution that he had just bought with his father's money. The pontifical letter was couched in the following terms: