“You’ll never make a banker of that boy,” he replied. “He isn’t cut out for a mercantile career and you’ll but waste your efforts. Why don’t you give him to the Church? I might be able to be of good service to you in that direction. I know quite a few dignitaries in Rome.”
“I don’t think a priest’s robe would be becoming to Albert’s style of beauty,” she said laughingly.
“Ah, you haven’t seen how chic the abbes in Rome wear their garb,” he returned in a tone of levity.
“No, I am afraid this is out of the question.”
“It’s better to give him to Rome than to Greece,” the former priest pressed his point symbolically. “It was the Church that saved the Italian masters from idolatry. Don’t you think it would have been far better for Voltaire, and mankind, if he had been won by the Church? I know Albert, he needs the Church. He might carve for himself a glorious career in Rome!”
“Personally I’d have him anything rather than a rhymester,” the mother burst out passionately, without concealing her horror at such a prospect.
“But with the present unrest what else is left for a gifted young man?” proceeded the Jesuit. Then he added in a lower voice, “One day we are Prussian, the next French, and we may be Russian some day, God only knows. And while you know how free I am from prejudice, the boy’s faith will be in his way. I hear that the Jews in Berlin have almost exhausted the holy water of the baptismal font there.” He laughed indulgently as he referred to the great number of conversions in the Prussian capital.
“No one knows better than you,” she presently said, “that you can’t make a good Christian of a good Jew. The most you can do is to turn a bad Jew into a worse Christian.”
They both laughed amicably.
“Honestly, I don’t believe Albert has a religious sense,” she added a moment later. “Nothing is too sacred for him to make fun of.”