“Oh, mon Père! Oh, mon bon Père!” groaned Gaultier, “Je suis un pauvre pécheur, un misérable.”
“Now it comes,” thought the Norman; “Allons, allons, mon fils, ayez courage! l’Eglise est pleine de miséricorde.”
“There was an old owl in the barn,” said Gaultier, “and woodcocks being scarce—”
“Ventre Saint Gris!” cried Marteville to himself, “this will never come to an end;” “Mais, mon fils,” he said aloud, “I have told you, all that is pardoned. Speak, can you charge yourself with murder, treason, conspiracy, sorcery,”—Gaultier groaned—“astrology,”—Gaultier groaned still more deeply—“or of having concealed any such crimes, when committed by others?” Gaultier groaned a third time. The Norman had now brought him to the point; and after much moaning, hesitation, and agony of mind, he acknowledged that he had been privy to a meeting of sorcerers.—Nay, that he had even conducted a notorious Astrologer, a little man in grey, on the road to meet the defunct Père Le Rouge and his companion the Devil, at the old Chateau of St. Loup; and that it was his remorse of conscience for this crime, together with his terror at revealing it, after the menaces of the Sorcerer, that had thrown him into the lamentable state in which he then lay.
By degrees, the Norman drew from him every particular, and treasuring them up in his memory, he hastened to give the suffering innkeeper absolution; which, though not performed in the most orthodox manner, quite satisfied Gaultier; who concluded, that any little difference of form from that to which he had been used, proceeded from the Norman being a Jesuit and a directeur; and he afterwards was heard to declare, that the Père Alexis was the most pious and saintly of men, and that one absolution from him was worth a hundred from any one else; although the Curé of the village, when he heard the method in which it had been administered, pronounced it to be heterodox and heretical, and in short a damnable error.
And here be it remarked, that a neighbouring Curé having taken up the quarrel of Père Alexis, and pronounced his form to be the right one, a violent controversy ensued, which raged in Champagne for more than fifty years, producing nine hundred pamphlets, three thousand letters, twenty public discussions, and four Papal bulls, till at length it was agreed on all hands to write to the Jesuits of Alençon, and demand their authority for such a deviation from established rules: when it was discovered that they administered absolution like every one else; and that they never had such a person as Père Alexis belonging to their very respectable and learned body.
But to return to the Norman. As soon as he had concluded all the ceremonies he thought right to perform, for the farther consolation of Gaultier, he said to him—“Fear not, my son, the menaces of the Sorcerer; for I forbid all evil beings, even were it the Devil himself, to lay so much as the tip of a finger upon you; and moreover, I will go this very night to the old Chateau of St. Loup, and will exorcise Père Le Rouge and drive his spirit forth from the place, and, morbleu! if he dare appear to me I will take him by the beard, and lead him into the middle of the village, and all the little children shall drum him out of the regiment—I mean out of the town.”
With this bold resolution, Monsieur Marteville descended to the ground floor, and communicated his design to Louise and the bourgeoise, who were sitting with their noses together over a flaggon of vin chaud. “Donnez moi un coup de vin,” said he, “et j’irai.”
But Louise, who did not choose to trust her new husband out of her sight, having discovered by a kind of instinct, that in his case “absence was worse than death,” declared she would go with him, and see him take Père Le Rouge by the beard. The Norman remonstrated, but Louise persisted with a sort of sweet pertinacity which was quite irresistible, and, though somewhat out of humour with her obstinacy, he was obliged to consent.
However, he growled audibly while she assisted to disembarrass him of his long black robe; and probably, had it not been for his assumed character, would have accompanied his opposition with more than one of those elegant expletives with which he was wont to season his discourse. Louise, notwithstanding all this, still maintained her point, and the horses being brought forth, the bags were placed on their backs, and the Norman and his spouse set forth for the old Chateau of St. Loup, taking care to repeat their injunction to the landlady not to discover their real characters to any one, as the business of the Père directeur required the utmost secrecy.