What could he do? What could he venture? He remembered hearing of priests who had fled away with young girls whom they had seduced, and he thought for an instant that he would carry off Suzanne and fly.
Willingly would he have left behind him his honour and his reputation, willingly would he have torn his priestly robe on the sharp points of infamy and scandal, willingly would he have quitted for ever that cursed parsonage where shame and humiliation, vice and remorse were henceforth installed; but Suzanne, would she follow him?
Then, had he well weighed the mortifications which await the apostate priest!
To be nameless in society, with no future, repulsed, despised, scoffed at by all!
Should he, like the Père Hyacinth, go and found a free church in some corner of the republic, and rove through Europe, like him, to confer about morality, the rights of women and virtue?
Would not poverty come and knock at his door? Poverty with a beloved wife! It would appear a hideous and terrifying spectre, chilling in its livid approach and in its kisses of love.
To struggle against these obstacles he would need high energy and high courage, and he felt that courage and energy were lacking in him, the miserable coward, who had shamefully succumbed to the clumsy artifices of a lascivious woman, who had allowed the first fruits of his virginity and his youth to be lost in shameful debauch; while close by there was an adorable maiden whose heart was beating in unison with his own.
Thus did his reflection lead him till the end of the Gospel, and when he said the Deo gratias he had as yet decided nothing.