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Compassionate souls, who admire the complaisance of the queen, do not pity her too much: she punished the king, by imitating him, at Usson and elsewhere.
And yet Pan was a lesser Geneva. Amidst these violences and this voluptuousness, devotion was warm; they went to sermons or to the church, with the same air as to the battle-field or the rendezvous. This is because religion then was not a virtue, but a passion. In such case, the neighboring passions, instead of extinguishing it, only inflame; the heart overflows on that side as on the others. When the lazzarone has stabbed his enemy, he finds a second pleasure, says Beyle, in prating about his anger, alongside a wire grating in a great box of black wood. The Hindoo that gets excited and howls at the feast of Juggernaut, to the hubbub of fifty thousand tom-toms, the American Methodist who weeps and cries aloud his sins in a revival, feels something the same sort of pleasure as an Italian enthusiast at the opera. That explains and reconciles the zeal and the gallantry of Marguerite.
“They only allowed me,” said she, “to have mass said in a little chapel not more than three or four paces long, which, narrow as it was, was full when there were seven or eight of us there. So when they wanted to say mass, they raised the bridge of the castle, for fear that the Catholics of the country, who had no exercise of their religion, should hear of it; for they had an infinite desire to assist at the holy sacrifice, of which they had been deprived for several years. And, urged by this sacred desire, the inhabitants of Pau found means, at Whitsuntide, before the bridge was raised, to enter the castle, and slip into the chapel, where they were not discovered until toward the end of mass, when, half opening the door to let in one of my people, some Huguenots who were spying round the door perceived them, and went to tell it to le Pin, secretary of the king my husband, and he sent there some guards of the king my husband, who, dragging them forth and beating them in my presence, carried them off to prison, where they remained a long time, and paid a heavy fine.”
