The Spaniard looked at Lucien, and a smile came over his face.
“Let us wait till we come to the next hill; we can walk up and talk out in the open. The back seat of a traveling carriage is not the place for confidences.”
They traveled in silence for sometime; the rapidity of the movement seemed to increase Lucien’s moral intoxication.
“Here is a hill, father,” he said at last awakening from a kind of dream.
“Very well, we will walk.” The Abbé called to the postilion to stop, and the two sprang out upon the road.
“You child,” said the Spaniard, taking Lucien by the arm, “have you ever thought over Otway’s Venice Preserved? Did you understand the profound friendship between man and man which binds Pierre and Jaffier each to each so closely that a woman is as nothing in comparison, and all social conditions are changed?—Well, so much for the poet.”
“So the canon knows something of the drama,” thought Lucien. “Have you read Voltaire?” he asked.
“I have done better,” said the other; “I put his doctrine in practice.”
“You do not believe in God?”
“Come! it is I who am the atheist, is it?” the Abbé said, smiling. “Let us come to practical matters, my child,” he added, putting an arm round Lucien’s waist. “I am forty-six years old, I am the natural son of a great lord; consequently, I have no family, and I have a heart. But, learn this, carve it on that still so soft brain of yours—man dreads to be alone. And of all kinds of isolation, inward isolation is the most appalling. The early anchorite lived with God; he dwelt in the spirit world, the most populous world of all. The miser lives in a world of imagination and fruition; his whole life and all that he is, even his sex, lies in his brain. A man’s first thought, be he leper or convict, hopelessly sick or degraded, is to find another with a like fate to share it with him. He will exert the utmost that is in him, every power, all his vital energy, to satisfy that craving; it is his very life. But for that tyrannous longing, would Satan have found companions? There is a whole poem yet to be written, a first part of Paradise Lost; Milton’s poem is only the apology for the revolt.”