The priest, ashamed of having yielded to this weakness, hastily pushed Esther away, and she sat down quite abashed, for he said:
“You are still the courtesan.” And he calmly replaced the paper in his sash.
Esther, like a child who has a single wish in its head, kept her eyes fixed on the spot where the document lay hidden.
“My child,” the priest went on after a pause, “your mother was a Jewess, and you have not been baptized; but, on the other hand, you have never been taken to the synagogue. You are in the limbo where little children are——”
“Little children!” she echoed, in a tenderly pathetic tone.
“As you are on the books of the police, a cipher outside the pale of social beings,” the priest went on, unmoved. “If love, seen as it swept past, led you to believe three months since that you were then born, you must feel that since that day you have been really an infant. You must, therefore, be led as if you were a child; you must be completely changed, and I will undertake to make you unrecognizable. To begin with, you must forget Lucien.”
The words crushed the poor girl’s heart; she raised her eyes to the priest and shook her head; she could not speak, finding the executioner in the deliverer again.
“At any rate, you must give up seeing him,” he went on. “I will take you to a religious house where young girls of the best families are educated; there you will become a Catholic, you will be trained in the practice of Christian exercises, you will be taught religion. You may come out an accomplished young lady, chaste, pure, well brought up, if——” The man lifted up a finger and paused.
“If,” he went on, “you feel brave enough to leave the ‘Torpille’ behind you here.”
“Ah!” cried the poor thing, to whom each word had been like a note of some melody to which the gates of Paradise were slowly opening. “Ah! if it were possible to shed all my blood here and have it renewed!”