No sound was heard; at this hour the monastery was asleep. Durtal and the abbot were walking on the banks of the great pond, where the water was alive, it alone wakeful in the slumber of the woods, for the moon, which shone in a cloudless sky, sowed a myriad of goldfish, and this luminous spawn, fallen from the planet, mounted, descended, sparkled in a thousand little points of fire, of which the wind as it blew increased the brightness.
The abbot spoke no longer, and Durtal, who was thinking, intoxicated by the sweetness of the night, groaned suddenly. He had just considered that at this same hour the next day he would be at Paris, and seeing the monastery, whose pale front appeared at the end of a walk as at the end of a dark tunnel, he cried, thinking of all the monks who inhabited it,
"Ah! they are happy!"
And the abbot answered, "Too happy."
Then gently, in a low voice,
"Yes, it is true we enter here to do penance, to mortify ourselves, and we have hardly begun to suffer when God consoles us. He is so good that He Himself wishes to deceive Himself about our merits. If at certain moments He allows the Demon to persecute us, He gives us in exchange so much happiness that there is no proportion preserved between the recompense and the sorrow. Sometimes when I think of it, I ask myself how there still subsists that equilibrium that nuns and monks are charged to maintain, since neither of us suffer enough to neutralize the repeated sins of towns?"
The abbot stopped, and then went on pensively,
"The world does not even conceive that the austerity of the abbeys can profit it. The doctrine of mystical compensation escapes it entirely. It cannot represent to itself that the substitution of the innocent for the guilty is necessary when to suffer merited punishment is concerned. Nor does it explain to itself any more that in wishing to suffer for others, monks turn aside the wrath of heaven, and establish a solidarity in the good which is a counter-weight against the federation of evil. God knows, moreover, with what cataclysms the unconscious world would be menaced, if in consequence of a sudden disappearance of all the cloisters, the equilibrium which saves it were broken."
"The case has already presented itself," said Durtal, who while listening to the Trappist thought of the Abbé Gévresin, and remembered how that priest had expressed himself on the same subject in nearly similar terms. "The Revolution, in fact, suppressed all convents with one stroke of a pen, but I think that the history of that time when so many hucksters were busy is still to be written. Instead of searching for documents on the acts, and even on the persons of the Jacobins, the archives of the religious orders which existed at that time should be ransacked.
"In working thus at the side of the Revolution, in sounding its neighbourhood, its foundations will be exhumed. Its causes will be brought to the surface, and it will certainly be discovered that in proportion to the suppression of convents, monstrous excesses had birth. Who knows if the demoniacal madness of Carrier or Marat do not accord with the death of an abbey whose sanctity preserved France for years."