And in answer to Durtal, who spoke of his rheumatism, he resignedly shrugged his shoulders.
"All the residence is the same," said he. "Monseigneur, who is almost a cripple, could not find a single dry room in the whole palace. Heaven forgive me, but I believe his rooms are even damper than mine. In point of fact there ought to be hot-air pipes all over the place, and it will never be done for lack of money."
"But at any rate Monseigneur might have stoves put into the rooms, here and there."
"He!" cried the Abbé, laughing, "but he has no private means whatever. He draws a stipend of ten thousand francs a year and not another penny; for there is no endowment at Chartres, and the revenue from the fees on the ecclesiastical Acts is nothing. In this rich, but irreligious town he can hope for no assistance; the gardener and porter are paid by him; he is obliged for economy's sake to employ Sisters from a convent as cook and linen-keeper. Add to that his inability to keep a carriage, so that he has to hire a conveyance for his pastoral rounds. And how much then do you suppose he has left to live on, if you deduct his charities? Why, he is poorer than you or I!"
"But then Chartres is the fag end of Church preferment, a mere raft for the shipwrecked and starving."
"Thou hast said! Bishop, canons, priests, everybody here is poverty-stricken."
The bell rang, and Madame Bavoil showed in the Abbé Plomb. Durtal recognized him. He looked even more scared than usual; he bowed, backing away, and did not know what to do with his hands, which he buried in his sleeves.
By the end of half an hour, when he was more at his ease, he expanded into smiles, and at last he talked; Durtal, much surprised, saw that the Abbé Gévresin was right. This priest was highly intelligent and well-informed, and what made the man even more attractive was his perfect freedom from the want of breeding, the narrow
ideas, the goody nonsense which make intercourse so difficult with the ecclesiastics in literary circles.
They had settled themselves in the dining-room, as dismal a room as the rest, but warmer, for an earthenware stove was roaring and puffing hot gusts from its open ventilators.