“Now, your Grace,” said François, squatting on the cot, and refusing to take the only chair in the cell, “I have no time to sing the old songs for you. I have only time to do what you often urged me in the old days in Bienville. That is, to confess.”
“Heaven be praised!” piously responded the Bishop; “I always told my brother, the General, and Mathilde that you were really an excellent person, and that some day you would become a penitent.”
“I have not much time to lose,” said François, “as I am to be shot at six o’clock this afternoon. By the way, what has become of the General and Mathilde? I always hated her.”
“My brother is in a Prussian prison. Mathilde is, I suppose, still at Bienville. I wish the next bishop joy of her if he gets her for a housekeeper. For I hardly think that I shall ever leave Paris alive.”
“It has indeed become a cursed place,” replied François. “I never thought that I should weary of Paris, but I assure your Grace I shall be glad to get out of it on almost any terms, even being shot. But as I have only a half hour in which to confess the sins of thirty years, I think I had better begin.”
François went down on his knees, and began a rapid confession of many and grievous sins. The last item was:
“And I propose to tell a lie and to say that I am Jean Leroux, for whom I am mistaken and numbered and put down in a book, and to be shot in the place of Leroux, an excellent fellow and an old comrade of mine, who is loved by a woman whom I love. So I think it is better to tell the lie and to die in the place of Leroux.”
The Bishop, who had been leaning back, quietly listening with closed eyes to the most remarkable confession he had ever heard, sat up straight and looked sternly at François.
“I shall not permit it,” he said. “It is suicide.”
“But your Grace can’t help yourself,” responded François, still on his knees. “It was told you in confession, and you are not permitted to reveal the secrets of the confessional either to save your own life or anybody else’s life.”