Entragues was afraid of growing indifferent because of the confidences of this sad invalid, once an intelligent boy whom his friends had thought destined to write interesting retrospective criticism, a sort of history of the Pleiade, less puerile and braver than that of the doleful Sainte-Beuve. These sicknesses of the will were contagious: he decided to shun this intellectual leper and abolish at once all remembrance of the meeting. A like malady might entrap his nerves and lay low his will in the beaten path of habit; he was not eager for a sojourn, not even for a tourist's excursion, within the borders of madness.
He sauntered along, visited some editorial offices in search of Van Baël, whom he wished to consult on a detail of costume, passed a half hour in an auction room where he bought some ancient silks and a lot of faded church ornaments, ugly, but sacred and smelling of simony.
A simoniac priest had haunted him for years; his was a lean face with malignant eyes, a rigid skeleton-like body, long hands, white hands, supple hands with square nails, hands of a seller of stuffs, hands of one who blesses, hands of a Jew quickly returned into the cloak with the prize of blood. In what century and country lived he?
"To reach some appropriateness of analysis," thought Entragues, while returning to his dwelling, a chasuble on his knees and a great heap of sacerdotal embroideries filling the rest of the carriage, "to instill true life into this simoniac, he should be modern. It would be necessary for me to be able to enter into his church, take a seat some evening and kneel down in his confessional, drinking the wine from his chalice and taking the consecrated wafers from his pyx. Like him I would have to be simoniacal and sacrilegious, Ah! what a test! and like him I would have to feel the irrevocable damnation and daily glorify myself with the opprobrious secret of my lies!"
Sixtine came to his rescue: the red robe rid him of the black robe.
The hour of the meeting, given the evening before, rang.
"Madame has gone out!"
"Ah!"
That was all. Why even open the mouth again?