“‛Seventeen ... eighteen ... nineteen ... twenty!...’
“The drops fell from the stirring-rod into the silver-gilt goblet. The father swallowed the twenty at a gulp, almost without pleasure. What he longed for was the twenty-first. Oh, that twenty-first drop!... Then, to escape temptation, he went and knelt down at the farthest end of the laboratory, and buried himself in his paternosters. But from the still-warm liquor there rose a faint steam charged with aromas, which came stealing about him and sent him back willy-nilly to his basins.... The liquor was a lovely golden green.... Leaning over it with open nostrils, the father stirred it gently with his stirring-rod, and in the little sparkling bubbles that the emerald wave carried round he seemed to see Auntie Bégon’s eyes laughing and twinkling as they looked at him....
“‛Here goes! Another drop!’
“And with one drop and another the unfortunate at last had his goblet full to the brim. Then, completely vanquished, he sank down in a great arm-chair, and lolling at ease, his eyes half shut, tasted his sin sip by sip, saying softly to himself with a delicious remorse:
“‘Ah! I’m damning myself ... damning myself....’
“The most terrible thing was that at the bottom of this diabolical elixir he rediscovered by some black art or other all Auntie Bégon’s naughty songs: ‛There are three little gossips, who talk of making a banquet’ ... or: ‛Master Andrew’s little shepherdess goes off to the wood by her little self,’ and always the famous one about the White Fathers: ‛Patatin, patatan.’
“Imagine his confusion next day when his cell-mates said to him slyly:
“‛Eh, eh, Father Gaucher, you had a bee in your bonnet last night, when you went to bed!’
“Then it was tears, despair and fasting, sackcloth and discipline. But nothing could avail against the demon of the elixir, and every evening at the same hour his possession began anew.