“Such is St. Augustine’s opinion,” added the curé; “and St. Fulgentius involves even the unborn child in damnation. The Church, it is true, has come to no decision on this matter. One remark, however. It is not God, but the sinner who damns himself; and the offence being infinite, since God is infinite, the punishment must be infinite. Is that all, sir?”
“Explain the Trinity to me,” said Bouvard.
“With pleasure. Let us take a comparison: the three sides of a triangle, or rather our soul, which contains being, knowing, and willing; what we call faculty in the case of man is person in God. There is the mystery.”
“But the three sides of the triangle are not each the triangle; these three faculties of the soul do not make three souls, and your persons of the Trinity are three Gods.”
“Blasphemy!”
“So then there is only one person, one God, one substance affected in three ways!”
“Let us adore without understanding,” said the curé.
“Be it so,” said Bouvard. He was afraid of being taken for an atheist, and getting into bad odour at the château.
They now visited there three times a week, about five o’clock in winter, and the cup of tea warmed them. The count’s manners recalled the ease of the ancient court; the countess, placid and plump, exhibited much discernment about everything. Mademoiselle Yolande, their daughter, was the type of the young person, the angel of “keepsakes”; and Madame de Noares, their lady companion, resembled Pécuchet in having a pointed nose like him.
The first time they entered the drawing-room she was defending somebody.
“I assure you he is changed. His gift is a proof of it.”
This somebody was Gorju. He had made the betrothed couple an offer of a Gothic prie-dieu. It was brought. The arms of the two houses appeared on it in coloured relief. M. de Mahurot seemed satisfied with it, and Madame de Noares said to him:
“You will remember my protégés?”
Then she brought in two children, a boy of a dozen years and his sister, who was perhaps ten. Through the holes in their rags could be seen their limbs, reddened with cold. The one was shod in old slippers, the other wore only one wooden shoe. Their foreheads disappeared under their hair, and they stared around them with burning eyeballs like famished wolves.
Madame de Noares told how she had met them that morning on the high-road. Placquevent could not give any information about them.
They were asked their names.
“Victor – Victorine.”
“Where was their father?’
“In jail.”
“And what was he doing before that?”
“Nothing.”
“Their country?”
“St. Pierre.”
“But which St. Pierre?”
The two little ones for sole response, said, snivelling:
“Don’t know – don’t know.”
Their mother was dead, and they were begging.
Madame de Noares explained how dangerous it would be to abandon them; she moved the countess, piqued the count’s sense of honour, was backed up by mademoiselle, pressed the matter – succeeded.
The gamekeeper’s wife would take charge of them. Later, work would be found for them, and, as they did not know how to read or write, Madame de Noares gave them lessons herself, with a view to preparing them for catechism.
When M. Jeufroy used to come to the château, the two youngsters would be sent for; he would question them, and then deliver a lecture, into which he would import a certain amount of display on account of his audience.
On one occasion, when the abbé had discoursed about the patriarchs, Bouvard, on the way home with him and Pécuchet, disparaged them very much.
“Jacob is notorious for his thieveries, David for his murders, Solomon for his debaucheries.”
The abbé replied that we should look further into the matter. Abraham’s sacrifice is a prefigurement of the Passion; Jacob is another type of the Messiah, just like Joseph, like the Brazen Serpent, like Moses.
“Do you believe,” said Bouvard, “that he composed the ‘Pentateuch’?”
“Yes, no doubt.”
“And yet his death is recorded in it; the same observation applies to Joshua; and, as for the Judges, the author informs us that, at the period whose history he was writing, Israel had not yet kings. The work was, therefore, written under the Kings. The Prophets, too, astonish me.”
“He’s going to deny the Prophets now!”
“Not at all! but their overheated imagination saw Jehovah under different forms – that of a fire, of a bush, of an old man, of a dove; and they were not certain of revelation since they are always asking for a sign.”
“Ha! and where have you found out these nice things?”
“In Spinoza.”
At this word, the curé jumped.
“Have you read him?”
“God forbid!”
“Nevertheless, sir, science – ”
“Sir, no one can be a scholar without being a Christian.”
Science furnished a subject for sarcasms on his part:
“Will it make an ear of corn sprout, this science of yours? What do we know?” he said.
But he did know that the world was created for us; he did know that archangels are above the angels; he did know that the human body will rise again such as it was about the age of thirty.
His ecclesiastical self-complacency provoked Bouvard, who, through want of confidence in Louis Hervieu, had written to Varlot; and Pécuchet, better informed, asked M. Jeufroy for explanations of Scripture.
The six days of Genesis mean six great epochs. The pillage of the precious vessels made by the Jews from the Egyptians must be interpreted to mean intellectual riches, the arts of which they had stolen the secret. Isaiah did not strip himself completely, nudus in Latin signifying “up to the hips”: thus Virgil advises people to go naked in order to plough, and that writer would not have given a precept opposed to decency. Ezekiel devouring a book has nothing extraordinary in it; do we not speak of devouring a pamphlet, a newspaper?
“But if we see metaphors everywhere, what will become of the facts?”
The abbé maintained, nevertheless, that they were realities.
This way of understanding them appeared disloyal to Pécuchet. He pushed his investigations further, and brought a note on the contradictions of the Bible.
“Exodus teaches us that for forty years they offered up sacrifices in the desert; according to Amos and Jeremiah they offered up none. Paralipomenon and the book of Esdras are not in agreement as to the enumeration of the people. In Deuteronomy, Moses saw the Lord face to face; according to Exodus, he could not see Him. Where, then, is the inspiration?”
“An additional ground for admitting it,” replied M. Jeufroy smiling. “Impostors have need of connivance; the sincere take no such precautions. In perplexity, have recourse to the Church. She is always infallible.”
“On whom does her infallibility depend?”
“The Councils of Basle and of Constance attribute it to the councils. But often the councils are at variance – witness that which decided in favour of Athanasius and of Arius; those of Florence and Lateran award it to the Pope.”
“But Adrian VI. declares that the Pope may be mistaken, like any other person.”
“Quibbles! All that does not affect the permanence of dogma.”
“Louis Hervieu’s work points out the variations: baptism was formerly reserved for adults, extreme unction was not a sacrament till the ninth century, the Real Presence was decreed in the eighth, purgatory recognised in the fifteenth, the Immaculate Conception is a thing of yesterday.”
And so it came to pass that Pécuchet did not know what to think of Jesus. Three Evangelists make him out to be a man. In one passage of St. John he appears to be equal to God; in another, all the same, to acknowledge himself His inferior.
The abbé rejoined by citing the letter of King Abgar, the acts of Pilate, and the testimony of the sibyls, “the foundation of which is genuine.” He found the Virgin again amongst the Gauls, the announcement of a Redeemer in China, the Trinity everywhere, the Cross on the cap of the Grand Lama, and in Egypt in the closed hands of the gods; and he even exhibited an engraving representing a nilometer, which, according to Pécuchet, was a phallus.
M. Jeufroy secretly consulted his friend Pruneau, who searched for proofs for him in the authors. A conflict of erudition was waged, and, lashed by conceit, Pécuchet became abstruse, mythological. He compared the Virgin to Isis, the Eucharist to the Homa of the Persians, Bacchus to Moses, Noah’s ark to the ship of Xithurus. These analogies demonstrated to his satisfaction the identity of religions.
But there cannot be several religions, since there is only one God. And when he was at the end of his arguments, the man in the cassock exclaimed: “It is a mystery!”
“What is the meaning of that word? Want of knowledge: very good. But if it denotes a thing the mere statement of which involves contradiction, it is a piece of stupidity.”
And now Pécuchet would never let M. Jeufroy alone. He would surprise him in the garden, wait for him in the confessional, and take up the argument again in the sacristy.
The priest had to invent plans in order to escape from him.
One day, after he had started for Sassetot on a sick call, Pécuchet proceeded along the road in front of him in such a way as to render conversation inevitable.
It was an evening about the end of August. The red sky began to darken, and a large cloud lowered above them, regular at the base and forming volutes at the top.
Pécuchet at first talked about indifferent subjects, then, having slipped out the word “martyr”:
“How many do you think there were of them?”
“A score of millions at least.”
“Their number is not so great, according to Origen.”
“Origen, you know, is open to suspicion.”
A big gust of wind swept past, violently shaking the grass beside the ditches and the two rows of young elm trees that stretched towards the end of the horizon.
Pécuchet went on:
“Amongst the martyrs we include many Gaulish bishops killed while resisting the barbarians, which is no longer the question at issue.”
“Do you wish to defend the emperors?”
According to Pécuchet, they had been calumniated.
“The history of the Theban legion is a fable. I also question Symphorosa and her seven sons, Felicitas and her seven daughters, and the seven virgins of Ancyra condemned to violation, though septuagenarians, and the eleven thousand virgins of St. Ursula, of whom one companion was called Undecemilla, a name taken for a figure; still more, the ten martyrs of Alexandria!”
“And yet – and yet they are found in authors worthy of credit.”
Raindrops fell, and the curé unrolled his umbrella; and Pécuchet, when he was under it, went so far as to maintain that the Catholics had made more martyrs than the Jews, the Mussulmans, the Protestants, and the Freethinkers – than all those of Rome in former days.
The priest exclaimed:
“But we find ten persecutions from the reign of Nero to that of Cæsar Galba!”
“Well! and the massacres of the Albigenses? and St. Bartholomew? and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes?”
“Deplorable excesses, no doubt; but you do not mean to compare these people to St. Étienne, St. Lawrence, Cyprian, Polycarp, a crowd of missionaries?”
“Excuse me! I will remind you of Hypatia, Jerome of Prague, John Huss, Bruno, Vanini, Anne Dubourg!”
The rain increased, and its drops dashed down with such force that they rebounded from the ground like little white rockets.
Pécuchet and M. Jeufroy walked on slowly, pressed close to one another, and the curé said:
“After abominable tortures they were flung into vessels of boiling water.”
“The Inquisition made use of the same kind of torture, and it burned very well for you.”
“Illustrious ladies were exhibited to the public gaze in the lupanars.”
“Do you believe Louis XIV.’s dragoons regarded decency?”
“And mark well that the Christians had done nothing against the State.”
“No more had the Huguenots.”
The wind swept the rain into the air. It clattered on the leaves, trickled at the side of the road; and the mud-coloured sky intermingled with the fields, which lay bare after the close of harvest. Not a root was to be seen. Only, in the distance, a shepherd’s hut.
Pécuchet’s thin overcoat had no longer a dry thread in it. The water ran along his spine, got into his boots, into his ears, into his eyes, in spite of the Amoros headpiece. The curé, while lifting up with one hand the tail of his cassock, uncovered his legs; and the points of his three-cornered hat sputtered the water over his shoulders, like the gargoyles of a cathedral.
They had to stop, and, turning their backs to the storm, they remained face to face, belly to belly, holding with their four hands the swaying umbrella.
M. Jeufroy had not interrupted his vindication of the Catholics.
“Did they crucify your Protestants, as was done to St. Simeon; or get a man devoured by two tigers, as happened to St. Ignatius?”
“But make some allowance for the number of women separated from their husbands, children snatched from their mothers, and the exile of the poor across the snow, in the midst of precipices. They huddled them together in prisons; just when they were at the point of death they were dragged along on the hurdle.”
The abbé sneered. “You will allow me not to believe a word of it. And our martyrs are less doubtful. St. Blandina was delivered over naked in a net to a furious cow. St. Julia was beaten to death. St. Taracus, St. Probus, and St. Andronicus had their teeth broken with a hammer, their sides torn with iron combs, their hands pierced with reddened nails, and their scalps carried off.”
“You are exaggerating,” said Pécuchet. “The death of the martyrs was at that time an amplification of rhetoric.”
“What! of rhetoric?”
“Why, yes; whilst what I relate to you, sir, is history. The Catholics in Ireland disembowelled pregnant women in order to take their children – ”
“Never!”
“ – and give them to the pigs.”
“Come now!”
“In Belgium they buried women alive.”
“What nonsense!”
“We have their names.”
“And even so,” objected the priest, angrily shaking his umbrella, “they cannot be called martyrs. There are no martyrs outside the Church.”
“One word. If the value of a martyr depends on the doctrine, how could he serve to demonstrate its existence?”
The rain ceased; they did not speak again till they reached the village. But, on the threshold of the presbytery, the curé said:
“I pity you! really, I pity you!”
Pécuchet immediately told Bouvard about the wrangle. It had filled him with an antipathy to religion, and, an hour later, seated before a brushwood fire, they both read the Curé Meslier. These dull negations disgusted Pécuchet; then, reproaching himself for perhaps having misunderstood heroes, he ran through the history of the most illustrious martyrs in the Biography.
What a clamour from the populace when they entered the arena! and, if the lions and the jaguars were too quiet, the people urged them to come forward by their gestures and their cries. The victims could be seen covered with gore, smiling where they stood, with their gaze towards heaven. St. Perpetua bound up her hair in order that she might not look dejected.
Pécuchet began to reflect. The window was open, the night tranquil; many stars were shining. There must have passed through these martyrs’ souls things of which we have no idea – a joy, a divine spasm! And Pécuchet, by dwelling on the subject, believed that he understood this emotion, and that he would have done the same himself.
“You?”
“Certainly.”
“No fudge! Do you believe – yes or no?”
“I don’t know.”
He lighted a candle; then, his eyes falling on the crucifix in the alcove:
“How many wretches have sought help from that!”
And, after a brief silence:
“They have denaturalised Him. It is the fault of Rome – the policy of the Vatican.”
But Bouvard admired the Church for her magnificence, and would have brought back the Middle Ages provided he might be a cardinal.
“You must admit I should have looked well in the purple.”
Pécuchet’s headpiece, placed in front of the fire, was not yet dry. While stretching it out he felt something in the lining, and out tumbled a medal of St. Joseph.
Madame de Noares wished to ascertain from Pécuchet whether he had not experienced some kind of change, bringing him happiness, and betrayed herself by her questions. On one occasion, whilst he was playing billiards, she had sewn the medal in his cap.
Evidently she was in love with him: they might marry; she was a widow, and he had had no suspicion of this attachment, which might have brought about his life’s happiness.
Though he exhibited a more religious tendency than M. Bouvard, she had dedicated him to St. Joseph, whose succour is favourable to conversions.
No one knew so well as she all the beads and the indulgences which they procure, the effect of relics, the privileges of blessed waters. Her watch was attached to a chain that had touched the bonds of St. Peter. Amongst her trinkets glittered a pearl of gold, in imitation of the one in the church of Allouagne containing a tear of Our Lord; a ring on her little finger enclosed some of the hair of the curé of Ars, and, as she was in the habit of collecting simples for the sick, her apartment was like a sacristy combined with an apothecary’s laboratory.
Her time was passed in writing letters, in visiting the poor, in dissolving irregular connections, and in distributing photographs of the Sacred Heart. A gentleman had promised to send her some “martyr’s paste,” a mixture of paschal wax and human dust taken from the Catacombs, and used in desperate cases in the shape of fly-blisters and pills. She promised some of it to Pécuchet.
He appeared shocked at such materialism.
In the evening a footman from the château brought him a basketful of little books relating pious phrases of the great Napoleon, witticisms of clergymen at inns, frightful deaths that had happened to atheists. All those things Madame de Noares knew by heart, along with an infinite number of miracles. She related several stupid ones – miracles without an object, as if God had performed them to excite the wonder of the world. Her own grandmother had locked up in a cupboard some prunes covered with a piece of linen, and when the cupboard was opened a year later they saw thirteen of them on the cloth forming a cross.
“Explain this to me.”
This was the phrase she used after her marvellous tales, which she declared to be true, with the obstinacy of a mule. Apart from this she was a harmless woman of lively disposition.
On one occasion, however, she deviated from her character.
Bouvard was disputing with her about the miracle of Pezilla: this was a fruit-dish in which wafers had been hidden during the Revolution and which had become gilded of itself.
“Perhaps there was at the bottom a little yellow colour caused by humidity?”
“Not at all! I repeat it, there was not! The cause of the gilding was the contact with the Eucharist.”
By way of proof she relied on the attestations of bishops.
“It is, they say, like a buckler, a – a palladium over the diocese of Perpignan. Ask Monsieur Jeufroy, then!”
Bouvard could not stand this kind of talk any longer; and, after he had looked over his Louis Hervieu, he took Pécuchet off with them.
The clergyman was finishing his dinner. Reine offered them chairs, and, at a gesture from her master, she went to fetch two little glasses, which she filled with Rosolio.
After this Bouvard explained what had brought him there.
The abbé did not reply candidly.
“Everything is possible to God, and the miracles are a proof of religion.”
“However, there are laws of nature – ”
“That makes no difference to Him. He sets them aside in order to instruct, to correct.”
“How do you know whether He sets them aside?” returned Bouvard. “So long as Nature follows her routine we never bestow a thought on it, but in an extraordinary phenomenon we believe we see the hand of God.”
“It may be there,” replied the ecclesiastic; “and when an occurrence has been certified by witnesses – ”
“The witnesses swallow everything, for there are spurious miracles.”
The priest grew red.
“Undoubtedly; sometimes.”
“How can we distinguish them from the genuine ones? If the genuine ones, given as proofs, have themselves need of proofs, why perform them?”
Reine interposed, and, preaching like her master, said it was necessary to obey.
“Life is a passage, but death is eternal.”
“In short,” suggested Bouvard, guzzling the Rosolio, “the miracles of former times are not better demonstrated than the miracles of to-day; analogous reasonings uphold those of Christians and Pagans.”
The curé flung down his fork on the table.
“Again I tell you those miracles were spurious! There are no miracles outside of the Church.”
“Stop!” said Pécuchet, “that is the same argument you used regarding the martyrs: the doctrine rests on the facts and the facts on the doctrine.”
M. Jeufroy, having swallowed a glass of water, replied:
“Even while denying them you believe in them. The world which twelve fishermen converted – look at that! it seems to me a fine miracle.”
“Not at all!”
Pécuchet gave a different account of the matter: “Monotheism comes from the Hebrews; the Trinity from the Indians; the Logos belongs to Plato, and the Virgin Mother to Asia.”
No matter! M. Jeufroy clung to the supernatural and did not desire that Christianity should have humanly the least reason for its existence, though he saw amongst all peoples foreshadowings or deformations of it. The scoffing impiety of the eighteenth century he would have tolerated, but modern criticism, with its politeness, exasperated him.
“I prefer the atheist who blasphemes to the sceptic who cavils.”
Then he looked at them with an air of bravado, as if to dismiss them.
Pécuchet returned home in a melancholy frame of mind. He had hoped for a reconciliation between faith and reason.
Bouvard made him read this passage from Louis Hervieu:
“In order to know the abyss which separates them, oppose their axioms.
“Reason says to you: ‘The whole comprehends the part,’ and faith replies to you: ‘By substantiation, Jesus, while communicating with the apostles, had His body in His hand and His head in His mouth.’
“Reason says to you: ‘No one is responsible for the crime of another,’ and faith replies to you: ‘By original sin.’
“Reason says to you: ‘Three make three,’ and faith declares that ‘Three make one.’ ”
They no longer associated with the abbé.
It was the period of the war with Italy. The respectable people were trembling for the Pope. They were thundering against Victor Emmanuel. Madame de Noares went so far as to wish for his death. Bouvard and Pécuchet alone protested timidly.
When the door of the drawing-room flew open in front of them and they looked at themselves in the lofty mirrors, as they passed, whilst through the windows they caught a glimpse of the walks where glared above the grass the red waistcoat of a man-servant, they felt a sensation of delight; and the luxuriousness of their surroundings rendered them indulgent to the words that were uttered there.
The count lent them all the works of M. de Maistre. He expounded the principles contained in them before a circle of intimate friends – Hurel, the curé, the justice of the peace, the notary, and the baron, his future son-in-law, who used to come from time to time for twenty-four hours to the château.
“What is abominable,” said the count, “is the spirit of ’eighty-nine. First of all they question the existence of God; then they dispute about government; then comes liberty – liberty for insults, for revolt, for enjoyments, or rather for plunder, so that religion and authority ought to proscribe the independents, the heretics. No doubt they will protest against what they call persecution, as if the executioners persecuted the criminals. Let me resume: No State without God! the law being unable to command respect unless it comes from on high, and, in fact, it is not a question of the Italians, but of determining which shall have the best of it, the Revolution or the Pope, Satan or Jesus Christ.”
M. Jeufroy expressed his approval by monosyllables, Hurel by means of a smile, and the justice of the peace by nodding his head. Bouvard and Pécuchet kept their eyes fixed on the ceiling; Madame de Noares, the countess, and Yolande were making clothes for the poor, and M. de Mahurot, beside his betrothed, was turning over the leaves of a book.
Then came intervals of silence, during which everyone seemed to be absorbed in the investigation of a problem. Napoleon III. was no longer a saviour, and he had even given a deplorable example by allowing the masons at the Tuileries to work on Sunday.
“It ought not to be permitted,” was the ordinary phrase of the count.
Social economy, fine arts, literature, history, scientific doctrines – on all he decided in his quality of Christian and father of a family; and would to God that the government, in this respect, exercised the same severity that he exhibited in his household! Authority alone is the judge of the dangers of science: spread too extensively, it inspires fatal ambitions in the breasts of the people. They were happier, these poor people, when the nobles and the bishops tempered the absolutism of the king. The manufacturers now make use of them. They are on the point of sinking into slavery.
And all looked back with regret to the old régime, Hurel through meanness, Coulon through ignorance, Marescot as a man of artistic tastes.
Bouvard, when he found himself at home once more, fortified his mind with a course of Lamettrie, Holbach, and others; whilst Pécuchet forsook a religion which had become a medium of government.
M. de Mahurot had communicated in order the better to charm the ladies, and, if he adopted it as a practice, it was in the interests of the servants.
A mathematician and dilettante, who played waltzes on the piano and admired Topffer, he was distinguished by a tasteful scepticism. What was said about feudal abuses, the Inquisition, and the Jesuits, was the result of prejudice. He extolled progress, though he despised everyone who was not a gentleman, or who had not come from the Polytechnic School!
M. Jeufroy likewise displeased the two friends. He believed in sorcery, made jokes about idolatry, declared that all idioms are derived from the Hebrew. His rhetoric lacked the element of novelty: it was invariably the stag at bay, honey and absinthe, gold and lead, perfumes, urns, and the comparison of the Christian soul to the soldier who ought to say in the face of sin: “Thou shalt not pass!”
In order to avoid his discourses they used to come to the château at as late an hour as possible.
One day, however, they encountered him there. He had been an hour awaiting his two pupils. Suddenly Madame de Noares entered.
“The little girl has disappeared. I am bringing Victor in. Ah! the wretch!”
She had found in his pocket a silver thimble which she had lost three days ago. Then, stifled with sobs:
“That is not all! While I was giving him a scolding, he turned his back on me!”
And, ere the count and countess could have said a word:
“However, it is my own fault: pardon me!”
She had concealed from them the fact that the two orphans were the children of Touache, who was now in prison.
What was to be done?
If the count sent them away they would be lost, and his act of charity would be taken for a caprice.
M. Jeufroy was not surprised. Since man is corrupt, our natural duty is to punish him in order to improve him.
Bouvard protested. Leniency was better. But the count once more expatiated on the iron hand indispensable for children as well as for the people. These two children were full of vices – the little girl was untruthful, the boy brutish. This theft, after all, might have been excused, the impertinence never. Education should be the school of respect.
Therefore Sorel, the gamekeeper, would immediately administer to the youngster a good flogging.
M. de Mahurot, who had something to say to him, undertook the commission. He went to the anteroom for a gun, and called Victor, who had remained in the centre of the courtyard with downcast head.
“Follow me,” said the baron. As the way to the gamekeeper’s lodge turned off a little from Chavignolles, M. Jeufroy, Bouvard, and Pécuchet accompanied him.
At a hundred paces from the château, he begged them not to speak any more while he was walking along the wood.
The ground sloped down to the river’s edge, where rose great blocks of stone. At sunset they looked like slabs of gold. On the opposite side the green hillocks were wrapped in shadow. A keen wind was blowing. Rabbits came out of their burrows, and began browsing on the grass.
A shot went off; a second; a third: and the rabbits jumped up, then rolled over. Victor flung himself on them to seize hold of them, and panted, soaking with perspiration.
“You have your clothes in nice condition!” said the baron.
There was blood on his ragged blouse.
Bouvard shrank from the sight of blood. He would not admit that it ever should be shed.
M. Jeufroy returned:
“Circumstances sometimes make it necessary. If the guilty person does not give his own, there is need of another’s – a truth which the Redemption teaches us.”
According to Bouvard, it had been of hardly any use, since nearly all mankind would be damned, in spite of the sacrifice of Our Lord.
“But every day He renews it in the Eucharist.”
“And whatever be the unworthiness of the priest,” said Pécuchet, “the miracle takes place at the words.”
“There is the mystery, sir.”
Meanwhile Victor had riveted his eyes on the gun, and he even tried to touch it.
“Down with your paws!” And M. de Mahurot took a long path through the wood.
The clergyman had placed Pécuchet on one side of him and Bouvard at the other, and said to the latter:
“Attention, you know. Debetur pueris.”
Bouvard assured him that he humbled himself in the presence of the Creator, but was indignant at their having made Him a man. We fear His vengeance; we work for His glory. He has every virtue: an arm, an eye, a policy, a habitation.
“ ‘Our Father, who art in heaven,’ what does that mean?”
And Pécuchet added: “The universe has become enlarged; the earth is no longer its central point. It revolves amongst an infinite multitude of other worlds. Many of them surpass it in grandeur, and this belittlement of our globe shows a more sublime ideal of God.