five thousand livres of income, how my palace and my lackeys prove that pity is not a virtue, that kindness is not a duty, and that '93 was not inexorable ?”

The old man passed his hand across his forehead as if to dispel a cloud.

"Before answering you," said he, "I beg your pardon. I have done wrong Monsieur; you are in my house, you are my guest. I owe you courtesy. You are discussing my ideas; it is fitting that I confine myself to combatting your reasoning. Your riches and your enjoyments are advantages that I have over you in the debate, but it is not in good taste to avail myself of them. I promise you to use them no more."

"I thank you," said the Bishop.

"Let us get back to the explanation that you asked me. Where were we ? What were you saying to me? that '93 was inexorable?"

"Inexorable, yes," said the bishop. "What do you think of Marat clapping his hands at the guillotine?"

"What do you think of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades ?"

The answer was severe, but it reached its aim with the keenness of a dagger. The Bishop was staggered, no reply presented itself; but it shocked him to hear Bossuet spoken of in that manner. The best men have their fetishes, and sometimes they feel almost crushed at the little respect that logic shows them.

The Conventionist began to gasp; the agonizing asthma, which mingles with the latest breath, made his voice broken; nevertheless, his soul yet appeared perfectly lucid in his eyes. He continued,

"Let us have a few more words here and there-I would like it. Out ide of the Revolution which, taken as a whole, is an immense human affirmation, '93, alas is a reply.

You think it inexorable, but the whole monarchy, Monsieur ? Carrier is a bandit; but what name do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a wretch; but what is your opinion of Lamoignon Bâville? Maillard is frightful, but Saulx Tavannes, if you please? Le Père Duchêne is ferocious, but what epithet will you furnish me for Le Père Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tête is a monster, but less than the Marquis of Louvois. Monsieur, Monsieur, I lament Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen, but I lament also that poor Huguenot woman who, in 1685, under Louis le Grand, Monsieur, while nursing her child was stripped to the waist and tied to a post, while her child was held before her; her breast swelled with milk, and her heart with anguish; the little one, weak and famished, seeing the breast, cried with agony; and the executioner said to the woman, to the nursing mother, "Recant !" giving her the choice between the death of her child and the death of her conscience. What say you to this Tantalus torture adapted to a mother? Monsieur, forget not this; the French Revolution had its reasons. Its wrath will be pardoned by the future; its result is a better world. From its most terrible blows comes a caress for the human race. I must be brief. I must stop. I have too good a cause; and I am dying." And, ceasing to look at the Bishop, the old man completed his idea in these few tranquil words,

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has been advanced."

The Conventionist thought that he had borne down successively one after the other all the interior intrenchments of the Bishop. There was one left, however, and from this, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu's resistance, came forth these words, in which nearly all the rudeness of the exordium reappeared.

"Progress ought to believe in God. The good cannot have an impious servitor. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race."

The old representative of the people did not answer. He was trembling. He looked up into the sky, and a tear gathered slowly in his eye. When the lid was full, the tear rolled down his livid cheek, and he said, almost stammering, low, and talking to himself, his eye lost in the depths,"O thou! O ideal! thou alone dost exist!"

The Bishop felt a kind of inexpressible emotion.

After brief silence, the old man raised his finger towards heaven, and said,

“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a This me of the infinite is God."

me.

The dying man pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and with a shudder of ecstacy, as if he saw some one. When he ceased, his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he had lived through in one minute the few hours that remained to him. What he had said had brought him near to him who is in death. The last moment was at hand.

The Bishop perceived it, time was pressing. He had come as a priest; from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion; he looked upon those closed eyes, he took that old, wrinkled, and icy hand, and drew closer to the dying man.

"This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think it would be a source of regret, if we should have met in vain ?”

The Conventionist re-opened his eyes. Calmness was imprinted upon his face, where there had been a cloud.

"Monsieur Bishop," said he, with a deliberation which perhaps, came still more from the dignity of his soul than from the ebb of his strength, "I have passed my life in

meditation, study, and contemplation.

I was sixty years

I

old when my country called me, and ordered me to take part in her affairs. I obeyed. There were abuses, I fought them; there were tyrannies, I destroyed them; there were rights and principles, I proclaimed and confessed them. The soil was invaded, I defended it; France was threatened, I offered her my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. was one of the masters of the State, the vaults of the Bank were piled with specie, so that we had to strengthen the walls or they would have fallen under the weight of gold and of silver; I dined in the Rue de l'Arbre-Sec at twentytwo sous for the meal. I succoured the oppressed, I solaced the suffering. True, I tore the drapery from the altar; but it was to staunch the wounds of the country. I have always supported the forward march of the human race towards the light, and I have sometimes resisted a progress which was without pity. I have, on occasion, protected my own adversaries, your friends. There is at Peteghem in Flanders, at the very place where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a monastery of Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire in Beaulieu, which I saved in 1793; I have done my duty according to my strength, and the good that I could. After which I was hunted, hounded, pursued, persecuted, slandered, railed at, spit upon, cursed, proscribed. For many years now, with my white hairs, I have perceived that many people believed they had a right to despise me; to the poor, ignorant crowd I have the face of the damned, and I accept, hating no man myself, the isolation of hatred. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am about to die. What have you come to ask of me?"

"Your benediction," said the Bishop. And he fell upon his knees.

When the Bishop raised his head, the face of the old man had become august. He had expired.

The Bishop went home deeply absorbed in thought. He

spent the whole night in prayer. The next day, some persons, emboldened by curiosity, tried to talk with him of the Conventionist G; he merely pointed to Heaven.

From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly love for the weak and the suffering.

Every allusion to "that old scoundrel G——," threw him into a strange reverie. No one could say that the passage of that soul before his own, and the reflex of that grand conscience upon his own, had not had its effect upon his approach to perfection.

66

This pastoral visit" was of course an occasion for criticism by the little local coteries of the place.

Was the bed-side of such a man as that the place for a Bishop? Of course he could expect no conversion there. All these revolutionists are back-sliders. Then why go there? What had he been there to see? He must have been very curious to see a soul carried away by the devil.

One day a dowager, of that impertinent variety who think themselves witty, addressed this sally to him: "Monseigneur, people ask when your Grandeur will have the red bonnet?" "Oh! ho! that is a high colour," replied the Bishop. Luckily those who despise it in a bonnet, venerate it in a hat."

XI.

A QUALIFICATION.

We should be very much deceived if we supposed from this that Monseigneur Bienvenu was a philosopher bishop," or "a patriot curé." His meeting, which we might almost call his communion with the Conventionist G―, left him in a state of astonishment which rendered him still more charitable; that was all.

Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was anything but a