On the bare chance, he put a notice in the personal column of one of the big papers, running thus:
“Arcade. Come back to your Maurice.”
Day after day went by, and Arcade did not return.
One morning, at seven o’clock, Maurice went to St. Sulpice to hear Abbé Patouille say Mass, then, as the priest was leaving the sacristy, he went up to him and asked to be heard for a moment.
They descended the steps of the church together and in the bright morning light walked round the fountain of the Quatre Évêques. In spite of his troubled conscience and the difficulty of presenting so extraordinary a case with any degree of credibility, Maurice related how the angel Arcade had appeared to him and had announced his unhappy resolve to separate from him and to stir up a new revolt of the spirits of glory. And young d’Esparvieu asked the worthy ecclesiastic how to find his celestial guardian again, since he could not bear his absence, and how to lead his angel back to the Christian faith. Abbé Patouille replied in a tone of affectionate sorrow that his dear child had been dreaming, that he took a morbid hallucination for reality, and that it was not permissible to believe that good angels may revolt.
“People have a notion,” he added, “that they can lead a life of dissipation and disorder with impunity. They are wrong. The abuse of pleasure corrupts the intelligence and impairs the understanding. The devil takes possession of the sinner’s senses, penetrating even to his soul. He has deceived you, Maurice, by a clumsy artifice.”
Maurice objected that he was not in any way a victim of hallucinations, that he had not been dreaming, that he had seen his guardian angel with his eyes and heard him with his ears.
“Monsieur l’Abbé,” he insisted, “a lady who happened to be with me at the time—I need not mention her name—also saw and heard him. And, moreover, she felt the angel’s fingers straying … well, anyhow, she felt them. … Believe me, Monsieur l’Abbé, nothing could be more real, more positively certain than this apparition. The angel was fair, young, very handsome. His clear skin seemed, in the shadow, as if bathed in milky light. He spoke in a pure, sweet voice.”
“That, alone, my child,” the Abbé interrupted quickly, “proves you were dreaming. According to all the demonologies, bad angels have a hoarse voice, which grates like a rusty lock, and even if they did contrive to give a certain look of beauty to their faces, they cannot succeed in imitating the pure voice of the good spirits. This fact, attested by numerous witnesses, is established beyond all doubt.”
“But, Monsieur l’Abbé, I saw him. I saw him sit down, stark naked, in an armchair on a pair of black stockings. What else do you want me to tell you?”
The Abbé Patouille appeared in no way disturbed by this announcement.
“I say once more, my son,” he replied, “that these unhappy illusions, these dreams of a deeply troubled soul, are to be ascribed to the deplorable state of your conscience. I believe, moreover, that I can detect the particular circumstance that has caused your unstable mind thus to come to grief. During the winter in company with Monsieur Sariette and your Uncle Gaétan, you came, in an evil frame of mind, to see the Chapel of the Holy Angels in this church, then undergoing repair. As I observed on that occasion, it is impossible to keep artists too closely to the rules of Christian art; they cannot be too strongly enjoined to respect Holy Writ and its authorized interpreters. Monsieur Eugène Delacroix did not suffer his fiery genius to be controlled by tradition. He brooked no guidance and, here, in this chapel he has painted pictures which in common parlance we call lurid, compositions of a violent, terrible nature which, far from inspiring the soul with peace, quietude, and calm, plunge it into a state of agitation. In them the angels are depicted with wrathful countenances, their features are sombre and uncouth. One might take them to be Lucifer and his companions meditating their revolt. Well, my son, it was these pictures, acting upon a mind already weakened and undermined by every kind of dissipation, that have filled it with the trouble to which it is at present a prey.”
But Maurice would have none of it.
“Oh, no! Monsieur l’Abbé,” he cried, “it is not Eugène Delacroix’s pictures that have been troubling me. I didn’t so much as look at them. I am completely indifferent to that kind of art.”
“Well, then, my son, believe me: there is no truth, no reality, in any of the story you have just related to me. Your guardian angel has certainly not appeared to you.”
“But, Abbé,” replied Maurice, who had the most absolute confidence in the evidence of the senses, “I saw him tying up a woman’s shoelaces and putting on the trousers of a suicide.”
And stamping his feet on the asphalt, Maurice called as witnesses to the truth of his words the sky, the earth, all nature, the towers of St. Sulpice, the walls of the great seminary, the Fountain of the Quatre Évêques, the public lavatory, the cabmen’s shelter, the taxis and motor buses’ shelter, the trees, the passersby, the dogs, the sparrows, the flower-seller and her flowers.
The Abbé made haste to end the interview.
“All this is error, falsehood, and illusion, my child,” said he. “You are a Christian: think as a Christian—a Christian does not allow himself to be seduced by empty shadows. Faith protects him against the seduction of the marvellous, he leaves credulity to freethinkers. There are credulous people for you—freethinkers! There is no humbug they will not swallow. But the Christian carries a weapon which dissipates diabolical illusions—the sign of the cross. Reassure yourself, Maurice—you have not lost your guardian angel. He still watches over you. It
