Short Fiction

not tell you that I had not seen the interior of the cathedral. I do not know where the tomb (if there be a tomb) of the Eleven Thousand Virgins is, and then, it appears that it is unapproachable, alas!

“A week afterwards, I received ten lines, breaking off our engagement, and then an explanatory letter from her father, whom she had, somewhat late, taken into her confidence.

“At the sight of the shrine, she had suddenly seen through my trickery and my lie, and had also found out that I was innocent of any other crime. Having asked the keeper of the relics whether any robbery had been committed, the man began to laugh, and pointed out to them how impossible such a crime was, but from the moment I had not burgled a sacred edifice, and plunged my profane hand into venerable relics, I was no longer worthy of my fair-haired and delicate betrothed.

“I was forbidden the house; I begged and prayed in vain, nothing could move the fair devotee, and I grew ill from grief. Well, last week, her cousin, Madame d’Arville, who is yours also, sent word to me that she should like to see me, and when I called, she told me on what conditions I might obtain my pardon, and here they are. I must bring her a relic, a real, authentic relic, certified to be such by Our Holy Father, the Pope, of some virgin and martyr, and I am going mad with worry and trouble.

“I will go to Rome, if needful, but I cannot call on the Pope unexpectedly, and tell him my stupid adventure; and, besides, I doubt whether they let private individuals have relics. Could not you give me an introduction to some cardinal, or only to some French prelate, who possesses some remains of a female saint? Or perhaps you may have the precious object she wants in your collection?

“Help me out of my difficulty, my dear Abbé, and I promise you that I will be converted ten years sooner than I otherwise should be!

“Madame d’Arville, who takes the matter seriously, said to me the other day:

“ ‘Poor Gilberte will never marry.’

“My dear old schoolfellow, will you allow your cousin to die the victim of stupid deception on my part? Pray prevent her from being the eleventh thousand and one virgin.

“Pardon me, I am unworthy, but I embrace you, and love you with all my heart.

“Your old friend,

“Henri Fontal.”

In the Moonlight

The Abbé Marignan well deserved to be named after that famous battle. He was a tall, thin, fanatical priest, always in a state of exaltation, but never unjust. All his beliefs were fixed, and they never wavered. He sincerely believed that he understood God, that he penetrated His designs, His wishes, His intentions.

As he walked up and down the garden path of his little country presbytery a question sometimes arose in his mind: “Why did God do that?” Then, imagining himself in God’s place, he searched obstinately, and he nearly always found the reason. He was not the man to murmur in transports of pious humility, “O Lord, thy designs are inscrutable!” What he said was: “I am the servant of God; I ought to know the reason for what he does, or to divine it if I do not.”

Everything in nature seemed to him created with an absolute and admirable logic. The “why” and the “wherefore” always balanced. The dawns were made to rejoice you on waking, the days to ripen the harvests, the rains to water them, the evenings to prepare for sleeping, and the nights dark for sleep.

The four seasons answered perfectly all the requirements of agriculture; and to him the suspicion could never have come that nature has no intention, and that everything that lives has accustomed itself, on the contrary, to the harsh necessities of different periods, of climates, and of matter.

But he hated women; he hated them unconsciously, and despised them by instinct. He often repeated the words of Christ, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” and he would add, “One would almost say that God himself was ill-pleased with that particular work of his hands.” Woman for him was indeed the “child twelve times impure” of whom the poet speaks. She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her damnable work; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously disturbing. And even more than her fatal body, he hated her loving soul.

He had often felt women’s tenderness dwell in him, and though he knew himself to be unassailable, he grew exasperated at this need of loving which quivers continually in their hearts.

To his mind, God had only created woman to tempt man and to test him. Man should not approach her without defensive precautions, and such fears as one has of an ambush. Woman, indeed, was just like a trap, with her arms extended and her lips open toward a man.

He had toleration only for nuns, rendered harmless by their vows, but he treated them harshly notwithstanding, because, ever at the bottom of their locked hearts, their chastened hearts, he perceived the eternal tenderness that constantly went out even to him, although he was a priest. He felt that tenderness in their eyes more filled with the ecstasies of piety than those of the monks, in their ecstasies touched with sex, in their loving yearning for Christ, which made him indignant, because it was woman’s love, carnal love. He felt that accursed tenderness even in their submissiveness, in the softness of their voices as they spoke to him, in their downcast eyes, and in their tears of resignation when he harshly reproved them. And he would shake the skirts of his cassock on coming out of a convent, and would stride off rapidly, as if in flight from danger.

He had a niece who lived with her mother in a little house near by. He was bent on making