In a students' hotel near the Odéon, where a few Scandinavians lived, I
became acquainted with two or three young lawyers and more young abbés
and priests. If you went in when the company were at table in the
dining room, the place rang again with their noisy altercations. The
advocates discussed politics, literature and religion with such ardour
that the air positively crackled. They were apparently practising to
speak one day at the Bar or in the Chamber. It was from surroundings
such as these that Gambetta emerged.
The young abbés and priests were very good fellows, earnest believers,
but so simple that conversations with them were only interesting
because of their ignorance and lack of understanding. Scandinavians in
Paris who knew only Roman Catholic priests from _Tartufe_ at the
theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was
the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful
cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks
and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet.
Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men
whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one
of these three types. But my ecclesiastical acquaintances were as free
from hypocrisy as from fanaticism. They were good, honest children of
the commonalty, with, not the cunning, but the stupidity, of peasants.
Many a day I spent exploring the surroundings of Paris in their
company. We went to St. Cloud and Sèvres, to Versailles and St.
Germain, to Saint Denis, to Montmorency and Enghien, or to Monthléry, a
village with an old tower from the thirteenth century, and then
breakfasted at Longjumeau, celebrated for its postillion. There Abbé
Leboulleux declared himself opposed to cremation, for the reason that
it rendered the resurrection impossible, since God himself could not
collect the bones again when the body had been burnt. It was all so
amiable that one did not like to contradict him. At the same meal
another was giving a sketch of the youth of Martin Luther; he left the
church--_on se demande encore pourquoi_. In the innocence of his heart
this abbé regarded the rebellion of Luther less as an unpermissible
than as an inexplicable act.