But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows. At
this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone in
the public part of the monastery. This itself is hard by the gate, with
a small dining-room on the ground-floor and a whole corridor of cells
similar to mine upstairs. I have stupidly forgotten the board for a
regular retraitant; but it was somewhere between three and five francs a
day, and I think most probably the first. Chance visitors like myself
might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing was
demanded. I may mention that when I was going away, Father Michael
refused twenty francs as excessive. I explained the reasoning which led
me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
he would not accept it with his own hand. 'I have no right to refuse for
the monastery,' he explained, 'but I should prefer if you would give it
to one of the brothers.'
I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
other guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
solitude and prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted cassock,
through the bleak hills of Gevaudan. The other was a short, grizzling,
thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed with a knitted
spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his button-hole. This
last was a hard person to classify. He was an old soldier, who had seen
service and risen to the rank of commandant; and he retained some of the
brisk decisive manners of the camp. On the other hand, as soon as his
resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady of the Snows as a
boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways, had decided to remain
as a novice. Already the new life was beginning to modify his
appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and smiling air
of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a Trappist, but
partook of the character of each. And certainly here was a man in an
interesting nick of life. Out of the noise of cannon and trumpets, he
was in the act of passing into this still country bordering on the grave,
where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like phantoms,
communicate by signs.
At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in
France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on the
example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the example
of Carthage. The priest and the commandant assured me of their sympathy
with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness of
contemporary feeling.
'Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely
agree,' said I, 'but he flies up at you in a temper.'
They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian.
While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a
word in praise of Gambetta's moderation. The old soldier's countenance
was instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat
the table like a naughty child.
'Comment, monsieur?' he shouted. 'Comment? Gambetta moderate? Will you
dare to justify these words?'
But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk. And suddenly, in
the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on
his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a
flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word.
It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th),
that this couple found out I was a heretic. I suppose I had misled them
by some admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it
was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out. I had been
tolerantly used both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father
Michael; and the good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious
weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder and said, 'You must be a
Catholic and come to heaven.' But I was now among a different sect of
orthodox. These two men were bitter and upright and narrow, like the
worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were worse.
The priest snorted aloud like a battle-horse.
'Et vous pretendez mourir dans cette espece de croyance?' he demanded;
and there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his
accent.