It is true that Abbé Guitrel, professor of sacred rhetoric at the
high seminary of …, was intimately connected with M. _le préfet_
Worms-Clavelin and with Madame Worms-Clavelin, _née_ Coblentz. But
Abbé Lantaigne was wrong in believing that M. Guitrel frequented the
drawing-rooms of the prefecture, where his presence would have been
equally disquieting to the Archbishop and to the masonic lodges, since
the _préfet_ was master of the lodge “The Rising Sun.” It was in the
confectioner’s shop kept by Dame Magloire in the Place Saint-Exupère,
where he went every Saturday at five o’clock to buy two little
three-sou cakes, one for his servant and the other for himself, that
the priest had met the _préfet’s_ wife, while she was eating _babas_
there in the company of Madame Lacarelle, wife of M. _le préfet’s_
private secretary.
By his demeanour, at once obsequious and discreet, which inspired
entire confidence and removed all apprehensions, the professor
of sacred rhetoric had instantly gained the good graces of Madame
Worms-Clavelin, to whom he suggested the mind, the face, and almost
the sex of those old-clothes women, the guardian angels of her youth
in the difficult days of Batignolles and the Place Clichy, when Noémi
Coblentz had finished growing up and was beginning to fade in the
business office kept by her father Isaac in the midst of distress-sales
and police-raids. One of these dealers in second-hand clothes, a
Madame Vacherie, who esteemed her, had acted as go-between for her and
an active and promising young barrister, M. Théodore Worms-Clavelin,
who, finding her seriously-minded and practically useful, had married
her after the birth of their daughter Jeanne, and she in return had
cleverly pushed him in the administration. Abbé Guitrel was very much
like Madame Vacherie. They had the same look, the same voice, the same
gestures. This propitious likeness had aroused in Madame Worms-Clavelin
a sudden sympathy. Besides, she had always revered the Catholic
clergy as one of the powers of this world. She constituted herself M.
Guitrel’s advocate in her husband’s good graces. M. Worms-Clavelin, who
recognised in his wife a quality that remained him a deep mystery, the
quality of tact, and who knew her to be clever, received Abbé Guitrel
courteously the first time he met him in the jeweller’s shop kept by
Rondonneau junior in the Rue des Tintelleries.
He had gone there to see the designs for the cups ordered by the
State to be given as prizes in the races organised by the Society for
the Improvement of Horse-breeding. After that visit he frequently
returned to the goldsmith’s, drawn by an innate taste for precious
metals. On his side, Abbé Guitrel contrived frequent occasions for
visiting the show-rooms of Rondonneau the younger, maker of sacred
vessels: candlesticks, lamps, pyxes, chalices, patens, monstrances, and
tabernacles. The _préfet_ and the priest were not ill-pleased at these
meetings in the first-storey show-rooms, out of sight of prying eyes,
in front of a counter loaded with bullion and amidst the vases and
statuettes that M. Worms-Clavelin called _bondieuseries_.[C] Stretched
out in Rondonneau junior’s one arm-chair, M. Worms-Clavelin sent a
little wave of his hand to M. Guitrel, who, black and fat, stole along
by the glass cases like a great rat.
[C] Lit. good-goderies—_i.e._, pious gimcrackeries.
“Good-day, monsieur l’abbé. Delighted to see you!”
And it was true. He vaguely felt that, in contact with this
ecclesiastic of peasant stock, as French in priestly character and in
type as the blackened stones of Saint-Exupère and the old trees on the
Mall, he was frenchifying himself, naturalising himself, stripping
off the ponderous remnants of his German and Semitic descent. Intimacy
with a priest was flattering to the Jewish official. In it he tasted,
without actually acknowledging it to himself, the pride of revenge.
To browbeat, to patronise one of those tonsured heads entrusted for
eighteen centuries, both by heaven and earth, with the excommunication
and extermination of the circumcised, was for the Jew a keen and
flattering success. And besides, this dirty, threadbare, yet respected,
cassock that bowed before him entered châteaux where the _préfet_ was
not received. The aristocratic women of the department revered this
garb now humiliated before the official uniform. Deference from one of
the clergy was almost equivalent to deference from that rural nobility
that had not completely come over, and of whose scornful coldness the
Jew, though by no means sensitive, had had painful experiences. M.
Guitrel, humble, yet with _finesse_, made his deference appreciated.
Being honoured as a powerful master by this ecclesiastical politician,
the head of the department returned in patronage what he received in
deference, and flung conciliatory speeches at Abbé Guitrel:
“Doubtless there are good, devoted, and intelligent priests. When the
clergy takes its stand upon its privileges …”
And Abbé Guitrel bowed.