He answered that in truth the ornaments of the priests provided precious models for artists, and that there we had a proof that the Church was no enemy to art.
From that day forward M. Guitrel began to hunt in the country sacristies for splendid antiques, and scarcely a week passed that he did not carry into Rondonneau junior’s, under his great-coat, a chasuble or a cope, adroitly pillaged from some innocent priest. M. Guitrel was, moreover, very scrupulous in remitting to the rifled vestry-board the hundred-sou piece with which the _préfet_ paid for the silk, the brocade, the velvet and the lace.
In six months’ time Madame Worms-Clavelin’s drawing-room had become like a cathedral treasury; a clinging odour of incense lingered round it.
One summer day in that year, M. Guitrel, according to custom, mounted the goldsmith’s stairs, and found M. Worms-Clavelin puffing away merrily in the shop. For the day before the _préfet_ had succeeded in getting his candidate, a cattle-breeder, and young turn-coat royalist, returned; and he was counting on the approval of the minister, who secretly preferred the new to the old republicans as being less exacting and more humble. In the elation of his boisterous satisfaction, he slapped the priest on the shoulder:
“Monsieur l’abbé, what we want is many priests like you, enlightened, tolerant, free from prejudices—for you haven’t any prejudices, not you!—priests who recognise the needs of the present day and the requirements of a democratic society. If the episcopate, if the French clergy would only catch the progressive yet conservative sentiments that the Republic professes, they would still have a fine part to play.”
Then, amidst the smoke of his big cigar, he expounded ideas on religion which testified to an ignorance that filled M. Guitrel with inward dismay. The _préfet_, however, declared himself to be more Christian than many Christians, and in the language of the masonic lodge he extolled the moral teaching of Jesus, while he rejected indiscriminately local superstitions and fundamental dogmas, the needles thrown into the piscina of Saint Phal by marriageable girls, and the real presence in the Eucharist.
M. Guitrel, an easy-going soul, but incapable of yielding a point as to dogma, stammered out: