in the parish. The customs of the Catholic confessional, so beautiful but so dangerous, strangely excited her imagination. Once a week, on Saturday, it was an inexpressible sweetness for her to be half an hour alone with him, as if face to face with God, to see him, to feel him filling his role of God, to breathe his breath, to undergo the sweet humiliation of his reprimands, of telling him her most intimate thoughts, her scruples, her apprehensions. Yet you must not think that she abused it. Very rarely does a pious woman dare to use the confessional for a love confidence. She may enjoy it greatly; she risks giving herself up to feelings which are not without danger; but the fact that such feelings are always a little mystic, is irreconcilable with the horror of sacrilege. In any case our poor girl was so shy, that the words would have died on her lips. Her passion was a silent, intimate, devouring fire. Feeling like that, to see him every day, him, handsome, young, always busied with his majestic functions, officiating with dignity amid a people bent before him, minister, judge, and director of her own soul! It was too much. The unhappy child’s head could not stand it; she lost her way. Disorders, more and more serious, arose in this strong organism which could not tolerate being turned from its path. Her old father attributed to a certain weakness of mind that which was the result of the inner ravages of impossible dreams in a heart which love had pierced from side to side.

‘Like an impetuous river which, meeting an insurmountable obstacle, renounces its direct course and twists aside, the poor girl, having no means of telling her love to the man she loved, fell back on trifles. To hold his attention an instant, not to be any chance comer in his eyes, to be allowed to do him little services, to be able to imagine that she was useful to him: that was enough for her. “My God, who knows?” she could say to herself, “he is a man after all: perhaps in his heart he is touched, and is only held back by the discipline of his calling.” All these efforts met an iron barrier, a wall of ice. The vicar did not swerve from an absolute coldness. She was the daughter of the man he respected the most; but she was a woman. Oh! if he had avoided her, if he had treated her roughly, that would have been a triumph for her, and a proof that she had touched his heart; but this uniform politeness, this resolution not to see the most obvious signs of love, was something terrible. He did not reprove her, he did not hide from her: he did not depart from the unshakeable decision he had made of not admitting her existence except as an abstraction.

‘At the end of some time, this became a cruelty. Repulsed, desperate, the poor girl fell ill; her eyes wandered, but she kept guard on herself; in its entirety nobody saw her secret, she ate her heart out alone. “What!” she would say to herself, “Shall I not be able to arrest his glance for a moment? He will not admit to me that I exist? I shall be for him, whatever I do, only a shadow, a phantom, a soul, along with a hundred others? His love, that would be too much to desire: but his attention, his looks? To be his equal, he so clever, so near to God, I would know not to lay claim to that: to be a mother by him, oh, that would be a sacrilege: but to be his, to be a Martha to him, the first of his servants, charged with the modest duties which I am quite fit for, and in that way have all in common with him, all, that is to say, his house, that which matters to the humble woman who has not been initiated to higher thoughts, oh, that would be paradise!”

‘She stayed whole afternoons motionless, seated in her chair, enchained to this fixed idea. She saw him, imagined herself with him, surrounding him with attentions, looking after his home, kissing the hem of his robe. She repelled those insensate dreams: but after giving herself up to them for hours, she was pale, half dead. She existed no longer for those who surrounded her. Her father ought to have seen it: but what could the simple old man do against an evil, the very thought of which his honest soul could not conceive?

‘Things continued so for perhaps a year. It is probable that the vicar noticed nothing; our priests live in this respect so conventionally, in a sort of resolution not to see anything. This admirable chastity only excited the imagination of the poor child. Love in her case became a cult, a pure adoration, an exaltation. She found thus a relative repose. Her imagination led her towards inoffensive games; she liked to tell herself that she was working for him, that she was busy doing something for him. She was at the stage of dreaming while wide awake, of executing like a somnambulist acts of which she was only half aware. Night and day she had only one thought; she saw herself serving him, caring for him, counting his linen,