unsightly, pitiful. Such was his lot as priest.

Complaints of the soul, wandering flashes of the imagination, criminal
aspirations of the heart, sinful desires ... these ... that was all.

Was this then life?

Was it for this that God had created him, that his mother had drawn him
painfully forth from her entrails, that nature had one day counted one
intelligent being the more?

Ah! he felt full well it was not so. He felt full well it was not so by his
thirst for emotions and enjoyment, by his altered lips, by his aspirations
for an unknown world. He was in haste to strip off for once at least this
old man's shell which enveloped him, this black, hideous, hardened covering
of the bad priest, beneath which he felt his vitality, his youth, his
strength, his heart of thirty, bounding, boiling, roaring, like burning
lava.

The next day be remembered that though it was nearly six months since he
had taken possession of his cure, his pastoral visits were not yet
completed.

In fact, he had gone everywhere, even to Captain Durand's. Only, he had
found the door closed and, after the information he received, he had fully
resolved not to go there again.

[Footnote 1: The Antigone of Soto.]