times going to mass---- You! You must account to me for this mystery,
explain such a flagrant disagreement between your opinions and your
conduct. You do not believe in God, and yet you attend mass? My dear
master, you are bound to give me an answer."

"I am like a great many devout people, men who on the surface are deeply
religious, but quite as much atheists as you or I can be."

And he poured out a torrent of epigrams on certain political personages,
of whom the best known gives us, in this century, a new edition of
Moliere's _Tartufe_.

"All that has nothing to do with my question," retorted Bianchon. "I
want to know the reason for what you have just been doing, and why you
founded this mass."

"Faith! my dear boy," said Desplein, "I am on the verge of the tomb; I
may safely tell you about the beginning of my life."

At this moment Bianchon and the great man were in the Rue des
Quatre-Vents, one of the worst streets in Paris. Desplein pointed to
the sixth floor of one of the houses looking like obelisks, of which
the narrow door opens into a passage with a winding staircase at the
end, with windows appropriately termed "borrowed lights"--or, in French,
_jours de souffrance_. It was a greenish structure; the ground floor
occupied by a furniture-dealer, while each floor seemed to shelter a
different and independent form of misery. Throwing up his arm with a
vehement gesture, Desplein exclaimed:

"I lived up there for two years."