A Second Home by Honoré de Balzac
page 48 of 95 (50%)
page 48 of 95 (50%)
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takes the communion every Sunday God has made, and amuses herself by
restoring chapels. She had given so many ornaments, and albs, and chasubles, she has crowned the canopy with so many feathers, that on the occasion of the last Corpus Christi procession as great a crowd came together as to see a man hanged, just to stare at the priests in their splendid dresses and all the vessels regilt. This house too is a sort of Holy Land. It was I who hindered her from giving those three pictures to the Church--a Domenichino, a Correggio, and an Andrea del Sarto--worth a good deal of money." "But Angelique?" asked the young man. "If you do not marry her, Angelique is done for," said the Count. "Our holy apostles counsel her to live a virgin martyr. I have had the utmost difficulty in stirring up her little heart, since she has been the only child, by talking to her of you; but, as you will easily understand, as soon as she is married you will carry her off to Paris. There, festivities, married life, the theatres, and the rush of Parisian society, will soon make her forget confessionals, and fasting, and hair shirts, and Masses, which are the exclusive nourishment of such creatures." "But the fifty thousand francs a year derived from Church property? Will not all that return--" "That is the point!" exclaimed the Count, with a cunning glance. "In consideration of this marriage--for Madame Bontems' vanity is not a little flattered by the notion of grafting the Bontems on to the genealogical tree of the Granvilles--the aforenamed mother agrees to settle her fortune absolutely on the girl, reserving only a |
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