with religion, although no bigot, he was of the greatest strictness, and,
admitting everything as an article of faith, nothing appeared difficult
to his conception. He believed the deluge to have been universal, and he
thought that, before that great cataclysm, men lived a thousand years and
conversed with God, that Noah took one hundred years to build the ark,
and that the earth, suspended in the air, is firmly held in the very
centre of the universe which God had created from nothing. When I would
say and prove that it was absurd to believe in the existence of
nothingness, he would stop me short and call me a fool.

He could enjoy a good bed, a glass of wine, and cheerfulness at home. He
did not admire fine wits, good jests or criticism, because it easily
turns to slander, and he would laugh at the folly of men reading
newspapers which, in his opinion, always lied and constantly repeated the
same things. He asserted that nothing was more troublesome than
incertitude, and therefore he condemned thought because it gives birth to
doubt.

His ruling passion was preaching, for which his face and his voice
qualified him; his congregation was almost entirely composed of women of
whom, however, he was the sworn enemy; so much so, that he would not look
them in the face even when he spoke to them. Weakness of the flesh and
fornication appeared to him the most monstrous of sins, and he would be
very angry if I dared to assert that, in my estimation, they were the
most venial of faults. His sermons were crammed with passages from the
Greek authors, which he translated into Latin. One day I ventured to
remark that those passages ought to be translated into Italian because
women did not understand Latin any more than Greek, but he took offence,
and I never had afterwards the courage to allude any more to the matter.
Moreover he praised me to his friends as a wonder, because I had learned