"I have made your book known to my husband, who exclaimed: 'It is pure
spiritualism. Here is a closed garden, which on the side of the lilies
and white roses has, I imagine, a small gate opening on the road to the
Academie.'"

Choulette relished these phrases, mingled in his mouth with the perfume
of whiskey, and replaced carefully the letter in its book.

Madame Martin congratulated the poet on being Madame Raymond's candidate.

"You should be mine, Monsieur Choulette, if I were interested in Academic
elections. But does the Institute excite your envy?"

He kept for a few moments a solemn silence, then:

"I am going now, Madame, to confer with divers notable persons of the
political and religious worlds who reside at Neuilly. The Marquise de
Rieu wishes me to be a candidate, in her country, for a senatorial seat
which has become vacant by the death of an old man, who was, they say, a
general during his illusory life. I shall consult with priests, women
and children--oh, eternal wisdom!--of the Bineau Boulevard. The
constituency whose suffrages I shall attempt to obtain inhabits an
undulated and wooded land wherein willows frame the fields. And it is
not a rare thing to find in the hollow of one of these old willows the
skeleton of a Chouan pressing his gun against his breast and holding his
beads in his fleshless fingers. I shall have my programme posted on the
bark of oaks. I shall say 'Peace to presbyteries! Let the day come when
bishops, holding in their hands the wooden crook, shall make themselves
similar to the poorest servant of the poorest parish! It was the bishops