the trip to Gavarnie, the Abbe was seized with a dread lest he should be
obliged to leave his pretty lady-visitors: "As you please, my dear sir,"
he replied. "Kindly attend to the matter, and--you are quite right, make
the cheapest arrangements possible, for I shall have two ecclesiastics of
small means with me. There will be four of us. Let me know at the hotel
this evening at what hour we shall start."

Thereupon he again joined his lady-friends, and led them towards the
Grotto, following the shady path which skirts the Gave, a cool,
sequestered path well suited for lovers' walks.

Feeling somewhat tired, Pierre had remained apart from the others,
leaning against the parapet of the new bridge. And now for the first time
he was struck by the prodigious number of priests among the crowd. He saw
all varieties of them swarming across the bridge: priests of correct mien
who had come with the pilgrimage and who could be recognised by their air
of assurance and their clean cassocks; poor village priests who were far
more timid and badly clothed, and who, after making sacrifices in order
that they might indulge in the journey, would return home quite scared
and, finally, there was the whole crowd of unattached ecclesiastics who
had come nobody knew whence, and who enjoyed such absolute liberty that
it was difficult to be sure whether they had even said their mass that
morning. They doubtless found this liberty very agreeable; and thus the
greater number of them, like Abbe des Hermoises, had simply come on a
holiday excursion, free from all duties, and happy at being able to live
like ordinary men, lost, unnoticed as they were in the multitude around
them. And from the young, carefully groomed and perfumed priest, to the
old one in a dirty cassock and shoes down at heel, the entire species had
its representative in the throng--there were corpulent ones, others but
moderately fat, thin ones, tall ones and short ones, some whom faith had