'It is not this woman who causes me alarm in René's case. According to what you tell me, she would have left him when once her whim was gratified. In his present state she will not give him a thought. It is the moral condition of the poor lad, as shown by this affair, which troubles me. Here is a young man of twenty-five, brought up as he has been, knowing how indispensable he is to the best of sisters, possessing that divine and incomparable gift called talent--a gift which, if properly directed, can produce such great things--and possessing it, too, at a tragic moment in the history of our country; here is one, I say, who knows that to-morrow his country may be lost for ever in another hurricane, that its safety is entrusted to every one of us--to you and me and each of these passers-by--and yet all this does not outweight the grief of being deceived by a wretched woman! But,' he continued, as if his remarks applied to Claude as much as to the wounded man he had just quitted, 'what is it you hope to find in that troubled sea of sensuality into which you plunge on a pretext of love, except sin with its endless misery? You speak of complication. Human life is very simple. It is all comprised in God's Ten Commandments. Find me a case, a single one, which is not provided for there. Has a blindness fallen upon the men of this generation that a lad, whom I knew to be pure, has sunk so low in so short a time, and only through breathing the vapours of the age? Ah, sir,' he added in the accents of a father deceived in his son, 'I was so proud of him! I expected so much of him!' 'You talk as if he were dead,' said Claude, feeling both moved and irritated by the Abbé's words. On the one hand, he pitied him for his evident distress; but, on the other hand, he could not bear to hear the priest enunciate such ideas, although they were also his own in his fits of remorse. Like many modern sceptics, he was incessantly sighing for a simpler faith, and yet his taste for intellectual or sentimental complexities was incessantly leading him to look upon any and every faith he examined as a mutilation. There suddenly came over him an irresistible desire to contradict the Abbé Taconet and to defend the very youth whose fate he had himself so bewailed on reaching the Rue Coëtlogon that afternoon.