‘See,’ said Lindet to his friend, as they parted at the door of the presbytery of La Couture; ‘see how want and poverty dry up the natural springs of love and virtue; and how the nobles, the Church, and the king, by their oppression of the peasant, are demoralising him. Believe me, if ever a day of reckoning should come, those natural feelings, which oppression has turned into gall, will overwhelm the oppressors. If once the people get the upper hand, mercy must not be expected; wrong-doing has long ago destroyed all the tenderer feelings of our poor.’ But he was wrong in thinking that they were destroyed. Frozen over they were, but not dried up. That night, after André had gone up his ladder to the bed of straw on which he lay, and after several hours of darkness, Gabrielle woke up at the sound of sobs, and creeping lightly from her attic chamber to her father’s door, she saw him by the moonlight that flowed in at the unglazed window, kneeling against his bed, with his head laid upon his arm, and the moon illumining it, weeping convulsedly, and the white light glittered in his tears. CHAPTER III. The west front of Évreux Cathedral occupies one side of a small square, of which the south side is formed by a high wall pierced by the arched gate that conducts into the courtyard of the bishop’s palace. Above this arch was wont to be erected the arms of the prelate occupying the see, impaled with those of the diocese. The Bishop of Évreux in 1788 was Monseigneur de Narbonne-Lara, and the arms borne by him displayed a ramping and roaring lion. As those of the bishopric were a S. Sebastian bound to a pillar, and transfixed with arrows, the combination was peculiar, and was seized on by the wags to point a moral. They observed that the saint typified Religion, bound hand and foot by establishmentarian thongs, and pierced through with many sorrows, whilst Monseigneur’s lion, which seemed bent on devouring the martyr, symbolized the greed and ambition of the episcopacy. Monseigneur de Narbonne had scrambled from a counter to a throne. He was one of those few prelates of the French Church who were not members of great families. Tell it not in Gath! his father made and sold goose-liver pasties at Strasbourg; but Strasbourg is a very long way from Évreux.