‘I shall go to the bishop,’ returned Lindet; ‘and I shall give him the money into his hand. I shall have the joy, the satisfaction, may be, of seeing, for once in my life, a bishop’s cheek burn with shame.’ ‘Is this a Christian temper?’ ‘Is it the part of a Christian bishop to consume his clergy with exactions and with persecutions, and to torture them with insults? Our bishop neglects his diocese. He receives some four hundred and fifty thousand livres per annum, and can only visit Bernay, with five thousand souls in it, once in three years, to confirm the young and to meet the clergy. When he comes amongst us on these rare occasions he takes up his abode at the Abbey, and receives us, the priests who seek advice and assistance, at a formal interview of ten minutes, into which we must condense our complaints; and then we are dismissed without sympathy and without redress.’ Lindet took a few steps along the path to La Couture. ‘I will accompany you, Jean,’ he said; ‘and I will tell you how I was treated when last I had access to Monseigneur. He sat at a little table; on it was a newspaper and a hand-bell, and his large gold watch. He signed to me to stand before him; I did so, holding my hands behind my back like a boy who is about to be scolded. He asked me some trifling question about my health, which I did not answer. I could not afford to waste one out of my ten minutes thus; so I broke out into an account of our troubles here. I told him there was no school for the children; that I had no parsonage house. God knows! I would teach the poor children myself if they could be crowded into my garret, but the good woman with whom I lodge will not permit it. I told him of the want and misery here, of the exactions under which the poor are bowed. I spoke to him of the hollow-eyed hungry workmen, and of the women hugging their starving babes to their empty breasts.’ The priest stopped, gasping for an instant, his trembling white hand working in the air, and expressing his agitation with mute eloquence. ‘All the while I talked, his eye was on the newspaper; I saw that he was reading, and was not attending to me. What he read was an account of a fête at Versailles, from which, alas! he was absent. Then he touched his bell. “Your time is up,” he said; and I was bowed out.’ ‘You forget that the time of a prelate is precious.’ ‘I grant you that,’ answered Lindet, with quivering voice; ‘too precious to be spent amidst a crowd of lackeys in dancing attendance on royalty; too precious to be wasted on fêtes and dinners to all the lordlings that Monseigneur can gather about his table in the hopes that they may shed some lustre on his own new-fledged nobility.’ ‘I will not hear you, my friend,’ said Lebertre, turning from him; ‘you are too bitter, too vindictive. You would tear our bishops from their seats, and strip them of their purple.’