Monseigneur Welcome, humble, poor, and out of the world, was not counted among the large mitres. This was visible in the utter absence of young priests around him. We have seen that at Paris "he did not take," and not an aspirant tried to cling to this solitary old man; not the most youthful ambition tried to flourish in his shade. His canons and vicars were good old men, walled up like him in this diocese which had no issue to the Cardinal's hat, and who resembled their bishop with this difference, that they were finished while he was completed. The impossibility of growing up near Monseigneur Welcome was so well felt, that young priests whom he ordained at once obtained letters commendatory to the Archbishop of Aix, or Auch, and went off at score. For, after all, we repeat, men wish to be pushed upward. A saint who lives in a state of excessive self-denial is a dangerous neighbor, he might possibly communicate to you by contagion an incurable poverty, a stiffening of the joints useful for advancement, and, in a word, more renunciation than you care for: and such scabby virtue is shunned. Hence came the isolation of Monseigneur Welcome. We live in the midst of a gloomy society. Succeed,--such is the teaching which falls drop by drop from the corruption hanging over us. Success is a very hideous thing, and its resemblance with merit deceives men. For the herd, success has nearly the same profile as supremacy. Success, that twin brother of talent, has a dupe,--history. Tacitus and Juvenal alone grumble at it. In our days an almost official philosophy wears the livery of success, and waits in its ante-room. Succeed, that is the theory, for prosperity presupposes capacity. Win in the lottery and you are a clever man, for he who triumphs is revered. All you want is to be born under a fortunate star. Have luck and you will have the rest, be fortunate and you will be thought a great man; leaving out five or six immense exceptions, which form the lustre of an age, contemporary admiration is blear-eyedness. Gilding is gold, and it does you no harm to be any one so long as you are the parvenu. The mob is an old Narcissus, adoring itself and applauding the mob. That enormous faculty by which a man is a Moses, Æschylus, Dante, Michael Angelo, or Napoleon, the multitude decrees broadcast and by acclamation to any one who attains his object, no matter in what. Let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy; a false Corneille produce Tiridates; an eunuch contrive to possess a harem; a military Prudhomme accidentally gain the decisive battle of an age; an apothecary invent cardboard soles for the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, and make out of the cardboard sold for leather an income of 400,000 francs a year; a pedler espouse usury and put it to bed with seven or eight millions, of which he is the father and she the mother; a preacher become a bishop by his nasal twang; let the steward of a good family be so rich on