"_Ventre Saint Gris!_" cried Marteville to himself, "this will never come to an end;" "_Mais, mon fils_," he said aloud, "I have told you, all that is pardoned. Speak, can you charge yourself with murder, treason, conspiracy, sorcery,"--Gaultier groaned--"astrology,"--Gaultier groaned still more deeply--"or of having concealed any such crimes, when committed by others?" Gaultier groaned a third time. The Norman had now brought him to the point; and after much moaning, hesitation, and agony of mind, he acknowledged that he had been privy to a meeting of sorcerers.--Nay, that he had even conducted a notorious Astrologer, a little man in grey, on the road to meet the defunct Père Le Rouge and his companion the Devil, at the old Chateau of St. Loup; and that it was his remorse of conscience for this crime, together with his terror at revealing it, after the menaces of the Sorcerer, that had thrown him into the lamentable state in which he then lay. By degrees, the Norman drew from him every particular, and treasuring them up in his memory, he hastened to give the suffering innkeeper absolution; which, though not performed in the most orthodox manner, quite satisfied Gaultier; who concluded, that any little difference of form from that to which he had been used, proceeded from the Norman being a Jesuit and a _directeur_; and he afterwards was heard to declare, that the Père Alexis was the most pious and saintly of men, and that one absolution from him was worth a hundred from any one else; although the _Curé_ of the village, when he heard the method in which it had been administered, pronounced it to be heterodox and heretical, and in short a damnable error. And here be it remarked, that a neighbouring _Curé_ having taken up the quarrel of Père Alexis, and pronounced his form to be the right one, a violent controversy ensued, which raged in Champagne for more than fifty years, producing nine hundred pamphlets, three thousand letters, twenty public discussions, and four Papal bulls, till at length it was agreed on all hands to write to the Jesuits of Alençon, and demand their authority for such a deviation from established rules: when it was discovered that they administered absolution like every one else; and that they never had such a person as Père Alexis belonging to their very respectable and learned body.