“It is also notorious that M. Guitrel occupies a position with respect to Madame Worms-Clavelin that is more mercantile than religious. This lady is fond of antiquities, and although a Jewess, she does not despise any articles connected with religion, provided that they have the merit of art or of antiquity. It is unhappily well attested that M. Guitrel busies himself in buying for Madame Worms-Clavelin at an absurd price the antique furniture of village parsonages, left in the care of ignorant churchwardens. In this way carved wainscoting, priestly vestments, chalices, and pyxes are torn from the sacristies of your rural churches, Monseigneur, in order that at the prefecture they may adorn the private apartments of M. and Madame Worms-Clavelin. And everybody knows that Madame Worms-Clavelin has trimmed with the splendid and sacred copes of Saint-Porchaire the species of furniture vulgarly called ‘_poufs_.’ I do not imply that M. Guitrel has derived any material and direct profit from these transactions; but it must needs grieve your paternal heart that a priest of the diocese should have joined in robbing your churches of that wealth which proves, even in the eyes of unbelievers, the superiority of Christian to profane art. “Second, without complaint or protest Abbé Guitrel allows the rumour to spread and grow that his elevation to the vacant bishopric of Tourcoing is favoured by the President of the Council, the Minister for Justice and Religion. Now this rumour is prejudicial to the minister, for, although a freethinker and a freemason, he ought to be too careful of the interests of the Church over which he has been appointed civil overseer to place in the seat of the blessed Loup a priest such as M. Guitrel. And if this invention were to be traced to its source, it is to be feared that in M. Guitrel himself would be found the first and foremost contriver of it. “Third, having formerly occupied his leisure in translating into French verse the Bucolics of that Latin poet called Calpurnius, whom the best critics agree in relegating to the lowest class of insipid babblers, Abbé Guitrel, with a carelessness which I would fain believe to be quite unintentional, has allowed this work of his youth to circulate privately. A copy of the Bucolics was addressed to the free-thinking radical paper of the district, _le Phare_, which published extracts from it; among them there occurred in particular this line, which I blush to put before the paternal eyes of Your Eminence: “And our heaven of bliss is a well-loved breast.[B]