“It is a matter of principle. I should have decided in favour of the fraternities. It is also a matter of business. The fraternities did a great deal of good.” The _préfet_ summed up from out of the cloud of his cigar-smoke. “Harking back over what has been done is useless. But the new spirit is a spirit of conciliation.” And again M. Guitrel bowed, while Rondonneau junior bent over his account books his bald head where the flies pitched. One day, being asked to give her opinion about a vase that the _préfet_ was to present with his own hand to the winner in the race for draught-horses, Madame Worms-Clavelin came to Rondonneau junior’s with her husband. She found M. Guitrel in the jeweller’s office. He made a feint to leave the place. But they begged him to remain. They even consulted him as to the nymphs who formed, by their bending figures, the handles of the cup. The _préfet_ would have preferred them to be Amazons. “Amazons, doubtless,” murmured the professor of sacred rhetoric. Madame Worms-Clavelin would have liked centauresses. “Centauresses, yes, yes,” said the priest; “or rather centaurs.” Meanwhile Rondonneau junior was holding up the wax model in his fingers in front of the spectators and smiling in admiration. “Monsieur l’abbé,” asked the _préfet_, “does the Church always ban the nude in art?” M. Guitrel replied: “The Church has never absolutely proscribed nude studies; but she has always judiciously restrained their employment.” Madame Worms-Clavelin looked at the priest and thought how remarkably like Madame Vacherie he was. She confided to him that she had a passion for curios, that she was mad about brocades, stamped velvets, gold fringes, embroidery and lace. She disclosed to him the covetous desires accumulated in her mind since the days when she used to trail in her youth and poverty in front of the shop-windows of the second-hand dealers in the Quartier Bréda. She told him that she had dreams of a salon with old copes and old chasubles, and that she was also collecting antique jewels. He answered that in truth the ornaments of the priests provided precious models for artists, and that there we had a proof that the Church was no enemy to art. From that day forward M. Guitrel began to hunt in the country sacristies for splendid antiques, and scarcely a week passed that he did not carry into Rondonneau junior’s, under his great-coat, a chasuble or a cope, adroitly pillaged from some innocent priest. M. Guitrel was, moreover, very scrupulous in remitting to the rifled vestry-board the hundred-sou piece with which the _préfet_ paid for the silk, the brocade, the velvet and the lace. In six months’ time Madame Worms-Clavelin’s drawing-room had become like a cathedral treasury; a clinging odour of incense lingered round it.