“O vain desire for fame! We long to live in the memory of men, and unless we are consummately well-bred men of the world, we would fain publish in the market-place our loves, our joys, our sorrows and our hates. Narcissus, here, can only really believe that he has actually won his Ernestine, when all the world has heard of it. It was the same spirit that drove Phidias to trace a beloved name on the great toe of the Olympian Jove. O thirst of the soul to unburden itself, to plunge into the ocean of the not-self! ‘_To-day, on this bench, Narcissus...._’ “Yet,” thought M. Bergeret once more, “the first virtue of civilised man and the corner-stone of society is dissimulation. It is just as incumbent on us to hide our thoughts as it is for us to wear clothes. A man who blurts out all his thoughts, just as they arise in his mind, is as inconceivable as the spectacle of a man walking naked through a town. Talk in Paillot’s shop is free enough, yet were I, for instance, to express all the fancies that crowd my mind at this moment, all the notions which pass through my head, like a swarm of witches riding on broomsticks down a chimney, if I were to describe the manner in which I suddenly see Madame de Gromance, the incongruous attitudes in which I picture her, the vision of her which comes to me, more ludicrous, more weird, more chimerical, more quaint, more monstrous, more perverted and alien to all seemly conventions, a thousand times more waggish and indecent than that famous figure introduced in the scene of the Last Judgment on the north portal of Saint-Exupère by a masterly craftsman who had caught a glimpse of Lust himself as he leant over a vent-hole of hell; if I were accurately to reveal the strangeness of my dream, it would be concluded that I am a prey to some repulsive mania. Yet, all the same, I know that I am an honourable man, naturally inclined to purity, disciplined by life and reflection to self-control, a modest man wholly dedicated to the peaceful pleasures of the mind, a foe to all excess, and hating vice as a deformity.” As he walked on, deep in this singular train of thought, M. Bergeret caught sight, along the Mall, of Abbé Lantaigne, the principal of the high seminary, and Abbé Tabarit, the chaplain of the prison. The two were in close conversation and M. Tabarit was waggling his long body, with his little pointed head, while he emphasised his words by sweeping gestures of his bony arms. Abbé Lantaigne, with head erect and chest projecting, held his breviary under his arm and listened gravely with far-away gaze and lips locked tightly between stolid cheeks that were never distended by a smile. M. Lantaigne answered M. Bergeret’s bow by a gesture and a word of greeting: “Stop, Monsieur Bergeret,” he cried, “M. Tabarit is not afraid of infidels.” But the prison chaplain was not to be interrupted in the full tide of his thoughts.