The young man easily guessed what had happened, how the dementia, the irresistible onrush of the devout, had ended by sweeping the Bishop and the priest from the positions they had originally taken up. Abbé Quandieu had long resisted, unwilling as he was to lend himself to what he regarded as idolatry. But at sight of the scandal occasioned by his demeanour and the solitude growing around him, he had been seized with anguish, wondering if religion would not suffer from his uncompromising attitude, and at last resigning himself to the painful duty of casting the holy mantle of his ministry over the new and pestilential sore. One day he had carried the story of his doubts, his struggles, his defeat to Monseigneur Bergerot, who like him was vanquished, who like him feared some diminution of the power of the Church if it should confess its follies and its flaws. And the weeping Bishop had embraced the priest and promised to attend the ceremony which was to seal the reconciliation with the Capuchins and their allies. Keen suffering must have come to them from their powerlessness, from their enforced cowardice; and they must have suffered yet more bitterly at seeing their ideal soiled, their faith made a mere matter of barter. Ah! that Christianity, so pure at its advent, a great cause of brotherhood and deliverance, and even that Catholicism which had winged its flight so boldly and proved itself so powerful an instrument of civilisation, in what mud would both expire, if they must be thus allowed to sink to the vilest trading, to become the prey of the basest passions, mere things to be bought and sold, instruments for the diffusion of brutishness and falsehood! Worms were gathering in them, as in all old things, and soon would come rottenness, final decomposition, which would leave nought save a little dust and mouldiness behind.