The Atheists Mass | Page 5

society, it was difficult to find
an hour of confidential solitude when, sitting with their feet on the
fire-dogs and their head resting on the back of an armchair, two men
tell each other their secrets. At last, seven years later, after the
Revolution of 1830, when the mob invaded the Archbishop's residence,
when Republican agitators spurred them on to destroy the gilt crosses
which flashed like streaks of lightning in the immensity of the ocean of
houses; when Incredulity flaunted itself in the streets, side by side with
Rebellion, Bianchon once more detected Desplein going into
Saint-Sulpice. The doctor followed him, and knelt down by him
without the slightest notice or demonstration of surprise from his friend.
They both attended this mass of his founding.
"Will you tell me, my dear fellow," said Bianchon, as they left the
church, "the reason for your fit of monkishness? I have caught you
three times going to mass---- You! You must account to me for this
mystery, explain such a flagrant disagreement between your opinions
and your conduct. You do not believe in God, and yet you attend mass?
My dear master, you are bound to give me an answer."
"I am like a great many devout people, men who on the surface are
deeply religious, but quite as much atheists as you or I can be."
And he poured out a torrent of epigrams on certain political personages,
of whom the best known gives us, in this century, a new edition of
Moliere's Tartufe.

"All that has nothing to do with my question," retorted Bianchon. "I
want to know the reason for what you have just been doing, and why
you founded this mass."
"Faith! my dear boy," said Desplein, "I am on the verge of the tomb; I
may safely tell you about the beginning of my life."
At this moment Bianchon and the great man were in the Rue des
Quatre-Vents, one of the worst streets in Paris. Desplein pointed to the
sixth floor of one of the houses looking like obelisks, of which the
narrow door opens into a passage with a winding staircase at the end,
with windows appropriately termed "borrowed lights"--or, in French,
jours de souffrance. It was a greenish structure; the ground floor
occupied by a furniture-dealer, while each floor seemed to shelter a
different and independent form of misery. Throwing up his arm with a
vehement gesture, Desplein exclaimed:
"I lived up there for two years."
"I know; Arthez lived there; I went up there almost every day during
my first youth; we used to call it then the pickle-jar of great men! What
then?"
"The mass I have just attended is connected with some events which
took place at the time when I lived in the garret where you say Arthez
lived; the one with the window where the clothes line is hanging with
linen over a pot of flowers. My early life was so hard, my dear
Bianchon, that I may dispute the palm of Paris suffering with any man
living. I have endured everything: hunger and thirst, want of money,
want of clothes, of shoes, of linen, every cruelty that penury can inflict.
I have blown on my frozen fingers in that _pickle-jar of great men_,
which I should like to see again, now, with you. I worked through a
whole winter, seeing my head steam, and perceiving the atmosphere of
my own moisture as we see that of horses on a frosty day. I do not
know where a man finds the fulcrum that enables him to hold out
against such a life.
"I was alone, with no one to help me, no money to buy books or to pay

the expenses of my medical training; I had not a friend; my irascible,
touchy, restless temper was against me. No one understood that this
irritability was the distress and toil of a man who, at the bottom of the
social scale, is struggling to reach the surface. Still, I had, as I may say
to you, before whom I need wear no draperies, I had that ground-bed of
good feeling and keen sensitiveness which must always be the
birthright of any man who is strong enough to climb to any height
whatever, after having long trampled in the bogs of poverty. I could
obtain nothing from my family, nor from my home, beyond my
inadequate allowance. In short, at that time, I breakfasted off a roll
which the baker in the Rue du Petit-Lion sold me cheap because it was
left from yesterday or the day before, and I crumbled it into milk; thus
my morning meal cost me but two sous. I dined only every other day in
a boarding-house where the meal cost me sixteen sous. You know as
well