Urbain Grandier | Page 5

installed there as a priest-in-charge, he received a prebendal stall,
thanks to the same patrons, in the collegiate church of Sainte-Croix.
It is easy to understand that the bestowal of these two positions on so
young a man, who did not even belong to the province, made him seem
in some sort a usurper of rights and privileges belonging to the people
of the country, and drew upon him the envy of his brother- ecclesiastics.
There were, in fact, many other reasons why Urbain should be an
object of jealousy to these: first, as we have already said, he was very
handsome, then the instruction which he had received from his father
had opened the world of science to him and given him the key to a
thousand things which were mysteries to the ignorant, but which he
fathomed with the greatest ease. Furthermore, the comprehensive
course of study which he had followed at the Jesuit college had raised
him above a crowd of prejudices, which are sacred to the vulgar, but for
which he made no secret of his contempt; and lastly, the eloquence of
his sermons had drawn to his church the greater part of the regular
congregations of the other religious communities, especially of the
mendicant orders, who had till then, in what concerned preaching,
borne away the palm at Loudun. As we have said, all this was more
than enough to excite, first jealousy, and then hatred. And both were
excited in no ordinary degree.
We all know how easily the ill-natured gossip of a small town can
rouse the angry contempt of the masses for everything which is beyond
or above them. In a wider sphere Urbain would have shone by his many
gifts, but, cooped up as he was within the walls of a little town and
deprived of air and space, all that might have conduced to his success
in Paris led to his destruction at Loudun.
It was also unfortunate for Urbain that his character, far from winning
pardon for his genius, augmented the hatred which the latter inspired.
Urbain, who in his intercourse with his friends was cordial and
agreeable, was sarcastic, cold, and haughty to his enemies. When he

had once resolved on a course, he pursued it unflinchingly; he jealously
exacted all the honour due to the rank at which he had arrived,
defending it as though it were a conquest; he also insisted on enforcing
all his legal rights, and he resented the opposition and angry words of
casual opponents with a harshness which made them his lifelong
enemies.
The first example which Urbain gave of this inflexibility was in 1620,
when he gained a lawsuit against a priest named Meunier. He caused
the sentence to be carried out with such rigour that he awoke an
inextinguishable hatred in Meunier's mind, which ever after burst forth
on the slightest provocation.
A second lawsuit, which he likewise gained; was one which he
undertook against the chapter of Sainte-Croix with regard to a house,
his claim to which the chapter, disputed. Here again he displayed the
same determination to exact his strict legal rights to the last iota, and
unfortunately Mignon, the attorney of the unsuccessful chapter, was a
revengeful, vindictive, and ambitious man; too commonplace ever to
arrive at a high position, and yet too much above his surroundings to be
content with the secondary position which he occupied. This man, who
was a canon of the collegiate church of Sainte-Croix and director of the
Ursuline convent, will have an important part to play in the following
narrative. Being as hypocritical as Urbain was straightforward, his
ambition was to gain wherever his name was known a reputation for
exalted piety; he therefore affected in his life the asceticism of an
anchorite and the self-denial of a saint. As he had much experience in
ecclesiastical lawsuits, he looked on the chapter's loss of this one, of
which he had in some sort guaranteed the success, as a personal
humiliation, so that when Urbain gave himself airs of triumph and
exacted the last letter of his bond, as in the case of Meunier, he turned
Mignon into an enemy who was not only more relentless but more
dangerous than the former.
In the meantime, and in consequence of this lawsuit, a certain Barot, an
uncle of Mignon and his partner as well, got up a dispute with Urbain,
but as he was a man below mediocrity, Urbain required in order to

crush him only to let fall from the height of his superiority a few of
those disdainful words which brand as deeply as a red-hot iron. This
man, though totally wanting in parts, was very rich, and having no
children was always surrounded by a horde of relatives, every one of
whom