home in the evening, I asked my cousin and her
husband concerning my new acquaintance, but
beyond knowing the old man by sight, having
heard that he had once been a priest, that he
had lived nearly twenty years in the same
cottage, that he always attended the daily and
weekly services of the parish church, and
partook every Sunday of the communion, but
never officiated in any way—beyond these, and
the circumstance that he was not a native of
the parish, my friends knew nothing whatever
about him. Now, in the Roman Catholic
Church, to be once a priest, is to be always
a priest. No individual who has been
ordained, can take to any other pursuit. If he
sin grievously against morality, or against
ecclesiastical authority, or be convicted of heresy,
he may be suspended from his functions for a
longer or a shorter period by his bishop, but he
nevertheless remains always a priest. I therefore
wondered more and more what could be the
reason of this old man not officiating in his
calling: the more so as I learnt that, owing
to the parish priest having to go once a month
to another village where there was no incumbent,
the church of the place where this old gentleman
lived remained shut up every fourth Sunday.

Of his former life the old gentleman never
spoke, save that he once said in my presence—
for I got by degrees to know him very well indeed,
and often called to sit and talk with him
on my way to and from the post-office—that he
had been ordained a priest in such a year (some
forty years previously) at Paris. In short, it
was only after I had been acquainted with him
for three or four months, and when I had formed
a decided liking for the old man, and when I
was on the eve of leaving that part of France
altogether, that I learnt from another person the
history of Père Flammand.

Monsieur Flammand, when a young man
about five-and-twenty, was ordained priest at
Paris a few months after Napoleon was banished
to St. Helena : that is to say, about the year
1816. After his ordination he was appointed
vicaire—what in England we should call curate
—to one of the large churches in the capital;
and four or five years later he was chosen by
the archbishop of the diocese to be curé—what
with us would be called rector—of a small
country parish about ten leagues from Paris.
In this village—the name of which I forget—
he inhabited a small house close to the church,
containing five rooms besides the kitchen. One
of these rooms was the priest's study; in another
he took his meals; in the third he slept; the fourth
was the room of the old bonne, or housekeeper,
who was his only servant; the fifth, fitted up with
a bed and a few chairs, formed a spare room in
which any brother clergyman coming from a
distance, or any stranger who happened to visit
the curé, could sleep. All the rooms were on
the ground floor: in fact, the house was merely
a better kind of cottage. The room used as a
spare room had been added to the rest of the
house, and butted out close to the main road
which led to the village. It had one door which
opened into the garden, and another which led
into the study, or sitting-room, next to which
was the room in which the priest slept; the
dining-room, the room in which the old bonne
slept, and the kitchen, being all at the other
side of the passage, which, as it were, cut the
house in two.

One very cold winter's evening, shortly after
dark, and in the midst of a snow-storm, a young
peasant woman came to the priest's door, and
besought the housekeeper for a lodging for the
night. She said she was on her way to Paris
to see her father, who was in service in that
city, but she had wandered and lost her way in
the snow-storm. She was not without means
to pay for her lodging, but hoped Monsieur le
Curé might kindly allow her to sleep in his
kitchen for the night. It would not only save
the price of her bed, but be more respectable as
a sojourn for a young unmarried woman than
the auberge of the village. In country places
in France, such applications to the clergy are
by no means uncommon, and were still less so
before railways had drawn all towns and localities
much nearer each other. Moreover, at that time
there were a considerable number of disbanded
soldiers, and other loose characters, wandering
about France: insomuch that no woman who
could have avoided doing it, would have spent
a night in a small village wine-shop, if she had
any other place she could go to.

As a matter of course the priest gave his
consent that the traveller should stop the night
in his house, and the spare room was got ready
for her. The next morning the snow-storm
was still so heavy that it was impossible for
the woman to proceed on her journey, so she
remained at the priest's, helping the old bonne
in her household work, and dining with the
priest and his housekeeper; in the evening she
retired as before to the room which had been
allotted to her.

The following morning, very early, there was
an alarm through the village. A strange woman
had been found murdered in the priest's house.
It appeared that a labourer who often attended
to the priest's garden, and did other odd jobs
about the place, went to the curé's before any
one was awake, with the intention of shovelling
the snow off the roof of the house. Not to
disturb any one, he entered the spare room by
the door which led into the garden, as he had
left a spade in that room on a previous occasion,
and did not know any one was lying there.
To his astonishment he found a woman in the
bed, with her throat cut from ear to ear, and
evident marks of a struggle visible in her torn
clothes and the disordered bed-clothes. The first
thing he did was to call the priest, who appeared
paralysed with fear and dismay. The mayor
and other village authorities were then
summoned, and quickly assembled in the room,
in order to go through the forms which the law
of France requires on such occasions. Near
the bed of the murdered woman was found a
razor, which was recognised as belonging to the
priest, and with this weapon, which was covered