what a magical instrument do they form, if you do but touch the keys with a light, skillful, and vigorous hand! How beautiful too is the power of thought! Talk of the acorn that becomes an oak, the seed that grows up to the corn--the seed takes months, the acorn centuries, to unfold its splendors--but here is a little word in eight letters, necklace and this word, falling into my brain but a few minutes ago, has grown and grown till it has become larger than any oak.Yes, that word is the germ of an idea, that, like the oak, lifts itself up towards heaven, for the greater glory of the Lord--such as they call Him, and such as I would assert Him to be, should I attain--and I shall attain--for these miserable Renneponts will pass away like a shadow.And what matters it, after all, to the moral order I am reserved to guide, whether these people live or die? What do such lives weigh in the balance of the great destinies of the world? while this inheritance which I shall boldly fling into the scale, will lift me to a sphere, from which one commands many kings, many nations--let them say and make what noise they will.The idiots--the stupid idiots! or rather, the kind, blessed, adorable idiots! They think they have crushed us, when they say to us men of the church: `You take the spiritual, but we will keep the temporal!'--Oh, their conscience or their modesty inspires them well, when it bids them not meddle with spiritual things! They abandon the spiritual! they despise it, they will have nothing to do with it--oh, the venerable asses! they do not see, that, even as they go straight to the mill, it is by the spiritual that we go straight to the temporal.As if the mind did not govern the body!
They leave us the spiritual--that is, command of the conscience, soul, heart, and judgment--the spiritual--that is, the distribution of heaven's rewards, and punishments, and pardons--without check, without control, in the secrecy of the confessional--and that dolt, the temporal, has nothing but brute matter for his portion, and yet rubs his paunch for joy.Only, from time to time, he perceives, too late, that, if he has the body, we have the soul, and that the soul governs the body, and so the body ends by coming with us also--to the great surprise of Master Temporal, who stands staring with his hands on his paunch, and says: "Dear me! is it possible?"
Then, with a laugh of savage contempt, Rodin began to walk with great strides, and thus continued: "Oh! let me reach it--let me but reach the place of SIXTUS V.--and the world shall see (one day, when it awakes)
what it is to have the spiritual power in hands like mine--in the hands of a priest, who, for fifty years, has lived hardly, frugally, chastely, and who, were he pope, would continue to live hardly, frugally, chastely!"
Rodin became terrible, as he spoke thus.All the sanguinary, sacrilegious, execrable ambition of the worst popes seemed written in fiery characters on the brow of this son of Ignatius.A morbid desire of rule seemed to stir up the Jesuit's impure blood; he was bathed in a burning sweat, and a kind of nauseous vapor spread itself round about him.Suddenly, the noise of a travelling-carriage, which entered the courtyard of the house, attracted his attention.Regretting his momentary excitement, he drew from his pocket his dirty white and red cotton handkerchief, and dipping it in a glass of water, he applied it to his cheeks and temples, while he approached the window, to look through the half-open blinds at the traveller who had just arrived.The projection of a portico, over the door at which the carriage had stopped, intercepted Rodin's view.