Every skull-cap may dream of the tiara. The priest is nowadays the only man who can become a king in a regular manner; and what a king! the supreme king.
Then what a nursery of aspirations is a seminary!
How many blushing choristers, how many youthful abbes bear on their heads Perrette's pot of milk! Who knows how easy it is for ambition to call itself vocation? in good faith, perchance, and deceiving itself, devotee that it is.
Monseigneur Bienvenu, poor, humble, retiring, was not accounted among the big mitres.
This was plain from the complete absence of young priests about him.
We have seen that he "did not take" in Paris.
Not a single future dreamed of engrafting itself on this solitary old man.
Not a single sprouting ambition committed the folly of putting forth its foliage in his shadow.
His canons and grand-vicars were good old men, rather vulgar like himself, walled up like him in this diocese, without exit to a cardinalship, and who resembled their bishop, with this difference, that they were finished and he was completed.
The impossibility of growing great under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so well understood, that no sooner had the young men whom he ordained left the seminary than they got themselves recommended to the archbishops of Aix or of Auch, and went off in a great hurry.
For, in short, we repeat it, men wish to be pushed.
A saint who dwells in a paroxysm of abnegation is a dangerous neighbor; he might communicate to you, by contagion, an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the joints, which are useful in advancement, and in short, more renunciation than you desire; and this infectious virtue is avoided.
Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu.
We live in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption.
Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing.
Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.
For the masses, success has almost the same profile as supremacy.
Success, that Menaechmus of talent, has one dupe,--history.
Juvenal and Tacitus alone grumble at it. In our day, a philosophy which is almost official has entered into its service, wears the livery of success, and performs the service of its antechamber.
Succeed: