CHAPTER IV.
AN ADVENTURE WITH A CARMELITE.
When I had thanked the academician of the Academy of Sciences for having set me right, I went away quite out of heart, praising Providence, but muttering between my teeth these doleful words: "What! to have no more than forty crowns a year to live on, nor more than twenty-two years to live! Alas! may our life be yet shorter, since it is to be so miserable!"
SON, KNOW THAT WE OURSELVES BEG CHARITY; WE DO NOT BESTOW IT
As I was saying this, I found myself just opposite a very imposing house. Already was I feeling myself pressed by hunger. I had not so much as the hundred and twentieth part of the sum that by right belongs to each individual. But as soon as I was told that this was the palace of my reverend fathers, the bare-footed Carmelites, I conceived great hopes, and said to myself, "Since these saints are humble enough to go bare-footed, they will be charitable enough to give me a dinner."
I rang. A Carmelite came to the door.
"What would you please to have, my son?"
"A morsel of bread, my reverend father. The new edicts have stripped me of everything."
"Son, know that we ourselves beg charity; we do not bestow it."
"What! while your holy institute forbids you to wear shoes, you have the house of a prince, and can you refuse to give me a meal!"
"My son, it is true, we go without stockings and shoes; that is an expense the less; we feel no more cold in our feet than in our hands. As to our fine house, we built it very easily, and we have a hundred thousand livres a year of income from houses in the same street."
"So, then! you suffer me to die of hunger, while you have an income of a hundred thousand livres! I suppose you pay fifty thousand of these to the new government?"
"Heaven preserve us from paying a single farthing! It is only the produce of the land, cultivated by laborious hands, callous with work, and moistened with tears, that owes taxes to the legislative and executive power. The alms which have been bestowed upon us have enabled us to build those houses by the rent of which we get a hundred thousand livres a year. But these alms, coming from the fruits of the earth, and having, consequently, already paid the tax, ought not to pay twice. They have sanctified the faithful believers, who have impoverished themselves to enrich us, and we continue to beg charity, and to lay under contribution the Faubourg of St. Germain in order to sanctify a still greater number of the faithful believers."
Having thus spoken, the Carmelite politely shut the door in my face.
I then passed along and stopped before the Hôtel of the Mousquetaires gris, and related to those gentlemen what had just happened to me. They gave me a good dinner and a half-crown (un écu). One of them proposed to go directly and set fire to the convent; but a musketeer, more discreet than he, remonstrated with him, insisting that the time for action had not yet arrived, and implored him to wait patiently a little longer.