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manuscripts in the British Museum or go to the cathedral of
Clermont-Ferrand,
it’s all one to me; become as the rich Mussulmans of Tunis who hire silly women to reduce the hour to its minimum of sense, still it will not be a cure, for there is none that takes place all at once in any man. You know what man really desires?” inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. “One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.”
    “I was not thinking of women at all,” the Baron said, and he tried to stand up.
    “Neither was I,” said the doctor. “Sit down.” He refilled his glass. “The
fine
is very good,” he said.
    Felix answered, “No, thank you, I never drink.”
    “You will,” the doctor said. “Let us put it the other way; the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel. Luther, and I hope you don’t mind my saying so, was as bawdy an old ram as ever trampled his own straw, because the custody of the people’s ‘remissions’ of sins and indulgences had been snatched out of his hands, which was in that day in the shape of half of all they had and which the old monk of Wittenberg had intended to get off with in his own way. So, of course, after that, he went wild and chattered like a monkey in a tree and started something he never thought to start (or so the writing on his side of the breakfast table would seem to confirm), an obscene megalomania—and wild and wanton stranger that
that
is, it must come clear and cool and long or not at all. What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence—and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he gets the bum’s rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know.
    “But turn to the Catholic church, go into mass at any moment—what do you walk in upon? Something that’s already in your blood. You know the story that the priest is telling as he moves from one side of the altar to the other, be he a cardinal, Leo X, or just some poor bastard from Sicily who has discovered that
pecca fortiter
among his goats no longer masses his soul, and has, God knows, been God’s child from the start—it makes no difference. Why? Because you are sitting there with your own meditations
and
a legend (which is nipping the fruit as the wren bites), and mingling them both with the Holy Spoon, which is that story; or you can get yourself into the confessional, where, in sonorous prose, lacking contrition (if you must) you can speak of the condition of the knotty, tangled soul and be answered in Gothic echoes, mutual and instantaneous—one saying hail to your farewell. Mischief unravels and the fine high hand of Heaven proffers the skein again, combed and forgiven!
    “The one House,” he went on, “is hard, as hard as the gift of gab, and the other is as soft as a goat’s hip, and you can blame no man for anything, and you can’t like them at all.”
    “Wait!” said Felix.
    “Yes?” said the doctor.
    Felix bending forward, deprecatory and annoyed, went on: “I like the prince who was reading a book when the executioner touched him on the shoulder telling him that it was time, and he, arising, laid a paper-cutter between the pages to keep his place and closed the book.”
    “Ah,” said the doctor, “that is not man living in his moment, it is man living in his miracle.” He refilled his glass.
“Gesundheit”
he said;
“Freude sei Euch von Gott beschieden, wie heut’ so immerdar!”
    “You argue about sorrow and confusion too easily,”