"
"We have confidence in you."
"Oh!
I am a stone in your walls."
"The chapter assembled.
The vocal mothers, whom I have just consulted again, and who are now deliberating, have decided that Mother Crucifixion shall be buried, according to her wish, in her own coffin, under our altar.
Think, Father Fauvent, if she were to work miracles here!
What a glory of God for the community! And miracles issue from tombs."
"But, reverend Mother, if the agent of the sanitary commission--"
"Saint Benoit II., in the matter of sepulture, resisted Constantine Pogonatus."
"But the commissary of police--"
"Chonodemaire, one of the seven German kings who entered among the Gauls under the Empire of Constantius, expressly recognized the right of nuns to be buried in religion, that is to say, beneath the altar."
"But the inspector from the Prefecture--"
"The world is nothing in the presence of the cross.
Martin, the eleventh general of the Carthusians, gave to his order this device: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis."
"Amen," said Fauchelevent, who imperturbably extricated himself in this manner from the dilemma, whenever he heard Latin.
Any audience suffices for a person who has held his peace too long. On the day when the rhetorician Gymnastoras left his prison, bearing in his body many dilemmas and numerous syllogisms which had struck in, he halted in front of the first tree which he came to, harangued it and made very great efforts to convince it.