Two high-spirited boys were always at hand to
encourage his taste for flogging, and had it not been for the Marquis,
the Abbe's cup would have been full to overflowing. But the Marquis
loved not the lean, ogling instructor of his sons, and presently began
to assail him with all the abuse of which he was master. He charged the
Abbe with unspeakable villainy; salop and saligaud were the terms in
which he would habitually refer to him. He knew the rascal for a spy,
and no modesty restrained him from proclaiming his knowledge. But
whatever insults were thrown at the Abbe he received with a grin
complacent as Shylock's, for was he not conscious that when he liked the
pound of flesh was his own!
With a fiend's duplicity he laid his plans of ruin and death. The
Marquise, swayed to his will, received him secretly in the blue room
(whose very colour suggests a guilty intrigue), though never, upon
the oath of an Abbe, when the key was turned in the lock. A journey to
Switzerland had freed him from the haunting suspicion of the Marquis,
and at last he might compel the wife to denounce her husband as
a murderer. The terrified woman drew the indictment at the Abbe's
dictation, and when her husband returned to St. Amand he was instantly
thrust into prison. Nothing remained but to cajole the sons into an
expressed hatred of their father, and the last enormity was committed by
a masterpiece of cunning. 'Your father's one chance of escape,' argued
this villain in a cassock, 'is to be proved an inhuman ruffian.
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