Mauprat
"'And why, I should like to know? You make them all believe that you are a saint!"
"'Because I know how to behave like a saint; whereas you—you behave like a fool. Why, you can't stop swearing for an hour, and you would be breaking all the mugs after dinner!'
"'I say, Népomucène,' rejoined the other, 'do you fancy that you would get off scot-free if I were caught and tried?'
"'Why not?' answered the Trappist. 'I had no hand in your folly, nor did I advise anything of this kind.'
"'Ha! ha! my fine apostle!' cried Antony, throwing himself back in his chair in a fit of laughter. 'You are glad enough about it, now that it is done. You were always a coward; and had it not been for me you would never have thought of anything better than getting yourself made a Trappist, to ape devotion and afterward get absolution for the past, so as to have a right to draw a little money from the "Headbreakers" of Sainte-Sévère. By Jove! a mighty fine ambition, to give up the ghost under a monk's cowl after leading a pretty poor life and only tasting half its sweets, let alone hiding like a mole! Come, now; when they have hung my pretty Bernard, and the lovely Edmonde is dead, and when the old neck-breaker has given back his big bones to the earth; when we have inherited all that pretty fortune yonder, you will own that we have done a capital stroke of business—three at a blow! It would cost me rather too much to play the saint, seeing that convent ways are not quite my ways, and that I don't know how to wear the habit; so I shall throw the cowl to the winds, and content myself with building a chapel
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