Let us leave the catacomb, if you wish, and you can repeat your story to me up above.

A very great misfortune?
Well," he added, pressing the hand of the young man whom, personally, he liked as much as he detested his views, "rest assured, my dear child, we will prevent it!" There was in the manner in which he uttered those words the tranquillity of a mind which knows not uneasiness, that of a believer who feels sure of always accomplishing all that he wishes to do.

It would not have been Montfanon, that is to say, a species of visionary, who loved to argue with Dorsenne, because he knew that in spite of all he was understood, if he had not continued, as they walked along the lighted corridor, while remounting toward daylight: "If it is all the same to you, sir apologist of the modern world, I should like to pause here and ask you frankly: Do you not feel yourself more contemporary with all the dead who slumber within these walls than with a radical elector or a free-mason deputy?
Do you not feel that if these martyrs had not come to pray beneath these vaults eighteen hundred years ago, the best part of your soul would not exist?
Where will you find a poetry more touching than that of these symbols and of these epitaphs?
That admirable De Rossi showed me one at Saint Calixtus last year.

My tears flow as I recall it.

'Pete pro Phoebe et pro virginio ejus'.