Mademoiselle Cormon and the Abbe de Sponde belonged to that "little Church," sublime in its orthodoxy, which was to the court of Rome what the Ultras were to be to Louis XVIII.

The abbe, more especially, refused to recognize a Church which had compromised with the constitutionals.

The rector was therefore not received in the Cormon household, whose sympathies were all given to the curate of Saint-Leonard, the aristocratic parish of Alencon.

Du Bousquier, that fanatic liberal now concealed under the skin of a royalist, knowing how necessary rallying points are to all discontents (which are really at the bottom of all oppositions), had drawn the sympathies of the middle classes around the rector.

So much for the first case; the second was this:-- Under the secret inspiration of du Bousquier the idea of building a theatre had dawned on Alencon.