Achmed Abdullah

“ It was the love of a man, a very good man, the sort of love which all the most expert psychologizing in the world can neither account for nor explain out of existence, and he watched over the Marquis de Chabot-Perhoet as the police kiosque near the Pont Neuf watches over the dusty shop windows of the Quai des Grands-Augustins.
Day after day it was the same tale.
A ring at the bell, angry, short, jerky, hectic—a square-shoed foot thrust in to keep the door from being slammed—and the butcher’s purple face, the butcher’s raucous voice:
“I want my money! I want to speak to the Marquis!” ”

“ A sin of love you committed. But truly,” again he smiled, “not of fleshly, thus sinful love. Shall we call it a sin of the love of loyalty—a sin of virtue—such a sin as was even committed by Agatha, the dear saint? Ah—the sin is not a bad one!”
“Go, my son, and sin no more,” he would wind up, giving him a slight penance, thoroughly convinced that promptly the same afternoon Marc Lapauze would lie to baker or butcher and that promptly the following Monday he would kneel in the confessional and tell the same tale:
“I told the wine dealer that Monsieur le Marquis was not at home. ”

“ What stood between him and ruin was Marc Lapaue, his valet, a Breton like himself, as old as himself—he, whom the clergy-baiting young Norman at the Cercle Richelieu had compared to a police kiosque topped by a celluloid crucifix and surrounded by a pinchbeck halo.
He loved his master. He had never loved anybody else. Not even a woman. ”