Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 03.djvu/117

Rh "That cannot be," said the bailiff; and then entered into a long explanation of the nature of a convent, telling him that this word was derived from conventus, in the Latin, which signifies "an assembly"; and the Huron could not comprehend why he might not be admitted into this assembly. As soon as he was informed that this assembly was a kind of prison, in which girls were shut up, a shocking institution, unknown in Huronia and England, he became as furious as was his patron Hercules when Euritus, king of Œchalia, no less cruel than the abbé of St. Yves, refused him the beauteous Iola, his daughter, not inferior in beauty to the abbé's sister. He was upon the point of going to set fire to the convent to carry off his mistress, or be burned with her. Miss Kerkabon, terrified at such a declaration, gave up all hopes of ever seeing her nephew a subdeacon; and, sadly weeping, she exclaimed: "The devil has certainly been in him since he has been christened."

The ingenuous Hercules walked toward the sea-coast wrapped in deep and gloomy melancholy, with his double-charged fusee upon his shoulder and his cutlass by his side, shooting now and then a bird, and often tempted to shoot himself; but he had still some