"Kindly attend to the matter, and--you are quite right, make the cheapest arrangements possible, for I shall have two ecclesiastics of small means with me.

There will be four of us.

Let me know at the hotel this evening at what hour we shall start." Thereupon he again joined his lady-friends, and led them towards the Grotto, following the shady path which skirts the Gave, a cool, sequestered path well suited for lovers' walks.
Feeling somewhat tired, Pierre had remained apart from the others, leaning against the parapet of the new bridge.

And now for the first time he was struck by the prodigious number of priests among the crowd.

He saw all varieties of them swarming across the bridge: priests of correct mien who had come with the pilgrimage and who could be recognised by their air of assurance and their clean cassocks; poor village priests who were far more timid and badly clothed, and who, after making sacrifices in order that they might indulge in the journey, would return home quite scared and, finally, there was the whole crowd of unattached ecclesiastics who had come nobody knew whence, and who enjoyed such absolute liberty that it was difficult to be sure whether they had even said their mass that morning.