- [first lines]
- Donissan: With you, everything looks easy. Alone, I'm useless. I'm like the zero, only useful next to other numbers. Priests are so miserable. They waste their lives seeing God being ignored. People make jokes on us. We're like those walls where people write obscenities.
- Menou-Segrais: You're tired.
- Donissan: Tired? I'm not tired. Tired is a bad thought.
- Menou-Segrais: Suspend your visits.
- Donissan: Those visits do more harm than good. In the beginning, I didn't know evil. I learned it from the mouths of the sinners.
- Menou-Segrais: No one knows better than a priest about the terrible monotony of sin.
- Donissan: I can't speak to them. I can't only make absolutions and feel sorry.
- Menou-Segrais: If one absolution in thirty was worthy, the world would be brief.