The midday sun darted its clear white rays. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air. The solitary orb swung across the vast repose in which everything was wrapped and urged its blazing course towards the horizon. On the deserted Mall the shadows lay still and heavy at the foot of the elms. A road-mender slept in the bottom of the ditch that bounds the ramparts. The birds were silent.

Seated at the shady end of a bench three parts steeped in sunlight, M. Bergeret forgot, under these classic trees, in the friendly solitude, his wife and his three daughters, his cramped life and his cramped home; like Æsop he revelled in the freedom of his mind, and his analytical imagination roved irresponsibly among the living and the dead.

However AbbÉ Lantaigne, head of the high seminary, was passing, with his breviary in his hand, down the broad walk of the Mall. M. Bergeret rose to offer his shady place on the bench to the priest. M. Lantaigne came up and sank into it composedly, with that priestly dignity which never left him and which in him was just simplicity. M. Bergeret sat near him, at the spot where the shadow fell mingled with light from the feathery end of the branches, so that his black clothing was covered with golden discs, and over his dazzled eyes his eyelids began to blink.

He congratulated AbbÉ Lantaigne in these words:

“It is said everywhere, monsieur l’abbÉ, that you will be called to the bishopric of Tourcoing.

But this choice is too good a one not to make one doubtful. You are believed to be a royalist, and that counts against you. Are you not a republican like the Pope?”

M. LANTAIGNE: “I am a republican like the Pope. That is to say, I am at peace and not at war with the government of the Republic. But peace is not love. And I do not love the Republic.”

M. BERGERET: “I guess your reasons. You condemn it for being freethinking and hostile to the clergy.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Assuredly I condemn it as irreligious and inimical to the priests. But this irreligion, these hostilities, are not inherent in it. They are the attributes of republicans, not of the Republic. They diminish or increase at every change of ministers. They are less to-day than they were yesterday. Possibly they will increase to-morrow. Perhaps a time will come when they will be non-existent, as they were non-existent under the rule of Marshal MacMahon, or at least during the delusive beginnings of that rule and under the deceptive ministry of May 16th. They are accidental, not essential. But even if it were respectful towards religion and its ministers, I should still hate the Republic.”

M. BERGERET: “Why?”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Because it is diversity. In that it is essentially bad.”

M. BERGERET: “I don’t quite understand you, monsieur l’abbÉ.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “That comes from your not having the theological mind. At one time even laymen received some impress of it. Their college note-books, which they preserved, supplied them with the elements of philosophy. That is especially true of the men of the seventeenth century. At that time all those who were educated knew how to reason, even the poets. It is the teaching of Port-Royal that underlies the PhÈdre of Racine. But to-day when theology has been relegated to the seminaries, no one knows how to reason, and men of the world are almost as foolish as poets and savants. Did not M. de Terremondre, believing that he was speaking to the point, tell me yesterday, on the Mall, that Church and State ought to make mutual concessions? People no longer know, they no longer think. Empty words pass and repass in the air. We are in Babel. You, Monsieur Bergeret, are much better read in Voltaire than in Saint Thomas.”

M. BERGERET: “It is true. But did you not say, monsieur l’abbÉ, that the Republic is diversity, and that in that respect it is essentially bad? That is what I beg you to explain to me. Perhaps I might succeed in understanding you. I know more theology than you credit me with. Note-book in hand, I have read Baronius.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Baronius is only an annalist, although the greatest of all; and I am quite sure that from him you have only been able to carry away some historic odds and ends. If you were in the slightest degree a theologian, you would be neither surprised nor disconcerted at what I have just said.

“Diversity is hateful. It is the characteristic of evil to be diverse. This characteristic manifests itself in the government of the Republic, which is more alienated than any other from unity. With its want of unity it fails in independence, permanence, and power. It fails in knowledge, and one may say of it that it knows not what it does. Although for our chastisement it continues, yet it has no continuity. For the idea of continuity implies that of identity, and the Republic of one day is never the same as that of the day before. Even its ugliness and its vices do not belong to it. And you have yourself remarked that by them it has never been discredited. Reproaches and scandals that would have ruined the mightiest empire have poured over it harmlessly. It is indestructible, for it is destruction. It is dispersion, it is discontinuity, it is diversity, it is evil.”

M. BERGERET: “Are you speaking of Republics in general, or only of our own?”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Obviously I am considering neither the Roman Republic, nor the Dutch, nor the Swiss, but only the French. For these governments have nothing in common save the name, and you will not charge me with judging them by the name by which they call themselves, nor by those points in which they seem, one and all, opposed to monarchy—an opposition which is not in itself necessarily to be condemned; but the Republic in France means nothing more than the lack of a prince and the want of a governing power. And this nation was too old at the time of the amputation for one not to fear that it would die of it.”

M. BERGERET: “Yet France has already survived the Empire by twenty-seven years, the bourgeois-king by forty-eight years, and the legitimate sovereign by sixty-six years.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Say rather that for a century France, wounded to death, has been dragging out a miserable remnant of life in alternate fits of fever and prostration. And do not imagine that I flatter the past or base my regrets on lying pictures of an age of gold which never existed. The conditions of national life are quite familiar to me. Its hours are marked by perils, its days by disasters. And it is just and necessary that it should be so. Its life, like that of individual men, if it were exempt from trials, would have no meaning. The early history of France is full of crimes and expiations. God ceaselessly chastened this nation with the zeal of an untiring love, and in the time of the kings His mercy spared her no suffering. But, being then Christian, her woes were useful and precious to her. In them she recognised the ennobling power of chastisement. From them she derived her lessons, her merits, her salvation, her power, and her renown. Now her sufferings have no longer any meaning for her; she neither understands them nor acquiesces in them. Whilst undergoing the test she rebels against it. And the demented state expects good fortune! It is in losing faith in God that one loses, along with the idea of the absolute, the knowledge of the relative and even the historic sense. God alone informs the logical sequence of human events which, without Him, would no longer follow one another in a rational and conceivable manner. And for the last hundred years the history of France has been an enigma for the French. Yet even in our days there was one solemn hour of hope and expectation.

“The horseman who rides forth at the hour appointed by God, and who is called now Shalmanezar, now Nebuchadnezzar, then Cyrus, Cambyses, Memmius, Titus, Alaric, Attila, Mahomet II., or William, had ridden with fiery trail across France. Humiliated, bleeding, and mutilated, she raised her eyes to Heaven. May that moment be counted to her for righteousness! She seemed to understand, and along with her faith to recover her intelligence, to recognise the value and the use of her vast and providential woes. She aroused her just men, her Christians, to form a sovereign assembly. Then appeared the spectacle of that assembly, renewing a solemn custom and consecrating France to the heart of Jesus. We saw, as in the times of Saint Louis, churches rising on the mountains, before the gaze of penitent cities; we saw the foremost citizens preparing for the restoration of the monarchy.”

M. BERGERET (sotto voce): “1. The Assembly of Bordeaux. 2. The SacrÉ-Coeur of Montmartre and the Church of FourviÈres at Lyons. 3. The Commission of the Nine and the mission of M. Chesnelong.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “What do you say?”

M. BERGERET: “Nothing. I am filling in the headings in the Discours sur l’Histoire universelle.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Do not jest and do not deny. Coming along the roads sounded the white horses that were bringing the king to his own again. Henri DieudonnÉ was coming to re-establish the principle of authority from which spring the two social forces: command and obedience; he was coming to restore human order along with divine order, political wisdom along with the religious spirit, the hierarchy, law, discipline, true liberty and unity. The nation, linking up its traditions once more, was recovering, along with the sense of its mission, the secret of its power and the pledge of victory.… God willed it not. These great designs, thwarted by the enemy who still hated us after having satisfied his hatred, opposed by a great number of the French, miserably supported even by those who had formed them, were brought to naught in one day. The frontier of our country was barricaded against Henri DieudonnÉ, and the people subsided into a Republic; that is to say, they repudiated their birthright, they renounced their rights and their duties, in order to govern themselves according to their own inclinations and to live at their ease in that liberty which God curbs and which overturns both law and order, the temporal images of Himself. Henceforth evil was king and proclaimed its edicts. The Church, exposed to incessant vexations, was perfidiously tempted on the one side to an impossible renunciation and on the other to revolt involving punishment.”

M. BERGERET: “You doubtless reckon among the vexatious measures the expulsion of the fraternities?”

M. LANTAIGNE: “It is clear that the expulsion of the fraternities was prompted by evil intentions, and was the result of malicious calculation. It is also certain that the religious who were expelled did not deserve such treatment. In striking them it was believed that the Church was being struck. But the blow, badly aimed, strengthened the body that they wished to shake, and restored to the parishes the authority and the resources which had been diverted from them. Our enemies did not know the Church, and their chief minister of that time, less ignorant than they, but more desirous of satisfying them than of destroying us, made a war on us that was merely mimic and for purposes of show. For I do not regard the expulsion of the non-licensed orders as an effective attack. Of course, I honour the victims of this clumsy persecution; but I consider that the Church of France has in the secular clergy a sufficient staff to govern and minister to souls without the help of the regulars. Alas! the Republic has inflicted deeper and more secret wounds on the Church. You know too much about educational questions, Monsieur Bergeret, not to have discovered several of these plague-spots; but the most poisonous one was induced by the introduction into the episcopate of priests feeble in mind or in character.… I have said enough about that. The Christian at least consoles and reassures himself, knowing that the Church will not perish. But what will be the patriot’s consolation? He discovers that all the members of the State are gangrened and rotten. In twenty years what progress in corruption! A chief of the State whose sole virtue is his powerlessness, and who is denounced as criminal if it should get wind that he ventures to act, or even merely to think; ministers subject to a foolish Parliament, which is believed to be corrupt, and whose members, more ignorant every day, were chosen, moulded, nominated in the godless clubs of the freemasons to carry out an evil policy of which they are yet incapable, and which is surpassed by the evils brought about through their turbulent inaction; an incessantly increasing bureaucracy, vast, greedy, and mischievous, in which the Republic believes she is securing for herself a band of supporters, but which she is nourishing to her own ruin; a magistracy recruited without law or equity, and too often canvassed by the government not to be suspected of obsequiousness; an army, nay, a whole nation, unceasingly pervaded by the fatal spirit of independence and equality, is poured back straightway into town and country, a whole community, depraved by barrack life, unfitted for arts and trades, and disliking all labour; an educational body which has a mission to teach atheism and immorality; a diplomatic corps which fails in readiness and authority, and which leaves the care of our foreign policy and the conclusion of our alliances to innkeepers, shopkeepers and journalists; in a word, all the powers, the legislative and the executive, the judicial, the military, and the civil, intermingled, confused, destroyed one by the other; a farcical rule which, in its destructive weakness, has given to society the two most powerful instruments of death that wickedness ever devised: divorce and malthusianism. And all the evils of which I have made a rapid summary belong to the Republic and spring naturally from her: the Republic is essentially unrighteous. She is unrighteous in willing a liberty which God has not willed, since He is the master, and since He has delegated to priests and kings a part of his authority; she is unrighteous in willing an equality which God has not willed, since He has established the hierarchy of dignities in Heaven and on earth; she is unrighteous in instituting that tolerance which cannot be the will of God, since evil is intolerable; she is unrighteous in consulting the will of the people, as if the multitude of ignorant ought to prevail against the small company of those who bow themselves before the will of God, which overshadows the government and even the details of administration, as a principle whose consequences are never-ending; in a word, she is unrighteous in proclaiming her indifference to religion—that is to say, her impiety, her unbelief, her blasphemies (of which the very smallest is mortal sin), and her adhesion to diversity, which is evil and death.”

M. BERGERET: “Did you not say just now, monsieur l’abbÉ, that being as republican as the Pope, you were resolved to live at peace with the Republic?”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Certainly, I will live with her in submission and obedience. In rebelling against her, I should act according to her principles, and contrary to my own. By being seditious I should resemble her, and I should no longer resemble myself.

“It is unlawful to return evil for evil. Sovereignty is hers. Whether she decrees ill or does not decree, hers is the guilt. Let it rest with her! My duty is to obey. I shall do it. I shall obey. As a priest and, if it please God, as a bishop, I shall refuse nothing to the Republic of what I owe her. I call to mind that Saint Augustine, in Hippo, then besieged by the Vandals, died a bishop and a Roman citizen. For myself, the lowest member of this illustrious Church of the Gauls, after the example of the greatest of the doctors, I will die in France, a priest and a French citizen, praying God to scatter the Vandals.”

The elm-trees on the Mall began to incline their shadow towards the east. A fresh breeze coming from a region of distant storm stirred among the leaves. Whilst a ladybird travelled over the sleeve of his coat, M. Bergeret replied to AbbÉ Lantaigne in a tone of the greatest affability.

“Monsieur l’abbÉ, you have just traced, with an eloquence only to be found on your lips, the characteristics of democratic rule. This government is very much as you describe it. And yet it is the one I prefer. In it all bonds are loosened, which weakens the State, but relieves individuals and ensures a certain ease of life and a liberty which unfortunately local tyrannies counteract. It is true that corruption appears to be greater in it than in monarchies. That springs from the number and diversity of the people who are raised to power. But this corruption would be less visible if the secret of it were better kept. The lack of secrecy and the want of continuity render all enterprise impossible in a democratic Republic. But, since the enterprises of monarchies have most often ruined the nations, I am not very sorry to live under a government incapable of great designs. What rejoices me especially in our Republic is the sincere desire which she shows not to provoke war in Europe. She rejoices in militarism, but is not at all bellicose. In considering the chances of a war, other governments have nothing to fear save defeat. Ours fears equally—and justly so—both victory and defeat. This salutary fear secures us peace, which is the greatest of blessings.

“The worst fault of the present rÉgime is that it costs very dear. It makes no outward show: it is not ostentatious. It is gorgeous neither in its women nor its horses. But, with its humble appearance and neglected exterior, it is expensive. It has too many poor relations, too many friends to provide for. It is a spendthrift. The most grievous point is that it lives on an exhausted country, whose powers are waning and which no longer thrives. And the administration has great need of money. It is aware that it is in difficulties. And its difficulties are greater than it fancies. They will increase still more. The evil is not new. It is the one which killed the old rÉgime. I am going, monsieur l’abbÉ, to tell you a great truth: as long as the State contents itself with the revenues supplied by the poor, as long as it has enough from the subsidies which are assured to it with mechanical regularity by those who work with their hands, it lives happy, peaceful, and honoured. Economists and financiers are pleased to acknowledge its honesty. But as soon as this unhappy State, driven by need, makes a show of asking for money from those who have it, and of levying some slight toll on the rich, it is made to feel that it is committing a horrible outrage, is violating all rights, is wanting in respect to a sacred thing, is destroying commerce and industry, and crushing the poor by touching the rich. No one hides his conviction that discredit is at hand. And it sinks beneath the genuine contempt of the good citizen. Yet ruin comes slowly and surely. The State touches capital: it is lost.

“Our ministers are jesting at us when they speak of the clerical or the socialist peril. There is but one peril, the financial peril. The Republic is beginning to recognise this. I pity her, I shall regret her. I was reared under the Empire, in love for the Republic. ‘She is justice,’ my father, professor of rhetoric at the college of Saint-Omer, used to say to me. He did not know her. She is not justice, but she is ease. Monsieur l’abbÉ, if you had a soul less exalted, less serious, and more given to jesting thoughts, I should confide to you that the present Republic, the Republic of 1896, delights me and touches me by its modesty. She acquiesces in not being admired. She exacts but a trifling respect, and even renounces esteem. It is enough for her to live. That is her sole desire; it is a lawful one. The humblest beings cling to life. Like the woodcutter of the fabulist, like the apothecary of Mantua, who so greatly astonished that young fool of a Romeo, she fears death, and it is her only fear. She mistrusts princes and soldiers. In danger of death, she would be very ill to handle. Fear would make her abandon her own nature and would render her ferocious. That would be a pity. But as long as they make no attempt on her life, and as long as they only attack her honour, she is good-natured. A government of this kind suits me and gives me confidence. So many others were merciless through self-esteem! So many others made sure of their rights, their grandeur, and their prosperity by cruelties! So many others have poured out blood for their prerogative and their majesty! She has no self-esteem; she has no majesty. A fortunate lack which keeps her innocuous to us! Provided that she lives, she is content. She rules laxly, and I should be tempted to praise her for that more than for all the rest. And since she governs laxly, I forgive her for governing badly. I suspect men at all times of having much exaggerated the necessity of government and the benefits of a strong administration. Certainly strong administrations make nations great and prosperous. But the nations have suffered so much all through the centuries for their grandeur and prosperity, that I fancy they would renounce it. Glory has cost them too dear for them to resent the fact that our present rulers have only procured for us the colonial variety of it. If the uselessness of all government should at last be discovered, the Republic of M. Carnot would have paved the way for this priceless discovery. And one ought to feel some gratitude towards it for that. Taking everything into consideration, I feel much attached to our institutions.”

Thus spoke M. Bergeret, professor of literature at the University.

AbbÉ Lantaigne rose, drew out from his pocket his blue-checkered handkerchief, passed it over his lips, returned it to his pocket, smiled, contrary to his custom, secured his breviary under his arm, and said:

“You express yourself pleasantly, Monsieur Bergeret. Just so did the rhetors talk in Rome when Alaric entered it with his Visigoths. Yet under the terebinth trees of the Esquiline the rhetors of the fifth century let fall thoughts of less vanity. For then Rome was Christian. You are that no longer.”

“Monsieur l’abbÉ,” replied the professor, “be a bishop and not the head of the University.” “It is true, Monsieur Bergeret,” said the priest with a loud laugh, “that if I were head of the University I should forbid you to be a teacher of youth.”

“And you would do me a great service. For then I should write in the papers, like M. Jules LemaÎtre, and who knows whether, like him…”

“Well! well! you would not be out of place among the wits. And the French Academy has a partiality for freethinkers.”

He spoke and walked away with a firm, straight, heavy tread. M. Bergeret remained alone in the middle of the bench, which was now three-parts covered by shade. The ladybird which had been fluttering its wing-cases on his shoulder for a moment flew away. He began to dream. He was not happy, for he had an acute mind whose points were not always turned outwards, and very often he pricked himself with the needle-points of his own criticism. AnÆmic and bilious, he had a very weak digestion and enfeebled senses, which brought him more disgust and suffering than pleasure and happiness. He was reckless in speech, and in unerringness and precision his tactlessness attained the same results as the most practised skill. With cunning art he seized every opportunity of injuring himself. He inspired the majority of people with a natural aversion, and being sociable and inclined to fraternise with his fellows, he suffered from that fact. He had never succeeded in moulding his pupils, and he delivered his lectures on Latin literature in a gloomy, damp, deserted cellar, in which he was buried through the Dean’s burning hatred of him. The University buildings were, however, spacious. Built in 1894, “these new premises,” according to the words of M. Worms-Clavelin at the opening, “testified to the zeal of the government of the Republic for the diffusion of learning.” They boasted an amphitheatre, decorated by M. LÉon Glaize with allegorical paintings representing Science and Literature, where M. Compagnon gave his much-belauded lectures on mathematics. The other gownsmen in their red or yellow taught different subjects in handsome, well-lighted rooms. M. Bergeret alone, under the bedel’s ironic glance, had to descend, followed by three students, into a dusky, subterranean hole. There, in the heavy, noisome air, he expounded the Æneid with German scholarship and French subtlety; there, by his literary and moral pessimism, he afflicted M. Roux, of Bordeaux, his best pupil; there, he opened up new vistas, whose aspect was terrifying; there, one evening he pronounced those words now become famous, but which ought rather to have perished, stifled in the shadow of the vault: “Fragments of differing origins, soldered clumsily on to each other, made up the Iliad and the Odyssey. Such are the models of composition that have been imitated by Virgil, by FÉnelon, and in general, in classic literatures, by writers of narratives in verse or in prose.”

M. Bergeret was not happy. He had received no honorary distinction. It is true that he despised honours. But he felt that it would have been much finer to despise them while accepting them. He was obscure and less well known in the town for works of talent than M. de Terremondre, author of a Tourist Guide; than General Milher, a distinguished miscellaneous writer of the department; less even than his pupil, M. Albert Roux, of Bordeaux, author of NirÉe, a poem in vers libres. Certainly he despised literary fame, knowing that that of Virgil in Europe rested on a double misconception, one absurd and the other fabulous. But he suffered at having no intercourse with writers who, like MM. Faguet, Doumic, or Pellissier, seemed akin to him in mind. He would have liked to know them, to live with them in Paris, like them to write in reviews, to contradict, to rival, perhaps to outstrip them. He recognised in himself a certain subtlety of intellect, and he had written pages which he knew to be pleasing.

He was not happy. He was poor, shut up with his wife and his three daughters in a little dwelling, where he tasted to the full the inconveniences of domestic life; and it harassed him to find hair-curlers on his writing-table, and to see the margins of his manuscripts singed by curling-tongs. The only secure and pleasant place of retreat that he had in the world was that bench on the Mall shaded by an ancient elm, and the old-book corner in Paillot’s shop.

He meditated for a moment on his sad condition; then he rose from his bench and took the road which leads to the bookseller’s.