you?" said the lady, fixing her fine
gray eyes, full of invitation, on Etienne's face.

"Parisians believe in nothing," said the lawyer bitterly. "The virtue of
women is doubted above all things with terrible insolence. Yes, for some
time past the books you have written, you Paris authors, your farces,
your dramas, all your atrocious literature, turn on adultery--"

"Come, come, Monsieur the Public Prosecutor," retorted Etienne,
laughing, "I left you to play your game in peace, I did not attack you,
and here you are bringing an indictment against me. On my honor as a
journalist, I have launched above a hundred articles against the writers
you speak of; but I confess that in attacking them it was to attempt
something like criticism. Be just; if you condemn them, you must condemn
Homer, whose _Iliad_ turns on Helen of Troy; you must condemn Milton's
_Paradise Lost_. Eve and her serpent seem to me a pretty little case of
symbolical adultery; you must suppress the Psalms of David, inspired by
the highly adulterous love affairs of that Louis XIV. of Judah; you must
make a bonfire of _Mithridate, le Tartuffe, l'Ecole des Femmes, Phedre,
Andromaque, le Mariage de Figaro_, Dante's _Inferno_, Petrarch's
Sonnets, all the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the romances of the
Middle Ages, the History of France, and of Rome, etc., etc. Excepting
Bossuet's _Histoire des Variations_ and Pascal's _Provinciales_, I do
not think there are many books left to read if you insist on eliminating
all those in which illicit love is mentioned."

"Much loss that would be!" said Monsieur de Clagny.

Etienne, nettled by the superior air assumed by Monsieur de Clagny,
wanted to infuriate him by one of those cold-drawn jests which consist
in defending an opinion in which we have no belief, simply to rouse the
wrath of a poor man who argues in good faith; a regular journalist's
pleasantry.

"If we take up the political attitude into which you would force
yourself," he went on, without heeding the lawyer's remark, "and assume
the part of Public Prosecutor of all the ages--for every Government
has its public ministry--well, the Catholic religion is infected at its
fountain-head by a startling instance of illegal union. In the opinion
of King Herod, and of Pilate as representing the Roman Empire, Joseph's
wife figured as an adulteress, since, by her avowal, Joseph was not
the father of Jesus. The heathen judge could no more recognize the
Immaculate Co