s is good. In my opinion I believe it will be good, and I believe
that man will gain, through this new intelligence, in the direction of
the larger life which has come to women from this necessity of theirs.
Unquestionably there will have to be a new education, and this will
certainly come.

LA FOI.--This play is, without doubt, of all my plays the one which has
cost me the most labor and the one upon which I have expended the most
thought and time. The impulse to write it came to me at Lourdes in view
of the excited, suffering, and praying crowds of people. When the
thought of writing it came to me I hesitated, but during many years I
added notes upon notes. And it was while on a trip to Egypt that I saw
the possibility for discussing such questions in the theatre without
giving offence to various consciences. My true and illustrious friend,
Camille Saint-Saens, has been kind enough to underline my prose with his
admirable music. In this way LA FOI has been produced on the stage at
Monte Carlo for the first time under the auspices of His Royal Highness
the Prince of Monaco, whom I now beg to thank.

English readers of LA ROBE ROUGE would, I think, be somewhat misled, if
they did not understand the difference between the procedure in criminal
cases in France and in Great Britain. My purpose in this preface is to
attempt to show that difference in a few words.

With you, a criminal trial is conducted publicly and before a jury; with
us in France it is carried on in the Chambers of the Judge with only the
lawyer present. There sometimes result from this latter method dramas of
the kind of which my play LA ROBE ROUGE is one. The judge, too directly
interested and free of the criticism which might fall on him from the
general public, is liable to the danger of forming for himself an
opinion as to the guilt of the accused. He may do this in perfect good
faith, but sometimes runs the risk of falling into grave error. It thus
occasionally happens that he is anxious not so much to know the truth as
to prove that he was right in his own, often rash, opinion.

LA ROBE ROUGE is a criticism of certain judicial proceedings which
obtain in France; but it is also a study of an individual case of
professional crookedness. We should be greatly mistaken were we to draw
the dangerous conclusion that all French judges resemble Mouzon, and we
should be equally wrong were we to condemn too hastily the French code
relating to criminal tria