VI

But as the point I have now touched, of the religious condition of
France, is a specially grave and important point, I must ask my readers
to pause with me upon it for a moment here in this Introduction. I am
especially moved to do this because I have reason to think that very
serious and very extraordinary delusions on this point exist outside of
France, and especially in England. This is not unnatural when we
remember that nine foreigners in ten take their impressions of France as
a nation, not only from the current journalism and literature of Paris
alone, but from a very limited range of the current literature and
journalism even of Paris. Most Americans certainly, and I am inclined to
think most Englishmen, who visit Paris, and see and know a good deal of
Paris, are really in a condition of penumbral darkness as to the true
social, religious, and intellectual life of the vast majority of the
population even of Paris. We see the Paris of the boulevards, the
Champs-Elysees, the first nights at the theatres, the restaurants, and
the fashionable shops; the _Tout Paris_ of the gossips of the press,
representing, possibly, one per cent. of the population of the French
capital! Of the domestic, busy, permanent Paris, which keeps the French
capital alive from year to year and from generation to generation--the
Paris of industry and of commerce, of the churches, of the charities, of
the schools, of the convents--how much do we see? There are a number of
prosperous foreign colonies living in London now, most of whose leading
members maintain business or social relations, more or less active, with
one or another section of the English population of the great British
metropolis. Perhaps, if we could get a plain, unvarnished account from
some member of one of these colonies, of England and English life as
they appear to him and to his compatriots, Englishmen might be as much
confounded as I have known very intelligent and well-informed Frenchmen
to be, by the notions of French life and of the condition of the French
people, really and seriously entertained, not by casual foreign
tourists, but by highly educated foreigners who really wished to know
the truth.

Not long after the Legislative Elections of 1885, the results of which
astonished public men in England at the time as much almost as they did
the satellites of the Government in Paris, I met at the house of a
friend in London a very eminent English public man, whos