Both Santerre and Seguin, however, hotly opposed him, and quite a discussion ensued.  First Santerre took up the matter from a religious standpoint.  Said he, the words of the Old Testament, “Increase and multiply,” were not to be found in the New Testament, which was the true basis of the Christian religion.  The first Christians, he declared, had held marriage in horror, and with them the Holy Virgin had become the ideal of womanhood.  Seguin thereupon nodded approval and proceeded to give his opinions on feminine beauty.  But these were hardly to the taste of Mathieu, who promptly pointed out that the conception of beauty had often varied.

“To-day,” said he, “you conceive beauty to consist in a long, slim, attenuated, almost angular figure; but at the time of the Renaissance the type of the beautiful was very different.  Take Rubens, take Titian, take even Raffaelle, and you will see that their women were of robust build.  Even their Virgin Marys have a motherly air.  To my thinking, moreover, if we reverted to some such natural type of beauty, if women were not encouraged by fashion to compress and attenuate their figures so that their very nature, their very organism is changed, there would perhaps be some hope of coping with the evil of depopulation which is talked about so much nowadays.”

The others looked at him and smiled with an air of compassionate superiority.  “Depopulation an evil!” exclaimed Seguin; “can you, my dear sir, intelligent as you are, still believe in that hackneyed old story?  Come, reflect and reason a little.”

Then Santerre chimed in, and they went on talking one after the other and at times both together.  Schopenhauer and Hartmann and Nietzsche were passed in review, and they claimed Malthus as one of themselves.  But all this literary pessimism did not trouble Mathieu.  He, with his belief in fruitfulness, remained convinced that the nation which no longer had faith in life must be dangerously ill.  True, there were hours when he doubted the expediency of numerous families and asked himself if ten thousand happy people were not preferable to a hundred thousand unhappy ones; in which connection political and economic conditions had to be taken into account.  But when all was said, he remained almost convinced that the Malthusian hypotheses would prove as false in the future as they had proved false in the past.

“Moreover,” said he, “even if the world should become densely populated, even if food supplies, such as we know them, should fall short, chemistry would extract other means of subsistence from inorganic matter.  And, besides, all such eventualities are so far away that it is impossible to make any calculation on a basis of scientific certainty.  In France, too, instead of contributing to any such danger, we are going backward, we are marching towards annihilation.  The population of France was once a fourth of the population of Europe, but now it is only one-eighth.  In a century or two Paris will be dead, like ancient Athens and ancient Rome, and we shall have fallen to the rank that Greece now occupies.  Paris seems determined to die.”