She did not accept the idea of any revealed religion, and there was one of these revealed religions that she execrated.  This was the Catholic religion.  Her correspondence on this subject during the period of the Second Empire is most significant.  She was a personal enemy of the Church, and spoke of the Jesuits as a subscriber to the Siecle might do to-day.  She feared the dagger of the Jesuits for Napoleon III, but at the same time she hoped there might be a frustrated attempt at murder, so that his eyes might be opened.  The great danger of modern times, according to her, was the development of the clerical spirit.  She was not an advocate for liberty of education either.  “The priestly spirit has been encouraged,” she wrote.(53) “France is overrun with convents, and wretched friars have been allowed to take possession of education.”  She considered that wherever the Church was mistress, it left its marks, which were unmistakable:  stupidity and brutishness.  She gave Brittany as an example.

     (53) Correspondance: To Barbes, May 12, 1867.

“There is nothing left,” she writes, “when the priest and Catholic vandalism have passed by, destroying the monuments of the old world and leaving their lice for the future."(54)

     (54) Ibid.: To Flaubert, September 21, 1860.

It is no use attempting to ignore the fact.  This is anti-clericalism in all its violence.  Is it not curious that this passion, when once it takes possession of even the most distinguished minds, causes them to lose all sentiment of measure, of propriety and of dignity.

Mademoiselle La Quintinie is the result of a fit of anti-clerical mania.  George Sand gives, in this novel, the counterpart of Sibylle.  Emile Lemontier, a free-thinker, is in love with the daughter of General La Quintinie.  Emile is troubled in his mind because, as his fiancee is a Catholic, he knows she will have to have a confessor.  The idea is intolerable to him, as, like Monsieur Homais, he considers that a husband could not endure the idea of his wife having private conversations with one of those individuals.  Mademoiselle La Quintinie’s confessor is a certain Moreali, a near relative of Eugene Sue’s Rodin.  The whole novel turns on the struggle between Emile and Moreali, which ends in the final discomfiture of Moreali.  Mademoiselle La Quintinie is to marry Emile, who will teach her to be a free-thinker.  Emile is proud of his work of drawing a soul away from Christian communion.  He considers that the light of reason is always sufficient for illuminating the path in a woman’s life.  He thinks that her natural rectitude will prove sufficient for making a good woman of her.  I do not wish to call this into question, but even if she should not err, is it not possible that she may suffer?  This free-thinker imagines that it is possible to tear belief from a heart without rending it and causing an incurable wound.  Oh, what a poor psychologist!  He forgets that beliefs the summing up and the continuation of the belief of a whole series of generations.  He does not hear the distant murmur of the prayers of by-gone years.  It is in vain to endeavour to stifle those prayers; they will be heard for ever within the crushed and desolate soul.