“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 Conception than you yourself would admit the possibility of such a miracle if a new religion should nowadays be preached as based on a similar mystery.  Do you suppose that a judge and jury in a police court would give credence to the operation of the Holy Ghost!  And yet who can venture to assert that God will never again redeem mankind?  Is it any better now than it was under Tiberius?”

“Your argument is blasphemy,” said Monsieur de Clagny.

“I grant it,” said the journalist, “but not with malicious intent.  You cannot suppress historical fact.  In my opinion, Pilate, when he sentenced Jesus, and Anytus—­who spoke for the aristocratic party at Athens—­when he insisted on the death of Socrates, both represented established social interests which held themselves legitimate, invested with co-operative powers, and