“You must,” he said, throwing a satisfied glance all round him, even to the very extremity of the landscape, “hold the bottle perpendicularly on the table, and after the strings are cut, press up the cork with little thrusts, gently, gently, as indeed they do seltzer-water at restaurants.”

But during his demonstration the cider often spurted right into their faces, and then the ecclesiastic, with a thick laugh, never missed this joke—­

“Its goodness strikes the eye!”

He was, in fact, a good fellow and one day he was not even scandalised at the chemist, who advised Charles to give madame some distraction by taking her to the theatre at Rouen to hear the illustrious tenor, Lagardy.  Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous for morals than literature.

But the chemist took up the defence of letters.  The theatre, he contended, served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath a mask of pleasure, taught virtue.

“’Castigat ridendo mores,’* Monsieur Bournisien!  Thus consider the greater part of Voltaire’s tragedies; they are cleverly strewn with philosophical reflections, that made them a vast school of morals and diplomacy for the people.”

     It corrects customs through laughter.

“I,” said Binet, “once saw a piece called the ‘Gamin de Paris,’ in which there was the character of an old general that is really hit off to a T. He sets down a young swell who had seduced a working girl, who at the ending—­”

“Certainly,” continued Homais, “there is bad literature as there is bad pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most important of the fine arts seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic idea, worthy of the abominable times that imprisoned Galileo.”

“I know very well,” objected the cure, “that there are good works, good authors.  However, if it were only those persons of different sexes united in a bewitching apartment, decorated rouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this must, in the long-run, engender a certain mental libertinage, give rise to immodest thoughts and impure temptations.  Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all the Fathers.  Finally,” he added, suddenly assuming a mystic tone of voice while he rolled a pinch of snuff between his fingers, “if the Church has condemned the theatre, she must be right; we must submit to her decrees.”

“Why,” asked the druggist, “should she excommunicate actors?  For formerly they openly took part in religious ceremonies.  Yes, in the middle of the chancel they acted; they performed a kind of farce called ‘Mysteries,’ which often offended against the laws of decency.”

The ecclesiastic contented himself with uttering a groan, and the chemist went on—­

“It’s like it is in the Bible; there there are, you know, more than one piquant detail, matters really libidinous!”

And on a gesture of irritation from Monsieur Bournisien—­