but I question whether, out of a hundred persons, there were in Paris at this time ten Christian men or women.  “The fashionable world for ten years past,” says Mercier[24] in 1783, “has not attended mass.  People go only on Sundays so as not to scandalize their lackeys, while the lackeys well know that it is on their account.”  The Duc de Coigny,[25] on his estate near Amiens, refuses to be prayed for and threatens his curate if he takes that liberty to have him cast out of his pulpit; his son becomes ill and he prohibits the administering of the sacraments; the son dies and he opposes the usual obsequies, burying the body in his garden; becoming ill himself he closes his door against the bishop of Amiens, who comes to see him twelve times, and dies as he had lived.  A scandal of this kind is doubtless notorious and, therefore, rare.  Almost everybody, male and female, “ally with freedom of ideas a proper observance of forms."[26] When a maid appears and says to her mistress, “Madame la Duchesse, the Host (le bon Dieu) is outside, will you allow him to enter?  He desires to have the honor of administering to you,” appearances are kept up.  The troublesome individual is admitted and he is politely received.  If they slip away from him it is under a decent pretext; but if he is humored it is only out of a sense of decorum.  “At Sura when a man dies, he holds a cow’s tail in his hand.”  Society was never more detached from Christianity.  In its eyes a positive religion is only a popular superstition, good enough for children and innocents but not for “sensible people” and the great.  It is your duty to raise your hat to the Host as it passes, but your duty is only to raise your hat.

The last and gravest sign of all!  If the curates who work and who are of the people hold the people’s ideas, the prelates who talk, and who are of society hold the opinions of society.  And I do not allude merely to the abbés of the drawing-room, the domestic courtiers, bearers of news, and writers of light verse, those who fawn in boudoirs, and who, when in company, answer like an echo, and who, between one drawing room and another, serve as megaphone; an echo, a megaphone only repeats the phrase, whether skeptical or not, with which it is charged.  I refer to the dignitaries, and, on this point, the witnesses all concur.  In the month of August, 1767, the Abbé Bassinet, grand vicar of Cahors, on pronouncing the panegyric of St. Louis in the Louvre chapel,[27] “suppressed the sign of the cross, making no quotation from Scripture and never uttering a word about Christ and the Saints.  He considered Louis IX merely on the side of his political, moral and military virtues.  He animadverted on the Crusades, setting forth their absurdity, cruelty and even injustice.  He struck openly and without caution at the see of Rome.”  Others “avoid the name of Christ in the pulpit and merely allude to him as a Christian legislator."[28] In the code