The evening that Hubert dined there for the first time a divorce suit was discussed during the first half-hour, and a great lawyer gave some unpublished details of the case--the abominable character of a politician who had been arrested in the Champs Elysées, the two mistresses of another politician and their rivalry--but all related, as things are related only at Paris, with those hints which admit the telling of everything. Many allusions escaped Hubert, and he was accordingly less shocked by such narrations than by other speeches bearing upon ideas, such as the following paradox, started by one of the most famous novelists of the day. "Ah! divorce! divorce!" said this man, whose renown as a daring realist had crossed the threshold even of the house in the Rue Vaneau, "it has some good in it; but it is too simple a solution for a very complicated problem. Here, as elsewhere, Catholicism has perverted all our ideas. The characteristic of advanced societies is the production of many men of very different kinds, and the problem consists in constructing an equally large number of moralists. For my part, I would have the law recognise marriages in five, ten, twenty categories, according to the sensitiveness of the parties concerned. Thus we should have life-unions intended for persons of aristocratic scrupulosity; for persons of less refined consciences, we should establish contracts with facilities for one, two or three divorces; for persons inferior still, we should have temporary connections for five years, three years, one year." "People would marry just as they grant a lease," it was jestingly observed. "Why not?" continued the other; "the age boasts of being a revolutionary one, and it has never ventured upon what the pettiest legislator of antiquity undertook without hesitation--interference with morals." "I see what you mean," replied André de Sauve; "you would assimilate marriages with funerals--first, second, or third class----."