_Festivals Founded on Chimeras._ I do not know that there was, in all antiquity, a single festival founded on an established fact. It has been elsewhere remarked how extremely ridiculous those schoolmen appear who say to you, with a magisterial air: "Here is an ancient hymn in honor of Apollo, who visited Claros; therefore Apollo went to Claros; a chapel was erected to Perseus; therefore he delivered Andromeda." Poor men! You should rather say, therefore there was no Andromeda. But what, then, will become of that learned antiquity which preceded the olympiads? It will become what it is--an unknown time, a time lost, a time of allegories and lies, a time regarded with contempt by the wise, and profoundly discussed by blockheads, who like to float in a _void_, like Epicurus' atoms. There were everywhere days of penance, days of expiation in the temples; but these days were never called by a name answering to that of _feasts_. Every feast-day was sacred to diversion; so true is this that the Egyptian priests fasted on the eve in order to eat the more on the morrow--a custom which our monks have preserved. There were, no doubt, mournful ceremonies. It was not customary to dance the Greek brawl while interring or carrying to the funeral pile a son or a daughter; this was a public ceremony, but certainly not a feast. SECTION IV. _On the Antiquity of Feasts, Which, It has been Asserted, were Always Mournful._ Men of ingenuity, profound searchers into antiquity, who would know how the earth was made a hundred thousand years ago, if genius could discover it, have asserted that mankind, reduced to a very small number in both continents, and still terrified at the innumerable revolutions which this sad globe had undergone, perpetuated the remembrance of their calamities by dismal and mournful commemorations. "Every feast," say they, "was a day of horror, instituted to remind men that their fathers had been destroyed by the fires of the volcanoes, by rocks falling from the mountains, by eruptions of the sea, by the teeth and claws of wild beasts, by war, pestilence and famine." Then we are not made as men were then. There was never so much rejoicing in London as after the plague and the burning of the whole city in the reign of Charles II. We made songs while the massacres of Bartholomew were still going on. Some pasquinades have been preserved which were made the day after the assassination of Coligni; there was printed in Paris, _Passio Domini nostri Gaspardi Colignii secundum Bartholomæum_. It has a thousand times happened that the sultan who reigns in Constantinople has made his eunuchs and odalisks dance in apartments stained with the blood of his brothers and his viziers. What do the people of Paris do on the very day that they are apprised of the loss of a battle and the death of a hundred brave officers? They run to the play and the opera.