M. Scherer rose to greet us, and to introduce us to his wife and daughters. A tall, thin man, already white-haired, with something in his aspect which suggested his Genevese origin--something at once ascetic and delicately sensitive. He was then in his sixtieth year, deputy for the Seine-et-Oise, and an important member of the Left Center. The year after we saw him he became a Senator, and remained so through his life, becoming more Conservative as the years went on. But his real importance was as a man of letters--one of the recognized chiefs of French literature and thought, equally at war with the forces of Catholic reaction, then just beginning to find a leader in M. Bourget, and with the scientific materialism of M. Taine. He was--when we first knew him--a Protestant who had ceased to believe in any historical religion; a Liberal who, like another friend of ours, Mr. Goschen, about the same time was drifting into Conservatism; and also a man of strong and subtle character to whom questions of ethics were at all times as important as questions of pure literature. Above all, he was a scholar, specially conversant with England and English letters. He was, for instance, the "French critic on Milton," on whom Matthew Arnold wrote one of his most attractive essays; and he was fond of maintaining--and proving--that when French people _did_ make a serious study of England, and English books, which he admitted was rare, they were apt to make fewer mistakes about us than English writers make about France. Dear M. Scherer!--I see him first in the little suite of carpetless rooms, empty save for books and the most necessary tables and chairs, where he lived and worked at Versailles; amid a library "read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested," like that of Lord Acton, his English junior. And then, in a winter walk along the Champs-Élysées, a year or two later, discussing the prospects of Catholicism in France: "They haven't a man--a speaker--a book! It is a real drawback to us Liberals that they are so weak, so negligible. We have nothing to hold us together!" At the moment Scherer was perfectly right. But the following years were to see the flowing back of Catholicism into literature, the Universities, the École Normale. Twenty years later I quoted this remark of Scherer's to a young French philosopher. "True, for its date," he said. "There was then scarcely a single Catholic in the École Normale [i.e., at the headwaters of French education]. There are now a great many. _But they are all Modernists!_" Since then, again, we have seen the growing strength of Catholicism in the French literature of imagination, in French poetry and fiction. Whether in the end it will emerge the stronger for the vast stirring of the waters caused by the present war is one of the most interesting questions of the present day.