As to the circulation of _Robert Elsmere_, I have never been able to ascertain the exact figures in America, but it is probable, from the data I have, that about half a million copies were sold in the States within a year of the book's publication. In England, an edition of 5,000 copies a fortnight was the rule for many months after the one-volume edition appeared; hundreds of thousands have been circulated in the sixpenny and sevenpenny editions; it has been translated into most foreign tongues; and it is still, after thirty years, a living book. Fifteen years after its publication, M. Brunetière, the well-known editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_ and leader--in some sort--of the Catholic reaction in France, began a negotiation with me for the appearance of a French translation of the whole or part of the book in his _Revue_. "But how," I asked him (we were sitting in his editor's sanctum, in the old house of the Rue de l'Université), "could it possibly suit you, or the _Revue_, to do anything of the kind? And _now_--after fifteen years?" But, according to him, the case was simple. When the book first appeared, the public of the _Revue_ could not have felt any interest in it. France is a logical country--a country of clear-cut solutions. And at that time either one was a Catholic or a free thinker. And if one was a Catholic, one accepted from the Church, say, the date of the Book of Daniel, as well as everything else. Renan, indeed, left the Church thirty years earlier because he came to see with certainty that the Book of Daniel was written under Antiochus Epiphanes, and not when his teachers at St. Sulpice said it was written. But while the secular world listened and applauded, the literary argument against dogma made very little impression on the general Catholic world for many years. But now [said M. Brunetière] everything is different. Modernism has arisen. It is penetrating the Seminaries. People begin to talk of it in the streets. And _Robert Elsmere_ is a study in Modernism--or at any rate it has so many affinities with Modernism, that _now_--the French public would be interested. The length of the book, however, could not be got over, and the plan fell through. But I came away from my talk with a remarkable man, not a little stirred. For it had seemed to show that with all its many faults--and who knew them better than I?--my book had yet possessed a certain representative and pioneering force; and that, to some extent, at least, the generation in which it appeared had spoken through it. CHAPTER IV FIRST VISITS TO ITALY