Christianity, and which must necessarily fall with it. It is, moreover, the English, who with this democratic and utilitarian plebeianism have seduced and perverted the fine genius of France. Just as we owe to England the vulgarity which threatens to overspread Europe, so to France we owe the conception of a habit of nobility, in every best sense of the word. On that point Nietzsche’s opinion never wavered. The present subjection of the French spirit to this damnable Anglo-mania, he declared, must never lead us to forget the ardent and passionate energy, the intellectual distinction, which belonged to the France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[3] The French, as Nietzsche always held, are the one modern European nation which may be compared with the Greeks. In _Menschliches, Allzumenschliches_ he names six French writers--Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Fontenelle (in the _Dialogues des Morts_), Vauvenarges, Chamfort--who bring us nearer to Greek antiquity than any other group of modern authors, and contain more real thought than all the books of the German philosophers put together. The only French writer of the present century for whom he cared much (putting aside Mérimée) was Stendhal, who possesses some of the characters of the earlier group. The French, he points out, are the most Christian of all nations, and have produced the greatest saints. He enumerates Pascal (“the first among Christians, who was able to unite fervour, intellect, and candour;--think of what that means!”), Fénelon, Mme. de Guyon, De Rancé, the founder of the Trappists who have flourished nowhere but in France, the Huguenots, Port-Royal--truly, he exclaims, the great French freethinkers encountered foemen worthy of their steel! The land which produced the most perfect types of Anti-Christianity produced also the most perfect types of Christianity. He defends, also, that seeming superficiality which in a great Frenchman, he says, is but the natural epidermis of a rich and deep nature, while a great German’s profundity is too often strangely bottled up from the light in a dark and contorted phial.