France has drawn Magdalene again in the tale of _Læta Acilia_, one of those composing the volume entitled _Balthasar_. Here he represents her as driven from Judæa, and arriving by ship at Marseilles, where she tries to convert her protectress, a Roman knight's wife. The Roman lady desires a child. Magdalene promises to pray for her. The next time she comes to the house _Læta Acilia_ is pregnant. And now Magdalene tells her that she herself was a sinner when she first beheld the fairest of men, the Son of Man; that He drove seven devils out of her; and that she fell on her knees before Him in the house of one Simon and poured precious ointment from an alabaster box over His sacred feet. She repeats the words which the gentle Rabbi uttered in her defence when His disciples, with coarse taunts, would have driven her away. Since then she has lived in the shadow of the Master as in a new Paradise. And to her it was that He appeared first after His resurrection. It seems to the Roman lady that Magdalene is endeavouring to impart to her a distaste for the pleasures of her placid life. Until now she has had no idea of there being any other happiness in the world except that which she knows. "I have no desire to know your God. You have loved him too supremely. To please him one is to fall at his feet with unloosened hair! That is no posture for the wife of a Roman knight. Go, Jewess! Your God can never be mine. I have not lived the life of a sinner, and I have not been possessed with seven devils. I have not wandered in ways of error; I am a woman deserving of respect. Go!" What attracts France in these characters is the contrast between the emotional life of the two women, between the religiously erotic rapture of the Asiatic and the tradition-sanctioned conjugal love of the Roman matron. It is always as the creative writer that he touches history. Among the many things in which France does not believe is history as a science. History, he says, is a representation of the events of the past. But what is an event? A remarkable fact. Who decides whether a fact is remarkable or not? The historian decides it, arbitrarily, according to his taste. A fact is, moreover, an exceedingly composite thing. Does the historian represent it in all its compositeness? That would be impossible. Hence he gives us it cropped and pruned. And yet again, the historic fact is the final consequence of unhistoric or unknown facts. How can the historian demonstrate their concatenation? This line of argument appeals so forcibly to France that he sets it forth no fewer than three times--in the preface to _La Vie Littéraire_, in _Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard_, and in _Le Jardin d'Épicure_. As the creative writer he chills the ardour of the investigator by his scepticism. It is, he says, impossible to know the past; no one is able to read everything that would require to be read. Twice he relates the same fable in illustration of his argument: