this childish mediævalism. And yet he does not espouse it, for in the _Opinions of Jérome Coignard_ he says: “All those stories of Satanic fornication are disgusting dreams, and it is a shame that Jesuits and Dominicans should have made them up into treatises.” His theology is usually intermingled with his philosophy. In the story called _Komm l’Atrébate_ (in _Clio_) the warrior believes that the same moon does not shine over Rome and over Gaul, because Rome is so far away; in _La Muiron_ (in _Clio_) Buonaparte expounds his theory of government by faith: “The right to deny God is granted to a learned man shut up in his study, not to a leader of peoples whose power over the vulgar rests upon his community with their ideas. To govern men one must think like them on all great questions and allow oneself to be carried by public opinion.” Anatole France wishes to govern no man, and to be governed of no man. He is the most anarchistic of Socialists. And how could he feel otherwise if indeed he be Coignard, who “despised man tenderly,” who thought that “on earth one cannot help sinning”? The Abbé Coignard, in 1893, was full of cynical contempt for democracy, of disbelief in the importance of forms of government, and in the value of change; yet Coignard hated prisons and armies; he thought all war hateful, except civil war; for him glory, nobility, honour were words; glory, notably, was accident; modesty was Calvinism; he thought that there was a pure and an impure, but heaven alone knew which was which.... All that is the Francian philosophy mixed in with the Francian religion: doubts and smiles.