members maintain business or social relations, more or less active, with one or another section of the English population of the great British metropolis. Perhaps, if we could get a plain, unvarnished account from some member of one of these colonies, of England and English life as they appear to him and to his compatriots, Englishmen might be as much confounded as I have known very intelligent and well-informed Frenchmen to be, by the notions of French life and of the condition of the French people, really and seriously entertained, not by casual foreign tourists, but by highly educated foreigners who really wished to know the truth. Not long after the Legislative Elections of 1885, the results of which astonished public men in England at the time as much almost as they did the satellites of the Government in Paris, I met at the house of a friend in London a very eminent English public man, whose name I do not feel quite at liberty to mention, but who is certainly regarded by great numbers of Englishmen as an authority without appeal, not only in regard to questions of English domestic policy, but in regard to European affairs in general. In the course of a general conversation--there were ten or twelve well-known people in the company--this distinguished public man expressed to me his great surprise at the importance which I 'seemed to attach to the religious sentiment in France.' I assured him that I not only 'seemed' to attach, but did in fact attach very serious importance to it, and I ventured to ask him why this should 'surprise' him. To this he replied textually--for I noted down the remark afterwards that evening--that he was 'under the impression that the religious sentiment was dead in France!' 'May I ask,' I replied, 'what can possibly have given you such an impression as this?' 'Oh, many things,' he answered with great emphasis, 'but particularly a statement which I saw in a statistical work of much authority, not very long ago, to the effect that there are in France _five millions of professed atheists_!' All who heard this amazing assertion were, I think, as completely taken aback by it as I was. Courtesy required that I should beg the distinguished man who made it to give me, if he could, the title of the work in which he had found it. This he promptly replied that he was at the moment unable to do. He, however, very nearly asphyxiated a very quiet and well-bred young Frenchman attached to the French Embassy in London, who was present, by appealing to him on the subject. 'No, no!' exclaimed the alarmed _attache_, 'I dare say there is such a book, no doubt--no doubt--but I have never heard of it.'