The brilliant boy will never fail to light upon food for his brains wherever he may find himself. The misfortune is that everything in France leads to politics, and hence we have had the disgraceful sight of students in revolt against their professor, hissing and pelting him because elsewhere he had chosen to express political views to which these wise and learned young gentlemen objected, or because his politics were not those of their parents. The class of an eminent professor at Bordeaux was deserted, and stones were flung at him in the street by his pupils, for a graceful and manly reference to the cause of the death of the dean of his university, whose funeral oration he was called upon to pronounce. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to acquire a beneficial influence as a professor, for personal prestige, the value of character—which is the highest thing we can value in a teacher—are of no account in a land where, generally speaking, a man is loved or hated, not for the life he leads, the acts he commits, the duties he leaves unfulfilled, but solely for the political side he takes. In modern France character is nothing; politics everything. What students first demand is that their professors shall be on the side approved of by this immature class. After that they will condescend to listen to them. But the notion of being guided and influenced by the older mind, the riper judgment, does not enter their heads. The only professors who know how to grip and mark for life these malleable natures are the Jesuits. When Jesuit boys break away from their keepers, the Jesuits have no bitterer enemies. What intelligent Protestant has ever given us arguments so powerful and damning against Jesuit training as those two novels by their old pupils, _Le Scorpion_ of Marcel Prévost, and _L’Empreinte_ by Estaunié? _L’Empreinte_ (The Stamp) is much the greater study of Jesuitism of the two. Here you see a young, pliable nature for ever caught in its meshes, not brutalised or overtly captured, but insidiously demoralised, directed unconsciously into the path of dissimulation and unsleeping watchfulness, out of which the manliest efforts he makes afterwards, when he has shaken off its vice-like grasp of his individuality, never carry him. Here you understand, as no melodramatic stories of Sue or Dumas could make you understand, the shuddering intensity of moral hold; the implacable, mild pursuit; the potency and success of the Jesuits all the world over. It is a mistake to associate this self-rooted dislike of the Jesuits with bigoted Protestantism or blatant atheism. Read the exquisite stories of Ferdinand Fabre, studies by a sincere Catholic of Catholic life, which bear upon the underhand persecution of excellent, well-meaning country priests by what are called the Congregationalists, the Black Army, the Jesuits chiefly. Read that delightful study of Cévennes life under the Restoration, _Jacquou le Croquant_, by Eugene Le Roy, and see how a good