Christophe met some of these gentry at Roussin's. They were all blind fetish-worshippers. At that time they were rejoicing at having removed Christ from the Courts of Law. They thought they had destroyed religion because they had destroyed a few pieces of wood and ivory. Others were concentrating on Joan of Arc and her banner of the Virgin, which they had just wrested from the Catholics. One of the Fathers of the new Church, a general who was waging war on the French of the old Church, had just given utterance to an anti-clerical speech in honor of Vercingetorix: he proclaimed the ancient Gaul, to whom Free Thought had erected a statue, to be a son of the people, and the first champion against (the Church of) Rome. The Ministers of the Marine, by way of purifying the fleet and showing their horror of war, called their cruisers _Descartes_ and _Ernest Renan_. Other Free Thinkers had set themselves to purify art. They expurgated the classics of the seventeenth century, and did not allow the name of God to sully the _Fables_ of La Fontaine. They did not allow it in music either: and Christophe heard one of them, an old radical,--("_To be a radical in old age_," says Goethe, "_is the height of folly_")--wax indignant at the religious _Lieder_ of Beethoven having been given at a popular concert. He demanded that other words should be used instead of "God." "What?" asked Christophe in exasperation. "The Republic?" Others who were even more radical would accept no compromise and wanted purely and simply to suppress all religious music and all schools in which it was taught. In vain did a director of the University of Fine Arts, who was considered an Athenian in that Boeotia, try to explain that musicians must be taught music: for, as he said, with great loftiness of thought, "when you send a soldier to the barracks, you teach him how to use a gun and then how to shoot. And so it is with a young composer: his head is buzzing with ideas: but he has not yet learned to put them in order." And, being a little scared by his own courage, he protested with every sentence: "I am an old Free Thinker.... I am an old Republican..." and he declared audaciously that "he did not care much whether the compositions of Pergolese were operas or Masses: all that he wanted to know was, were they human works of art?"--But his adversary with implacable logic answered "the old Free Thinker and Republican" that "there were two sorts of music: that which was sung in churches and that which was sung in other places." The first sort was the enemy of Reason and the State: and the Reason of the State ought to suppress it.