Beyle and Mérimée resemble each other in their attitude to religion, which was a peculiar one for Romanticists. The French Romanticists were originally as little inimical to Roman Catholicism as the German. Several of them began life as good Catholics, and the attitude of the rest was, generally speaking, one either of respect or indifference. But both Mérimée and Beyle were from the very first thoroughly pagan in thought and feeling. And Mérimée's free-thought, as well as Beyle's, was of the ardent type. He was not naïve enough to cherish a species of enmity towards a personal God, but he shared Beyle's detestation of the representatives of religion. His dislike of Christianity is, however, far more indirectly expressed than Beyle's, which is incessantly forcing itself on our notice. He does not, like Beyle, hate Catholicism; he only smiles at it. He never puts out more than a finger tip from under his black domino. It amuses him to describe insinuating Catholic priests; and when his characters have occasion to speak of baptism, confession, or any other religious ceremony, he is apt to make them do it "in a sanctimonious, nasal tone." But when the words are his own, we never have more than such cautious, subtle irony as is contained in the following passage. "It was a religious book which Madame de Pienne had brought with her; and I do not intend to tell you its title, in the first place because I do not wish to injure its author, in the second, because you would probably accuse me of desiring to draw some opprobrious inference regarding such books in general. Suffice it to say that the work in question was written by a young man of nineteen, with the special aim of restoring hardened sinners of the female sex to the bosom of the Church, that Arsène was terribly exhausted, and that she had not closed her eyes the whole of the previous night. Whilst the third page was being read, that happened which would have happened whatever the book had been--Mademoiselle Guillot closed her eyes and fell asleep."