It was chiefly through Lamennais that the current of democratic ideas reached Victor Hugo. In Lamennais' principal work, _Essai sur l'Indifférence_, there were already signs indicating the possibility of a rejection of that principle of authority which he had championed so ardently in his youth. In August 1832 his theories were condemned by the Pope. The intimate relations between Lamennais and Hugo began in the latter's youth; Lamennais congratulated Hugo on the occasion of his marriage, and Hugo's first odes were dedicated to Lamennais. In 1822, persuaded by the Abbé de Rohan, Hugo determined to unburden his mind to a father confessor. The first he went to was Frayssinous, once the intrepid, self-sacrificing curé, now the fashionable Paris clergyman, a bishop, and head of the University. Hugo was repelled by Frayssinous' worldly ideas and counsels, and the Abbé then sent him to the little, frail, slender man with the yellow face, hooked nose, and beautiful, restless eyes, who walked the streets of Paris in a shabby cassock, blue woollen stockings, and hobnailed shoes--the famous Lamennais, whom he already knew so well. The ideas of both confessor and penitent underwent a change in the course of the years preceding the Revolution of July, and the one was not long after the other in going over to the Liberal and anti-clerical party. One evening in September 1830 Lamennais, entering Hugo's room, found him writing. "I am disturbing you," said Lamennais. "No. But you will not approve of what I am writing." "Never mind; let me hear it." And Hugo read the following lines from his _Journal d'un Révolutionnaire de 1830_: "The republic, which is not yet ripe, but which in a century will embrace the whole of Europe, signifies that society is its own sovereign. It protects itself by means of its citizen-soldiers; judges itself, by trial by jury; administers its own affairs, by local government; rules itself, by popular representation. The four limbs of monarchy--the standing army, the courts, the bureaucracy, the peerage--are for the republic only four troublesome excrescences which are withering up and will soon die." "You have one clause too many," said Lamennais; "that which asserts that the republic is not ripe. You speak of it in the future tense, I in the present." A few years later, Lamennais' connection with the Roman Catholic Church was at an end. It was in order to show that his defection was not the result of unbelief but of a new conviction, that he entitled his famous manifesto _Paroles d'un Croyant_ (1833).