"Why, we are prostitutes," the girls all replied together. "You are wrong," said the Mapah; "you are Protestants." And in words which were not without elevation and vividness, he expounded to them the manner in which they, poor girls, protested against the privileges of respectable women. It need hardly be said that, as this doctrine spread, it led to some disquietude in the minds of magistrates, who had not attained the heights of the new religion, but were still plunged in the darkness of Christianity. Two or three times they brought the Mapah before the examining magistrates and threatened him with a trial; but the Mapah merely shook his blouse with his fine nervous hand, as the Roman ambassador used to shake his toga. "Imprison me, try me, condemn me," he said; "I shall not appeal from the lower to a higher tribunal; I shall appeal from Pilate to the People!" And, in fact, whether they stood in awe of his beard, his blouse or his speech, which was certainly captivating; whether they were unable to arrive at a decision as to what court the new religion should be judged at--police court or Court of Assizes--they left the Mapah in peace. The most enthusiastic of the Evadian apostles was _he who was once Caillaux,_ who published the _Arche de la nouvelle alliance._ He was the Mapah's Saint John; the _Arche de la nouvelle alliance_ was the gospel which told the passion of Humanity to whose rescue the Christ of the Ile Saint Louis was come. We will devote a chapter to that gospel. The Mapah himself wrote nothing, except two or three manifestoes issued from his _apostolic pallet_, in which he announced his apostolate to the modern world; he did nothing but pictures and plaster-casts that looked like originals dug out of a temple of Isis. Taking his _religion_ back to its source, he showed by his _twofold symbolism_, how it had developed from age to age, fertilising the whole of nature, till, finally, it culminated in himself. The whole of the history was written in hieroglyphic signs, had the advantage of being able to be read and expounded by everybody and treated of Buddhism, Paganism and Christianity before leading up to Evadism. In the latter years of the reign of Louis-Philippe, the Mapah sent his allegorical pictures and symbols in plaster to the members of the Chamber of Deputies and to the Royal Family; it will be readily believed that the members of the Chamber and royal personages left these lithographs and symbols in the hands of their ushers and lackeys, with which to decorate their own attics. The Mapah trembled for their fate. "They scoff," he said in prophecy: "MANÉ, THÉCEL, PHARÈS; evil fortune will befall them!" What did happen to them we know.