Thus, amid the pretentious pathos which in our day has found its way into the Christian Apologia, has been preserved a school of solid doctrine, averse to all show and repugnant to success. Modesty has ever been the special attribute of the Company of St. Sulpice; this is why it has never attached any importance to literature, excluding it almost entirely. The rule of the St. Sulpice Company is to publish everything anonymously, and to write in the most unpretending and retiring style possible. They see clearly the vanity, and the drawbacks of talent, and they will have none of it. The word which best characterises them is mediocrity, but then their mediocrity is systematic and self-planned. Michelet has described the alliance between the Jesuits and the Sulpicians as "a marriage between death and vacuum." This is no doubt true, but Michelet failed to see that in this case the vacuum is loved for its own sake. There is something touching about a vacuum created by men who will not think for fear of thinking ill. Literary error is in their eyes the most dangerous of errors, and it is just on this account that they excel in the true style of writing. St. Sulpice is now the only place where, as formerly at Port-Royal, the style of writing possesses that absolute forgetfulness of form which is the proof of sincerity. It never occurred to the masters that among their pupils must be a writer or an orator. The principle which they insisted upon the most earnestly was never to make any reference to self, and if one had anything to say, to say it plainly and in undertones. It was all very well for you, my worthy masters, with that total ignorance of the world which does you so much honour, to take this view; but if you knew how little encouragement the world gives to modesty, you would see how difficult it is for literature to act up to your principles. What would modesty have done for M. de Chateaubriand? You were right to be severe upon the stagey ways of a theology reduced so low as to bid for applause by resorting to worldly tactics. But what does one ever hear of your theology? It has only one defect, but that is a serious one; it is dead. Your literary principles were like the rhetoric of Chrysippus, of which Cicero said that it was excellent for teaching the way of silence. Whoever speaks or writes for the public ear or eye must inevitably be bent upon succeeding. The great thing is not to make any sacrifice in order to attain that success, and this is what your serious, upright and honest teaching inculcated to perfection.