It is this toying, this series of mental amourettes, which incommunicably "makes the difference" in almost all the volumes of M. France familiar to me; but our affair is with this one story. Now in this vivid book we have our fill of color and animation and gallant strangenesses, and a stir of characters who impress us as living with a poignancy unmastered as yet by anybody's associates in flesh and blood. We have, in brief, all that Dumas could ever offer, here utilized not to make drama but background, all being woven into a bright undulating tapestry behind an erudite and battered figure,--a figure of odd medleys, in which the erudition is combined with much of Autolycus, and the unkemptness with something of à Kempis. For what one remembers of the _Rôtisserie_ is l'Abbé Jérôme Coignard; and what one remembers, ultimately, about Coignard is not his crowded career, however opulent in larcenous and lectual escapades and fisticuffs and broached wineflasks, but his religious meditations, wherein a merry heart does, quite actually, go all the way. Coignard I take to be a peculiarly rare type of man (there is no female of this species), the type that is genuinely interested in religion. In that his mind is actually at grapple with the most diverting of all themes, he stands apart. He halves little with the staid majority of us who sociably contract our sacred tenets from our neighbors like a sort of theological measles. He halves nothing whatever with our more earnest-minded juniors who--perennially discovering that all religions thus far put to the test of nominal practise have, whatever their paradisial entrée, resulted in a deplorable earthly hash,--perennially run yelping into the shrill agnosticism which believes only that one's neighbors should not be permitted to believe in anything. The creed of Coignard is more urbane: "Always bear in mind that a sound intelligence rejects everything that is contrary to reason, except in matters of faith, where it is necessary to believe blindly." Your opinions are thus all-important, your physical conduct is largely a matter of taste, in a philosophy which ranks affairs of the mind immeasurably above the gross accidents of matter. Indeed, man can win to heaven only through repentance, and the initial step toward repentance is to do something to repent of. There is no flaw in this logic, and in its clear lighting such abrogations of parochial and transitory human laws as may be suggested by reason, and the consciousness that nobody is looking, take on the aspect of divinely appointed duties. § 49