To the considerate, therefore, it may appear expedient to dismiss Coignard's trite winding-up of a half-century of splendid talking, as just the infelicitous outcropping, in the dying man's enfeebled condition, of an hereditary foible. And when moralizing would approach an admonitory forefinger to the point that Coignard's manner of living brought him to die haphazardly, among preoccupied strangers at a casual wayside inn, you do, there is no questioning it, recall that a more generally applauded manner of living has been known to result in a more competently arranged-for demise, under the best churchly and legal auspices, through the rigors of crucifixion. So it becomes the part of wisdom to waive these mundane riddles, and to consider instead the justice of Coignard's fine epitaph, wherein we read that "living without worldly honors, he earned for himself eternal glory." The statement may (with St. Peter keeping the gate) have been challenged in paradise; but in literature at all events, the unhonored life of Jérôme Coignard has clothed him with glory of tolerably longeval looking texture. It is true that this might also be said of Iago and Tartuffe, but then we have Balzac's word for it that merely to be celebrated is not enough. Rather is the highest human desideratum twofold,--_D'être célebré et d'être aimé._ And that much Coignard promises to be for a long while. § 50 The thoughts of M. Jérôme Coignard, then,--here somewhat to retrace my argument,--untiringly return to the most diverting of all themes, to the relationship between God and His children, and what familiary etiquette seems most adapt to keep that relationship an affable one. I know that religion is, just now, rather out-of-date. I know that nowadays a great deal of atheism is going about among the foolish and unreflective. But we may wiseliest, I am sure, put out of mind the notion of there being no God, and of the dead finding beyond the black door at the end of the gray corridor, that silver-handled door which is the sole exit from our workaday existence, nothing whatever. Even if one would, upon the whole, prefer to find there nothing, here it remains, in every sense, a rather wasteful parade of agnosticism to admit the existence of nothing. It is wasteful because no diversion is to be had of thinking about nothing. But any amount of diversion can be gained from meditation upon the strange realms beyond the tomb for which we may, quite conceivably, all be en route: for in this place also is the proffered lure that ageless aspiration toward lands which are in nothing familiar.