“You speak well, Abbé,” said Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, impaling a sausage from the dish. “But you give no answer to what I said, that the children born without heads are far from being adapted to the destiny of mankind, which, the Church tells us, is to know God and to serve Him and to love Him, and in that, as in the amount of germs which are wasted, nature is not, speaking plainly, sufficiently theological and Christian. I may add that she exhibits no religious spirit in any of her acts, and seems to ignore her God. That is what frightens me, Monsieur l’Abbé.” “Oh!” cried my father, waving on the end of his fork a drum-stick of the chicken he was carving, “Oh! this is indeed gloomy and dreary talk, ill-suited to the feast we celebrate to-day. And it is my wife who is to blame, who offers us a child with a serpent’s head as if it were an agreeable dish for honest company. That out of my beautiful red eggs should come so many diabolical tales!” “Ah, mine host,” said Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard. “It is true that everything comes out of the egg. From this idea the heathens have drawn many philosophical fables. But that from eggs, so Christian under their antique purple as those we have just eaten, should escape such a flight of wild impieties, that is what amazes me.” Monsieur Nicolas Cerise looked at my good master, winking his eye, and said, with a thin laugh: “Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, these eggs, whose beetroot-tinted shells lie scattered on the floor under our feet, are not in their essence as Christian and Catholic as it pleases you to think them. Easter Eggs, on the contrary, are of heathen origin, and recall, at the time of spring equinox, the mysterious burgeoning of life. It is an ancient symbol which has been preserved in the Christian religion.” “One might equably reasonably uphold,” said my good master, “that it is a symbol of the Resurrection of Christ. I, for one, have no wish to load religion with symbolical subtleties. I would most willingly believe that the pleasure of eating eggs, denied to us during Lent, is the sole reason why on this day they appear on the tables with honour and clothed in royal purple. But no matter, these are mere trifles, serving to amuse the learned and the bookmen. What is worth considering in your talk, Monsieur Nicolas Cerise, is that you bring into opposition nature and religion, and you want to make them inimical to each other. Impiety! Monsieur Nicolas Cerise. And so horrible that this good fellow of a cook trembles at it without understanding it. But I am not a whit disturbed; and such arguments cannot, even for one minute, seduce a mind which knows how to govern itself.