His sympathetic regard, then, urged him to humiliate his fellows, in their opinions, their knowledge, their philosophy, and institutions. He put his heart into showing them that their weak and silly nature has never constructed nor imagined anything worth the trouble of attacking and defending very briskly, and that if they knew the crudity and weakness of their greatest works, such as their laws and their empires, they would only fight in fun or in play, like children building sandcastles by the sea. We must not be astonished or scandalised then, that he depreciated every conception which makes for the honour and glory of mankind, at the expense of their peace. The majesty of the law did not impose on his clear-sighted intellect, and he deplored the fact that the wretched were subjected to so many restraints, of which in most cases, they could not discover the origin or the meaning. All principles appeared equally contestable to him. He had at last come to believe that members of a state would never condemn so many of their kind to infamy, if it were not to taste, by contrast, the pleasure of respectability. Such a view made him prefer bad company to good, after the example of Him who lived among publicans and sinners. But he kept his purity of heart, his gift of sympathy, and the treasure of his pity. I shall not speak here of his actions, which are recounted in _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_. I have no means of knowing whether, as was said of Madame de Mouchy, he was more worthy than his life. Our actions are not altogether our own; they depend less on us than on fortune. They come to us from all sides. We do not always merit them. Our inviolable mind is all we have of our very own. Thence the vanity of the world’s judgments. Nevertheless, I can say with pleasure that our leading lights have found Monsieur Coignard an amiable and pleasing person. Indeed one must be a Pharisee not to see in him a beautiful creation of God. So much said I hasten to return to his teachings, which alone matter here. What he had least of was the bump of veneration. Nature had denied it him, and he took no steps to acquire it. He feared lest, in exalting some, he should cast down others, and his universal charity was extended equally to the humble and the proud. It bore itself to the victims with a greater solicitude, but the executioners themselves seemed to him too wretched to be worthy of hate. He wished them no harm, and merely pitied them that they were wicked. He had no belief that reprisals, whether spontaneous, or according to law, did anything but add ill to ill. He viewed with complacence neither the vengeance that is private and much to the point, nor the majestic cruelty of the law, and if he happened to smile when the police were being drubbed, it was simply the result of his being but flesh and blood, and naturally a good fellow.