Salvan smiled sadly. 'Oh, all, my friend! How many are there around me then? There is yourself, and there was also that unfortunate fellow, Simon, on whom I greatly relied. Again, there is Mademoiselle Mazeline, the schoolmistress at your village, Jonville. If we had a few dozen teachers like her we might expect that the next generation would at last see women, wives and mothers, delivered from the priests! As for Férou, wretchedness and revolt are driving him crazy, bitterness of feeling is poisoning his mind. And after him comes the mere flock of indifferent, egotistical folk, stagnating in the observance of routine, and having only one concern, that of flattering their superiors in order to secure good reports. Then too there are the renegades, those who have gone over to the enemy, as, for instance, that Mademoiselle Rouzaire, who alone does the work of ten nuns, and who behaves so shamefully in the Simon affair. I was forgetting another, Mignot, one of our best pupils, who is certainly not a bad fellow, but whose mind requires forming, liable as it is to turn out good or bad, according to influence.' Salvan was growing excited, and it was with increased force that he continued: 'But a case that one may well despair of is that of Doutrequin, whom you saw leaving me just now. A schoolmaster himself, he is the son of one; in '70 he was fifteen, and three years later he entered the college still shuddering at the thought of the invasion, and dreaming of revenge. At that time considerations of patriotism influenced the whole of our educational system in France. The country asked us merely for soldiers; the army was like a temple, a sanctuary, that army which has remained waiting with arms grounded for thirty years, and which has devoured thousands upon thousands of millions of francs! And thus we have been turned into a warrior France instead of becoming a France of progress, truth, justice, and peace, such as alone could have helped to save the world. And now one sees so-called patriotism changing Doutrequin, once a good Republican, a supporter of Gambetta, and still quite recently an anti-clerical, into an anti-Semite, even as it will end by changing him into a clerical altogether. A few minutes ago he favoured me with an extraordinary speech, an echo of the articles in _Le Petit Beaumontais_. "France before everything else," said he; it was necessary to drive out the Jews, to make a fundamental dogma of respect for the army, and to allow more liberty in education, by which he meant to allow the religious Congregations full freedom to keep the masses ignorant. He typifies the bankruptcy of the earlier patriotic Republicans. Yet he is a worthy man, an excellent teacher, with five assistants under him, and the best-kept school in Beaumont. Two of his sons are already assistant-teachers in other schools of the department, and I know that they share their father's views and even exaggerate them as young men are wont to do.