Strange Inconsistency

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 35, 27 August 1903, Page 1

Strange Inconsistency

In his • Jacques Bonhomme,' Max O'Rell (Paul Blouet) wrote as follows : ' Far from attempting to hide our faults, we, as a matter of fact, often make show of those we have not. The Frenchman is the braggart of vice. If you say to an Englishman : " I know you are a rirtuous man," he will think you only give him his due. If you were to pay the same compliment to a Frenchman, he would resent it. Like the Anglomaniacs, represented in that charming American comedy by Mr. Bronson Howard, " The Henrietta," " each fellow," in France, " wants, every other fellow to believe that he is a devil of a fellow, but he isn't." ' Profession and practice are almost as often Kilkenny cats as they are good yoke-fellow?. Exaggeration of one's misdeeds was a common feature of the ' bloods ' and would-be ' bloods ' of the days of the second Charles and third George. In lodge-ridden France, history has been merely repeating itself. Nevertheless, those undue pretentions to vicious living are a strange freak of pervertdd vanity, -for even hypocrisy is the unwilling tribute that vice pays to virtue. The Frenchman who ' has religion '—and, despite the evils of his time, his name is legion— does' not wear it on his sleeve ; and the country has not yet produced, and is not likely to produce, canting hypocrites of the type of,Stiggins and Chadband, who have achieved what Taylor the water-poet calls ' The knowledge of the thriving art, A holy outside and a hollow heart.'

Beneath the no-creed professions of the careless Frenchman there often lies a sense of religion that comes to the surface under the stress of a colic on land or of a storm |t sea. Even the open, shameless, and illegal penalising of the practice of the Catholic faith by State officials has not in every case availed to keep down the sense of religion in those who are responsible for the present Kulturkampf in France. President Loubet, for instance, had his infant son recently baptised. ' The conduct of M. Laloge, an ex-deputy,' says a European exchange, ' affords another instance of this* inconsistency. M.' Laloge is the gentleman who first brought into vogue 11 civil interments "—that is interments from which religious ceremonies are strictly excluded— and he even pro- . posed that there should be a mimicry of the rite of baptism, champagne being used on each occasion instead of water. But, a child of his, aged eight months, died the

other day, and instead of making the funeral merely a civil function, he arranged for the intervention of the clergy. A priest accompanied the body to the cemetery and said the prayers prescribed by the Church at the grave. Again, M. Delmas, Ministerial Deputy for Corleze, never neglects an opportunity for proving that he is animated by an anti-clerical spirit. His little daughter, however, lately made her first Communion very devoutly at the Catholic church in Auteuil. M. Delmas hopes, no doubt, that his radical committees will hear nothing of the ceremony. Some Frenchmen at least have no scruples on the subject of rigid adherence to principle.'