ceived an excellent education."

"Where was that?"

"In Heaven."

"No, Arcade, no; you never had any education. If good principles had
been inculcated into you, you would still hold them. Such principles are
never lost. In my childhood I learnt to revere my family, my country, my
religion. I have not forgotten the lesson and I never shall. Do you know
what shocks me most in you? It is not your perversity, your cruelty,
your black ingratitude; it is not your agnosticism, which may be borne
with at a pinch; it is not your scepticism, though it is very much out
of date (for since the national awakening there is no longer any
scepticism in France);--no, what disgusts me in you is your lack of
taste, the bad style of your ideas, the inelegance of your doctrines.
You think like an intellectual, you speak like a freethinker, you have
theories which reek of radicalism and Combeism and all ignoble systems.
Get along with you! you disgust me. Arcade, my old friend, Arcade, my
dear angel, Arcade, my beloved child, listen to your guardian angel!
Yield to my prayers, renounce your mad ideas; become good, simple,
innocent, and happy once more. Put on your hat, come with me to
Notre-Dame. We will say a prayer and burn a candle together."

Meanwhile public opinion was still active in the matter; the leading
papers, the organs of the national awakening, in articles of real
elevation and real depth, unravelled the philosophy of this monstrous
attack which was revolting to the conscience. They discovered the real
origin, the indirect but effective cause in the revolutionary doctrines
which had been disseminated unchecked, in the weakening of social ties,
the relaxing of moral discipline, in the repeated appeals to every
appetite, to every greedy desire. It would be needful, so as to cut down
the evil at its root, to repudiate as quickly as possible all such
chimeras and Utopias as syndicalism, the income-tax, etc., etc., etc.
Many newspapers, and these not the least important, pointed out that the
recrudescence of crime was but the natural fruit of impiety and
concluded that the salvation of society lay in an unanimous and sincere
return to religion. On the Sunday which followed the crime the
congregations in the churches were noticed to be unusually large.

Judge Salneuve, who was entrusted with the task of investigation, first
examined the persons arrested by the police, and lost his way among
attractive but illusory clues; however