service; a few countrymen
and idlers were staring about at the pictures; and the Swiss, the paid
guardian of the place, was comfortably and appropriately asleep on his
bench at the door. I am inclined to think the famous reaction is over:
the students have taken to their Sunday pipes and billiards again; and
one or two cafes have been established, within the last year, that are
ten times handsomer than Notre Dame de Lorette.

However, if the immortal Goerres and the German mystics have had their
day, there is the immortal Goethe, and the Pantheists; and I incline to
think that the fashion has set very strongly in their favor. Voltaire
and the Encyclopaedians are voted, now, barbares, and there is no term
of reprobation strong enough for heartless Humes and Helvetiuses,
who lived but to destroy, and who only thought to doubt. Wretched as
Voltaire's sneers and puns are, I think there is something more
manly and earnest even in them, than in the present muddy French
transcendentalism. Pantheism is the word now; one and all have begun to
eprouver the besoin of a religious sentiment; and we are deluged with
a host of gods accordingly. Monsieur de Balzac feels himself to be
inspired; Victor Hugo is a god; Madame Sand is a god; that tawdry man of
genius, Jules Janin, who writes theatrical reviews for the Debats, has
divine intimations; and there is scarce a beggarly, beardless scribbler
of poems and prose, but tells you, in his preface, of the saintete of
the sacerdoce litteraire; or a dirty student, sucking tobacco and
beer, and reeling home with a grisette from the chaumiere, who is not
convinced of the necessity of a new "Messianism," and will hiccup, to
such as will listen, chapters of his own drunken Apocalypse. Surely, the
negatives of the old days were far less dangerous than the assertions of
the present; and you may fancy what a religion that must be, which has
such high priests.

There is no reason to trouble the reader with details of the lives of
many of these prophets and expounders of new revelations. Madame Sand,
for instance, I do not know personally, and can only speak of her from
report. True or false, the history, at any rate, is not very edifying;
and so may be passed over: but, as a certain great philosopher told us,
in very humble and simple words, that we are not to expect to gather
grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles, we may, at least, demand, in
all persons assuming the character of moralist or