Pliny's
incomparable picture of his Tuscan villa. '_Placida omnia et
quiescentia._' 'A spirit of pensive peace broods over the whole place,
making it not lovelier only, but more salubrious, making the sky more
pure, the atmosphere more clear.'

People who imagine convulsions and cataclysms to be a necessity of
political life in France, will find it hard to explain the relations
which existed throughout his whole career from the time when he took
part in forming the first government of Louis Philippe to the day of his
death between this great Protestant statesman and the Catholics of the
Calvados. These relations still exist between his representatives at Val
Richer and the Catholics of the Calvados.

When the great Chancellor de l'Hopital was using all his influence with
Catherine de' Medici to prevent the outbreak of the religious wars of
the sixteenth century, the Parisian rabble were set on by the satellites
of the House of Guise to attack the house of the Sieur de Longjumeau in
the Pre aux Clercs, as being a place of meeting for the Huguenots. The
Sieur de Longjumeau had no respect for the 'sacred right of
insurrection,' and, getting some of his friends into his house, gave the
people risen in their majesty such a thrashing that they speedily
disbanded. Upon this the 'moral unity' men of that time induced the
Court to banish the Sieur de Longjumeau to his estates, on the ground
that 'the most incompatible thing in a State is the existence of two
forms of religion.' This is the doctrine of the Third Republic to-day.
France cannot live with a mixed population of believers and of
unbelievers. All Frenchmen must be Atheists. The political history of
the Calvados for the last half-century, and especially of this region
about Lisieux and Val Richer, meets this 'moral unity' theory with a
practical demonstration of its absurdity. The great Protestant statesman
and his Catholic constituents at Lisieux lived and worked together for
liberty and for law, not in 'moral unity,' but in moral harmony. In
moral harmony his Protestant son-in-law, M. Conrad de Witt, through a
quarter of a century past has lived and worked for liberty and for law
with his Catholic constituents of Pont-l'Eveque.

The Catholics of the Calvados are not such intense Catholics as the
Catholics of Brittany and Poitou. After the Norman rising of 1793
against the tyranny at Paris had collapsed so dismally in the ridiculous
'battle' of Pacy--a battle which