ed. He was not
the author of the telegram that had been fathered on him, and he knew
nothing of Paul Bert's conversion. A day or two later the ship conveying
the heretic's corpse arrived at the Suez Canal. Madame Bert heard of
the preposterous story of her husband's conversion, and she immediately
telegraphed that it was absolutely and entirely false. Madame Bert, who
is a highly accomplished woman, is a Freethinker herself, and she is too
proud of her husband's reputation to lose a moment in contradicting a
miserable libel on his courage and sincerity.

Before dropping the pen, we take the opportunity of saying a few words
on Madame Adam's article on Paul Bert in the _Contemporary Review_. She
is an able woman, but not a philosopher, and she labors under the
craze of thinking that she is a great force in European politics. She
confesses that she hated Paul Bert, and she betrays that her aversion
originated in pique and jealousy. We do not wish to be ungallant, but
Gambetta had good reasons for preferring Paul Bert to Juliette Lambert,
although the lady is ludicrously wrong in saying that "it was to Paul
Bert that Gambetta owed all the formulae of his scientific politics."
She forgets that Gambetta's speeches before Paul Bert became his friend
are in print. She also ignores the fact that Gambetta was a stedfast
Freethinker from his college days, and was never infected with that
sentimental religiosity from which she assumes that Paul Bert perverted
him. Certainly he was incapable of being moved by the hackneyed
platitudes about science and religion that form the prelude of Madame
Adam's article, and seem borrowed from one of M. Oaro's lectures. Nor
did he need Paul Bert to tell him, after the terrible struggle of 1877,
that Clericalism was the enemy. Still less, if that were possible,
did he require Paul Bert or any other man to tell him that France
imperatively needed education free from priestcraft. Madame Adam is so
anxious to deal Paul Bert a stab in the dark that she confuses the most
obvious facts. Gambetta and he fought against clericalism, and labored
for secular education, because they were both Freethinkers as well as
Republicans. In venting her spite, and reciting her own witticisms, she
fails to see the force of her own admissions. This is what she writes of
a very momentous occasion:

"I saw Gambetta at Saint Cloud the Sunday after the mishap at
Obaronne. He had just been taking the chair at the Chateau d'