had become the
ideal of womanhood. Seguin thereupon nodded approval and proceeded to
give his opinions on feminine beauty. But these were hardly to the taste
of Mathieu, who promptly pointed out that the conception of beauty had
often varied.

"To-day," said he, "you conceive beauty to consist in a long, slim,
attenuated, almost angular figure; but at the time of the Renaissance
the type of the beautiful was very different. Take Rubens, take Titian,
take even Raffaelle, and you will see that their women were of robust
build. Even their Virgin Marys have a motherly air. To my thinking,
moreover, if we reverted to some such natural type of beauty, if women
were not encouraged by fashion to compress and attenuate their figures
so that their very nature, their very organism is changed, there would
perhaps be some hope of coping with the evil of depopulation which is
talked about so much nowadays."

The others looked at him and smiled with an air of compassionate
superiority. "Depopulation an evil!" exclaimed Seguin; "can you, my dear
sir, intelligent as you are, still believe in that hackneyed old story?
Come, reflect and reason a little."

Then Santerre chimed in, and they went on talking one after the other
and at times both together. Schopenhauer and Hartmann and Nietzsche were
passed in review, and they claimed Malthus as one of themselves. But all
this literary pessimism did not trouble Mathieu. He, with his belief
in fruitfulness, remained convinced that the nation which no longer had
faith in life must be dangerously ill. True, there were hours when he
doubted the expediency of numerous families and asked himself if ten
thousand happy people were not preferable to a hundred thousand unhappy
ones; in which connection political and economic conditions had to be
taken into account. But when all was said, he remained almost convinced
that the Malthusian hypotheses would prove as false in the future as
they had proved false in the past.

"Moreover," said he, "even if the world should become densely populated,
even if food supplies, such as we know them, should fall short,
chemistry would extract other means of subsistence from inorganic
matter. And, besides, all such eventualities are so far away that it is
impossible to make any calculation on a basis of scientific certainty.
In France, too, instead of contributing to any such danger, we are going
backward, we are marching towards annihilation. The population of
Fra