“Alas! my child,” he said, “the life of man is only a journey, and even the world itself is not set upon everlasting foundations. It must end like everything that has a beginning.”
“Have you read, on this subject,” said Theodore, “the ‘Treatise on the World, its Origin and its Antiquity’?”
“I learned all that I know from the book of Genesis,” said the conservative pastor; “but I have heard it said that M. de Mirabeau, a sophist of the last century, had written a book upon this subject.”
“Sub judice lis est,” Theodore interrupted brusquely. “I have proved in my ‘Stromates’ that the first two parts of ‘Le Monde’ were by that dreadfully pedantic Mirabeau, and the third was by the Abbé Lemascrier.”
“Ah! my goodness,” said the old aunt, taking off her spectacles; “then who was it that made America?”
“This is not the question now,” continued the abbé. “Do you believe in the Trinity?”
“How could I disbelieve the famous volume of Servetus, ‘De Trinitate,’” said Theodore, half raising himself on his pillow, “when I have seen an example go, ipsissimis oculis, for the trifling sum of two hundred and fifteen francs at the MacCarthy sale, while at the dispersal of the La Vallière collection it brought seven hundred?”[11]
“We are straying from the point,” exclaimed the priest, a little disconcerted. “I wish to know, my son, what you think of the divinity of Jesus Christ.”
“Well!” said Theodore, “it depends upon what you mean by it. I shall maintain against every one that the ‘Toldos-Jeschu,’ which was written by that ignorant railler Voltaire, who wasted on it a lot of foolish fables worthy of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ is nothing but evil rabbinesque nonsense, unworthy to be placed in the library of a scholar.”