M. Jeufroy, having swallowed a glass of water, replied:
“Even while denying them you believe in them. The world which twelve fishermen converted—look at that! it seems to me a fine miracle.”
“Not at all!”
Pécuchet gave a different account of the matter: “Monotheism comes from the Hebrews; the Trinity from the Indians; the Logos belongs to Plato, and the Virgin Mother to Asia.”
No matter! M. Jeufroy clung to the supernatural and did not desire that Christianity should have humanly the least reason for its existence, though he saw amongst all peoples foreshadowings or deformations of it. The scoffing impiety of the eighteenth century he would have tolerated, but modern criticism, with its politeness, exasperated him.
“I prefer the atheist who blasphemes to the sceptic who cavils.”
Then he looked at them with an air of bravado, as if to dismiss them.
Pécuchet returned home in a melancholy frame of mind. He had hoped for a reconciliation between faith and reason.
Bouvard made him read this passage from Louis Hervieu:
“In order to know the abyss which separates them, oppose their axioms.