The Athenæum, a paper written by the élite of the literary, scientific, and artistic worlds, was at a loss to know, not long since, why almost all the heroes of French novels were engineers. The reason is that French engineers are all ex-pupils of the Polytechnic School. I mean the engineers of mines, roads, and bridges. These young men, having passed their youth in study, in order to prepare for the most difficult examination we have, naturally have the reputation of being steady. The anecdote is this: Edmond About one day wrote: "Virtuous as a Polytechnician." The sentence displeased the young mathematicians, and they promptly took the author of it to task.
I forget the exact words of their reply, but it ran, as nearly as I can recollect:
"Dear Sir: Please to speak of what you know something about. We are no more virtuous than you."
And I can vouch for the truth of this little anecdote: I was one of those who signed the letter.
Call a Frenchman a "good father" or "good citizen," he will smile and probably answer back, "You humbug!" Yet he is a good father and a good citizen, and he used to be a good garde-national, notwithstanding his objection to be told so. He proved it during the siege of Paris, although his wife had never been able to look at him in his uniform without laughing.
Now, if the Englishman, who ornaments his buttonhole with a piece of blue ribbon, does not put on two pieces more to proclaim urbi et orbi that he is a good father and a good citizen, it is because the idea never occurred to him—for nobody doubts that, like his neighbor, he, too, is a good father and a good citizen.
Ah! I say once more, if we only knew how to hide our faults as we can hide our virtues, what a respectable figure we could cut by the side of our neighbors!
The English hypocrite is the hypocrite of virtue and religion. English novelists have exposed him, but have not succeeded in extinguishing him; the Chadbands, the Stigginses, the Podsnaps, the Pecksniffs, all the saintly British Tartuffes, are as flourishing as ever.
Molière could, in his times, put on the stage such a man as Tartuffe; at the present day the type is extinct; the religious hypocrite would not go down in France; the character is exploded.
Pecksniff, one of the most powerful creations of Dickens, a photograph from the life, had named his two daughters, Mercy and Charity. In France, this worthy father and the Misses Mercy and Charity would find every door shut in their faces. This kind of vocation would lead straight to the workhouse.