'For having trouble with the Christian Brothers?' I could not help asking.
'No! but the courts decided against him, and that was a misfortune. The President put it right by decorating him, for it is evident that he meant to do his duty, and a Government must stand by its friends. Do you know Bapaume? It is a pretty place—all factories. It was there, you know, that Faidherbe beat the Germans. A very pretty place.'
CHAPTER II
IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS—continued
Boulogne
Boulogne now, as in the days of Arthur Young, is surrounded with bright and pleasant villas and country houses, though many of the châteaux which Young was so much surprised to find inhabited by country gentlemen attending to their duties and living on their estates have disappeared.
It is not only a larger and a more lively place than Calais; it is a more picturesque and a more interesting place. The old walls and ramparts of the upper town make such a striking contrast with the modern streets and squares of the lower town as reminds one vaguely of Quebec, the Channel coming into the landscape like the St. Lawrence. As at Quebec, too, the two civilisations of France and of England meet without mingling; and at Boulogne, as at Quebec, the French type, if not the stronger of the two, certainly proves itself to be the subtler, and decides the local physiognomy.
I spent an hour at Boulogne, with a friend who now fills an important ecclesiastical position in one of the provinces of Central France, and who was passing a few weeks on the Channel for his health. He is one of the few French churchmen I personally know who heartily agree with Cardinal Manning in thinking that the abolition of the Concordat would greatly strengthen the Church in France, even if it involved a further serious sacrifice of the proprietary rights of the clergy. 'The way in which the people have come forward to the support of the congreganist schools against, the oppressive measures adopted in the law of 1886,' he said, 'confirms my old conviction, that a complete separation of the Church from the State in France, whatever its effect might be upon the State, would strengthen the Church.'
He cited a number of instances within his own knowledge in which rural communes had established, and were carrying on, at the direct expense of the local farmers and residents, free or congreganist schools, while, of course, at the same time they were paying taxes for the lay public schools to which they would not send their children. 'And this in spite,' he said, 'of the ingenious devices with which the law of 1886 bristles for making the establishment of free and Christian schools difficult and expensive. For example, to begin with, the legislature actually tried to prevent us from calling our schools free schools, though as schools supported by the free subscriptions of the people they were distinctly "free" schools, as distinguished from the schools established by the law at the expense of the taxpayers. We were gravely informed that it was an act of war to call a free school free! In this same petty and childish spirit the congregations are called "associations" in the text of the law. When a free school is to be opened, the teacher who is to have charge of it must run the gauntlet of a series of public officers, all of them, if they are on good terms with the Government, presumably hostile to him as a Christian. He begins with the mayor of the Commune, who may object to his opening the school in the place he has chosen, on grounds of "good morals or of hygiene." Then he must go through with the Prefect of the Department, the Academic Inspector, and the Procureur of the Republic.'