Aime Victor-Francis,
'"Bishop of Amiens."
'To this letter, written by the highest ecclesiastical authority of the chief city of his préfecture—will you believe it?—M. Spuller, who is after all not a perfectly illiterate person like Petit, actually made no reply!
'But the cotton-velvet bagman of blasphemy three days afterwards, reading in the papers the letter of Bishop Guilbert, burst into print with this incredible but most instructive effusion, addressed to his friend the Prefect:
'"Amiens: Nov. 15, 1880.
'"Mr. Prefect,—I find this morning in the journals of the bishopric the text of a letter addressed to you by the Bishop of Amiens in regard to the suppression of the Catholic emblem placed at the entrance of the general cemetery of the Madeleine.
'"It was by my order, and my written order, that the Christ of the Madeleine was removed. The only failure to comply with my orders was that the operation was performed in the evening after the cemetery was closed, instead of in the morning as I had directed. In acting thus, I have shown great tolerance; for, in virtue of Article 13 of the Law of the 7th Vendémiaire of the Year IV., circumscribed in its application, but not abrogated by the Law of the 18th Germinal year X., as is shown by a ministerial decree of the 7th Fructidor following: 'No sign special to any religion can be raised, fixed, and attached in any place whatever, so as to strike the eyes of citizens, except in an enclosure intended for the exercises of this religion, or in the interior of private houses, in the studios or warehouses of artists or merchants, or in public edifices destined to contain monuments of the arts.'"
'Then followed a dozen pages of similar twaddle, meant to show that the mayor of Amiens was a most tolerant prince, in that he had not ordered the destruction of every cross set up on a private grave!
'Of course all these laws of the First Republic were long ago shot into space under the Consulate and the Empire, and of course, even if they had not been shot into space, a consecrated cemetery is an "enclosure intended for the exercises of religion." But what did that signify to M. Petit, who, in a public speech the year after, boasted that he "had not been married in church, and that his children had never been baptized."
'Did all this give the man any right to destroy and carry away a costly piece of artistic work, the property of the city?'
Obviously, it is as absurd to expect peace and order in France under a republic in which men like M. Petit, and M. Spuller, and M. Dauphin, and M. Goblet are leading friends of the Government, as it would have been to expect peace and order in the England of the seventeenth century, when churchwardens—as at Banbury, for example—went about breaking at night into the churches confided to their care, and smashing the statues of the saints and defacing the glorious monuments of the past.