“I think well of it,” replied Renan. “It will put an end to the massacres.”
“ What,” exclaimed Dupont-White, “then do I understand that you were sent there to stir up religious fanaticism? I knew you received your mission through Prince Napoléon, so I thought your object would be rather to come to an understanding with the infidels. For I regard your prince and you as being two of the finest specimens of infidelity in the world.”
“But Prince Napoléon is a deist,” said Renan.
“Very well. And you?”
“I have no objection to saying Mon Dieu,” replied Renan. “But ...”
“I don’t see Renan going to preach a crusade in Syria or anywhere else,” said Littré, who had seemed to be dreaming.[73]
Two years later, on the 23rd of June, 1863, after Juliette had separated from her first husband and was living with her parents at Chauny, appeared Renan’s Vie de Jésus. From the point of view of its influence on free thought Dr. Lambert considered the publication of this book the most significant event of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Juliette received twenty letters from her friends, some extolling, others attacking the book. Mme. de Pierreclos thought it abominable and pernicious, all the more because of the perfection of its style. Ronchaud wrote admiring its poetry. “Even those,” he added, “who disbelieve in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth must henceforth worship him.”
“Renan,” said Dr. Lambert, “was like myself, a simple-minded, sincere and pious student of theology. But when he found the sacred text distorted by those to whom it had been entrusted, he lost faith as I did.”
Dr. Lambert on hearing that Renan had been deprived of his chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, exclaimed, “You see, imperialism, by treating Renan as an enemy, is pointing him out to us as our friend.”[74]