“I,” said Binet, “once saw a piece called the Gamin de Paris , in which there was the character of an old general that is really hit off to a T. He sets down a young swell who had seduced a working girl, who at the ending⁠—”

“Certainly,” continued Homais, “there is bad literature as there is bad pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most important of the fine arts seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic idea, worthy of the abominable times that imprisoned Galileo.”

“I know very well,” objected the curé, “that there are good works, good authors. However, if it were only those persons of different sexes united in a bewitching apartment, decorated rouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this must, in the long-run, engender a certain mental libertinage, give rise to immodest thoughts and impure temptations. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all the Fathers. Finally,” he added, suddenly assuming a mystic tone of voice while he rolled a pinch of snuff between his fingers, “if the Church has condemned the theatre, she must be right; we must submit to her decrees.”