Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/292

 a few commonplaces about Spain. The fashionable resort for the lecture fanatic has been, for some years past, the Bodinière, in the Rue St. Lazare. This is an old theatre, a concert hall, a kind of fast musical chamber, where ballets, songs, and lectures all mingle strangely, and the lecturer, when the curtain rises, is revealed seated before a table, with ballet-girls heel-and-toe-tipped on the walls around him. The first time I attended a fashionable lecture at the Bodinière, it was to hear the Abbé Charbonnel talk to us on Lamennais. I am not easily shocked, but I found both incongruous and indecorous the picture made by an abbé in his uniform of religion, between two ballet-girls, with images everywhere of public dance and light morals. The lecture was an impressive one, far above the average Parisian lecture, eloquent, original, solemnly grave, polished as only a Frenchman's prose is polished, with a note of burning revolt running through it. This, too, surprised me. When all London gathered to hear why an eminent clergyman of the Church of England left the faith of his fathers, they congregated in a church, and listened with a sense of solemnity to a solemn avowal. Here was a French abbé talking to us with a just indignation of the tyranny of Rome; talking with passion and admiration of Lamennais's revolt and the injustice of Rome, talking as only a man