'Sometimes I think we were so stunned as a nation by the invasion and the Commune that we are still staggering about like a man knocked on the head in a dark road.
'But let me tell you the tale of M. Petit and Mademoiselle Colombel. Mademoiselle Colombel was a lay teacher at the head of one of our schools, the school of the Petit St.-Jean. I don't quite see, by the way,' he observed, 'why M. Petit and his squad have not changed the names of these schools. In Paris, you know, they had the courage to change the name of one of the great lyceums into the Lyceum Lakanal. To be sure it didn't stay changed very long, for even Paris--which suffers one of its boulevards to commemorate that wretched creature Victor Noir--wouldn't stand Lakanal. But to infect the minds of children with the names of little Saints--surely this is a monstrous thing! Well, Mademoiselle Colombel lost her temper one day, and tried to find it about the person of one of her little pupils, with slaps, and pinches, and other caresses of the kind. She was brought up before the police for it, and sentenced to pay a small fine with costs. She appealed, but the court confirmed the sentence of the police magistrate, who had acted strictly within the law. What followed? This was in May 1885. Mdlle. Colombel declared herself to be a persecuted martyr of "laicisation," and in that capacity called upon the mayor, M. Petit, for aid and comfort. I believe they were old allies in the sacred cause. Be this as it may, the mayor made himself her champion against the magistrate, and wrote her, for public use, this letter. Pray print it. It is a great thing for Amiens to possess a mayor, and for France to possess a senator, who can write such a letter. It ought to have been sent to the Exposition.
'"Madame,--On the strength of calumnious imputations fomented by an Ulysses who could not console himself for the departure of Calypso, and complacently listened to, you have been prosecuted for cruelty to your pupils.
'"After an inquiry as long and as voluminous as if the matter at issue had been a case for the Assize Court, this intrigue came to a miserable end before a simple police tribunal. From the moment, when, through a singular sort of suspicion about your natural judges, you were removed from the disciplinary action of your superiors, without any preliminary inquiry made by them, and, indeed, without apprising them of the matter, you should have been taken before the Courts. Nobody seemed to understand this, so you were condemned by default to pay a fine, trifling indeed, but so imposed as to take from you the right of appeal. Be this as it may, since some of the law officers of the Republic are ready to revive against the lay instructors of our schools, the methods of the law officers of the Empire, it is well your colleagues should know that, whilst I am at the head of the municipal administration of Amiens, they shall not be given over defenceless to the rancour of the clerical world, its dupes, or its accomplices. I have therefore the honour to inform you that I not only relieve you from all the costs of your case, but that, in order to soothe the trouble it may have caused you, I grant you an indemnity of one hundred francs!