author's theory that all physical beauty and moral nobility belonged to
virgins only, to be thoroughly imbecile, and he could not restrain
himself from hinting his disapproval of it.

Both Santerre and Seguin, however, hotly opposed him, and quite a
discussion ensued. First Santerre took up the matter from a religious
standpoint. Said he, the words of the Old Testament, "Increase and
multiply," were not to be found in the New Testament, which was the true
basis of the Christian religion. The first Christians, he declared, had
held marriage in horror, and with them the Holy Virgin had become the
ideal of womanhood. Seguin thereupon nodded approval and proceeded to
give his opinions on feminine beauty. But these were hardly to the taste
of Mathieu, who promptly pointed out that the conception of beauty had
often varied.

"To-day," said he, "you conceive beauty to consist in a long, slim,
attenuated, almost angular figure; but at the time of the Renaissance the
type of the beautiful was very different. Take Rubens, take Titian, take
even Raffaelle, and you will see that their women were of robust build.
Even their Virgin Marys have a motherly air. To my thinking, moreover, if
we reverted to some such natural type of beauty, if women were not
encouraged by fashion to compress and attenuate their figures so that
their very nature, their very organism is changed, there would perhaps be
some hope of coping with the evil of depopulation which is talked about
so much nowadays."

The others looked at him and smiled with an air of compassionate
superiority. "Depopulation an evil!" exclaimed Seguin; "can you, my dear
sir, intelligent as you are, still believe in that hackneyed old story?
Come, reflect and reason a little."