Then Santerre chimed in, and they went on talking one after the other and
at times both together. Schopenhauer and Hartmann and Nietzsche were
passed in review, and they claimed Malthus as one of themselves. But all
this literary pessimism did not trouble Mathieu. He, with his belief in
fruitfulness, remained convinced that the nation which no longer had
faith in life must be dangerously ill. True, there were hours when he
doubted the expediency of numerous families and asked himself if ten
thousand happy people were not preferable to a hundred thousand unhappy
ones; in which connection political and economic conditions had to be
taken into account. But when all was said, he remained almost convinced
that the Malthusian hypotheses would prove as false in the future as they
had proved false in the past.

"Moreover," said he, "even if the world should become densely populated,
even if food supplies, such as we know them, should fall short, chemistry
would extract other means of subsistence from inorganic matter. And,
besides, all such eventualities are so far away that it is impossible to
make any calculation on a basis of scientific certainty. In France, too,
instead of contributing to any such danger, we are going backward, we are
marching towards annihilation. The population of France was once a fourth
of the population of Europe, but now it is only one-eighth. In a century
or two Paris will be dead, like ancient Athens and ancient Rome, and we
shall have fallen to the rank that Greece now occupies. Paris seems
determined to die."

But Santerre protested: "No, no; Paris simply wishes to remain
stationary, and it wishes this precisely because it is the most
intelligent, most highly civilized city in the world. The more nations
advance in civilization the smaller becomes their birth-rate. We are