which makes real hair look like artificial. M. Brun had
a dark wedge of beard apparently affixed under his lower lip.
M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two beards; one sticking out
from each corner of his emphatic chin. They were both young.
They were both atheists, with a depressing fixity of outlook
but great mobility of exposition. They were both pupils of
the great Dr Hirsch, scientist, publicist and moralist.

M. Brun had become prominent by his proposal that the common
expression "Adieu" should be obliterated from all the French classics,
and a slight fine imposed for its use in private life. "Then," he said,
"the very name of your imagined God will have echoed for the last time
in the ear of man." M. Armagnac specialized rather in a resistance
to militarism, and wished the chorus of the Marseillaise altered from
"Aux armes, citoyens" to "Aux greves, citoyens". But his antimilitarism
was of a peculiar and Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy
English Quaker, who had come to see him to arrange for the disarmament
of the whole planet, was rather distressed by Armagnac's proposal
that (by way of beginning) the soldiers should shoot their officers.

And indeed it was in this regard that the two men differed most
from their leader and father in philosophy. Dr Hirsch,
though born in France and covered with the most triumphant favours
of French education, was temperamentally of another type--mild, dreamy,
humane; and, despite his sceptical system, not devoid of transcendentalism.
He was, in short, more like a German than a Frenchman; and much as they
admired him, something in the subconsciousness of these Gauls was
irritated at his pleading for peace in so peaceful a manner.
To their party throughout Europe, however, Paul Hirsch was
a saint of science. His large and daring cosmic theories