preserve the relationship unstrained. These problems alone engross
Coignard unfailingly, even when the philosopher has had the ill luck
to fall simultaneously into drunkenness and a public fountain, and
retains so notably his composure between the opposed assaults of
fluidic unfriends.

What, though, is found the outcome of this philosophy, appears a
question to be answered with wariness of empiricism. None can deny
that Coignard says when he lies dying: "My son, reject, along with
the example I gave you, the maxims which I may have proposed to you
during my period of lifelong folly. Do not listen to those who, like
myself, subtilise over good and evil." Yet this is just one low-
spirited moment, as set against the preceding fifty-two high-hearted
years. And the utterance wrung forth by this moment is, after all,
merely that sentiment which seems the inevitable bedfellow of the
moribund,--"Were I to have my life over again, I would live
differently." The sentiment is familiar and venerable, but its
truthfulness has not yet been attested.

To the considerate, therefore, it may appear expedient to dismiss
Coignard's trite winding-up of a half-century of splendid talking,
as just the infelicitous outcropping, in the dying man's enfeebled
condition, of an hereditary foible. And when moralising would
approach an admonitory forefinger to the point that Coignard's
manner of living brought him to die haphazardly, among preoccupied
strangers at a casual wayside inn, you do, there is no questioning
it, recall that a more generally applauded manner of living has been
known to result in a more competently arranged-for demise, under the
best churchly and legal auspices, through the rigors of crucifixion.