Dear M. Scherer!--I see him first in the little suite of carpetless
rooms, empty save for books and the most necessary tables and chairs,
where he lived and worked at Versailles; amid a library "read, marked,
learned, and inwardly digested," like that of Lord Acton, his English
junior. And then, in a winter walk along the Champs-Elysees, a year or
two later, discussing the prospects of Catholicism in France: "They
haven't a man--a speaker--a book! It is a real drawback to us Liberals
that they are so weak, so negligible. We have nothing to hold us
together!" At the moment Scherer was perfectly right. But the following
years were to see the flowing back of Catholicism into literature, the
Universities, the Ecole Normale. Twenty years later I quoted this remark
of Scherer's to a young French philosopher. "True, for its date," he
said. "There was then scarcely a single Catholic in the Ecole Normale
[i.e., at the headwaters of French education]. There are now a great
many. _But they are all Modernists!_" Since then, again, we have seen
the growing strength of Catholicism in the French literature of
imagination, in French poetry and fiction. Whether in the end it will
emerge the stronger for the vast stirring of the waters caused by the
present war is one of the most interesting questions of the present day.

But I was soon to know Edmond Scherer more intimately. I imagine that it
was he who in 1884 sent me a copy of the _Journal Intime_ of Henri
Frederic Amiel, edited by himself. The book laid its spell upon me at
once; and I felt a strong wish to translate it. M. Scherer consented and
I plunged into it. It was a delightful but exacting task. At the end of
it I knew a good deal more French than I did at the beginning! For the
book abounded in passages that put one on one's mettle and seemed to
challenge every faculty one possessed. M. Scherer came over with his
daughter Jeanne--a _schoene Seele_, if ever there was one--and we spent