“Well, she cannot be allowed to perform her conjuring tricks in the county town. And you, my dear Lacarelle, you ought to make her father understand—this Deniseau, I mean to say—that he has nothing to do but to give a good flogging to his daughter and put her under lock and key.”
Lacarelle smoothed his Gallic moustaches.
“Monsieur _le préfet_, I advise you to go and see this Deniseau girl. She is interesting. She will give you a private sitting quite to yourself.”
“You can’t mean it, Lacarelle! Fancy my going to be instructed by a little hussy that my Government is on the point of collapse!”
M. _le préfet_ Worms-Clavelin was not credulous. He only thought of religion from a political point of view. He had inherited no creed from his parents, who were aliens to every superstition, as they were to every land. His soul had sucked none of the nourishment of the past from any soil. He remained empty, colourless, unfettered. Through metaphysical incompetency and the instinctive feeling for action and acquisition, he clung to tangible truth, and in all good faith believed himself to be a positivist. Having but lately drunk his bocks in the cafés at Montmartre in the company of chemists with political opinions, he still preserved a blind trustfulness in scientific methods, which he in his turn extolled in the lodges to the leading spirits among the freemasons. He enjoyed embellishing his political intrigues and administrative expedients with the fair appearance of sociological experiment. And the more useful science was to him the better he appreciated it. “I profess,” said he in all sincerity, “that unquestioning faith in facts which constitutes the scientist, the sociologist.” And it was just because he only believed in facts and because he professed the creed of positivism that the affair of the Sibyl began to worry him.
His private secretary, M. Lacarelle, had said to him: “This young woman has cured a road-mender and a bailiff. These are facts. She has pointed out the place where they would discover a treasure, and they really found in that place a trap-door to the opening of a subterranean passage. That is a fact. She foretold the failure of the vines. That is a fact.”