Prejudices die hard, and I suppose the idea still prevails abroad that France is an irreligious, if not actually an anti-Catholic, country. Living in France after the war, it is a continual source of astonishment that such an impression should ever have arisen at all. I know, for instance, a very shrewd old French lady, the wife of a deputé for a Southern constituency, who regards Paris as a religious centre second in importance only to Rome itself. She has spent a great part of each year in Paris for fifty years, more or less, and she ought to be in a position to know its character. She and her husband the deputé have for twenty years never once missed making their annual pilgrimage to Lourdes. I know of another deputé, from the other end of France, who once a month stays up all night on duty at the perpetual adoration in the Sacre Cœur Basilica. These are not even isolated cases : they have both come within my own acquaintance in one typically unpretentious middle-class hotel. Neither of them are men of any particular note outside of the districts that elected them to the Chambre.