In Bordeaux Cathedral, Cardinal Dounet delivered an address to the
Marshal which, while intended to give him the sanction of the Pope, was also intended to assure France that there was no intention of trying to make the Government the tool of the Church. " France—I speak of that which prides itself on a great past and glorious traditions —is pleased to admire, personified in you, its ancient honour, and its chivalric devotion to holy causes. We will not—I say it emphatically —give some an opportunity of evoking we know what phantom of theocracy, but we wish to affirm that France and religion are inseparable, and that to proscribe or mutilate the latter is to give up the former to irreparable misfortune. Such, M, he Pr6sident de la Rapublique, is your conviction, as it is mine ; and this is why God has chosen you, without, and perhaps against, your will, in a day of reparation. God's hand is on you. Your pacific, task will be facilitated to the end by the blessing of the Head of Catholicity,—of Pius IX., for whom I would give the last drop of my blood, if that sacrifice, too easy at the age I have reached, could hasten by an hour the end of the trials afflicting his heart and ours." But in spite of this repudiation of theocratic ideas, Cardinal Don. net's address claimed the Marshal too frankly as an ally of the Pope, to render his Government willing to publish the undis- puted claim ; and the Journal Qfficiel kept silence about the Car- dinal's words, while publishing those of other speakers, less compromising to the Marshal. The French Government would prefer the tacit favour of the Church to her most eloquent flattery.
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