Monsieur Bergeret in Paris by Anatole France

In the warm luminous decline of day, the Luxembourg garden was as though bathed in a golden dust. Monsieur Bergeret sat on the terrace between Messieurs Denis and Goubin, at the foot of the statue of Marguerite d'Angoulême.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I should like to read you an article that appeared this morning in the _Figaro_. I shall not name the author, for I think you will recognize him for yourselves. Since chance will have it so, it gives me all the more pleasure to read it in the presence of this lovable woman who was a lover of sound doctrine and of open-hearted men, and who, because she was learned, sincere, tolerant and pitiful, and sought to deprive the torturers of their victims, raised against her all the monasteries and all the universities. They used even to incite the young scapegraces of the College of Navarre to insult her, and had she not been sister to the King of France they would have sewed her up in a sack and thrown her into the Seine. She was a gentle soul, profound yet cheerful.