Summa Justitia*

The crones and lasses who sell magazines from Parisian kiosks on the grand boulevards were elated last week when a lean stalwart priest, the Abbe Bethlehem, 57, was finally arrested after he had seized from the kiosks and torn up at least 300 copies of those magazines in which the feminine thigh is perennially displayed in frilly netherthings like the paper lace on a lamb chop. Heedless that he had taken coppers from the purses and bread from the mouths of kiosk women too weak to resist him, the strapping Abbe cried: "If I saw poison being offered to a child, I would seize it and destroy it. These periodicals empoison the soul created by God. They incite to ribaldry and lust."

Next day, one Jean Henri Baptiste Brieux, son of a poor kiosk woman, entered several shops where religious knick-knacks were on sale, seized and dashed upon the ground some two dozen cheap plaster figurines of the Blessed Virgin. Arrested, he explained: "In revenge for 30 copies of La Vie Parisienne and nine of Le Sourire seized from my mother and torn up by the Abbe Bethlehem, I smashed a few of those idolatrous images sold by the accomplices of priesthood. They seem to me fully as poisonous to the soul as any magazine my mother ever sold. My father was an agnostic. I am an atheist. I defy the Abbe Bethlehem -- coward, despoiler of honest women, IDOLATER!"

Soon the pious Abbe and the impetuous atheist felt the cold, im partial rigor of the Code Napoleon. Each was severely reprimanded, each was fined eleven francs, 44c.

* The highest justice. Justice is defined by Justinian as "a firm and continuous desire to render to everyone that which is his due."