ABSTRACT
By the latter half of the 19th century, the practicing Catholics at the Ecole Normale were typically viewed by their non-believing classmates as objects of suspicion if not ridicule. Facetiously labelled "talas", a term whose obscure origins are most often explained as a play on the words "ceux qui vont à la messe", they-or rather the word, came to personify for their foes in the late 1890's the forces of anti-Dreyfusism. Thus Jean and Jerome Tharaud remember the Ecole Normale of that epoch as being somewhat like a small provincial village whose inhabitants were separated into opposing camps, the one on the side of the curé, the other on the side of the school-teacher, the talas and the anti-talas. By 1906, religious and political tensions both in Paris and at the Ecole Normale were receding, or such was the recollection of at least one normalien who entered that year: Louis Farigoule, better known as Jules Romains.
