The Cathedral

The Place de la Cathédrale is full of hot red sunset, taken and held there, like wine in the chalice of old golden walls. The old golden walls of the houses that once were palaces lift up the shape of a cup to the wine of the sunset, a vessel of silence and slow time.

Now every night at sunset the bells of the Cathedral are ringing, and people are coming into the Place from the St. Réal and the rue Croix d'Or and the tunnel street, under the first stories of the Palais du Maréchal, that is called the rue Petite Lanterne.

They are coming to the Cathedral for the prayers and canticles for France.

There are women and old people and children and soldiers, fine straight young chasseurs alpins from the garrison, like chamois hunters, with béret and mountain-horn, and wounded soldiers from the hospitals, and from the dépôt d'éclopés, with crutches and canes and white bandages.

The swallows are flying low back and forth across the cobbles of the Place and crying.

Behind the tower of the Cathedral, the great purple mass of the mountains stands out against the sunset. The smell of the mountains, of vineyards and cows and cool waters, comes down to the smells of the town's living in the Place.

Inside the church there are no lights, except of so much of sunset as comes in under the low arches, and of the red lamp, and of the candles, burning for Our Lady of Victories, and for the new Saint Jeanne d'Arc. Among the dusky figures, very still, in the church, you see white things. Sometimes it is the white cap of an old crone and sometimes it is a white bandage.

III

The church smells like a hospital. There is no more the smell of incense in the church, that used to linger there from office to office through the years. You wonder if really ever the church smelled of incense and wax candles. The smell of hospital has so come to belong there.