[*] This formula is repeated with reference to the other senses—hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
And the sins of the sight were redeemed; lascivious looks, immodest curiosity, the pride of spectacles, unwholesome readings, tears shed for guilty troubles.
And she, dear child, knew no other book than the “Golden Legend,” no other horizon than the apse of the Cathedral, which hid from view all the rest of the world. She had wept only in the struggle of obedience and the renunciation of passion.
The Abbé Cornille wiped both her eyes with a bit of cotton, which he afterwards put into one of the little cornets of paper.
Then Monseigneur anointed the ears, with their lobes as delicate and transparent as pearl, first the right ear, afterwards the left, scarcely moistened with the sign of the cross.
“Per istam sanctam unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per auditum deliquisti.”
So all the abominations of hearing were atoned for: all the words and music which corrupt, the slanders, the calumnies, the blasphemies, the sinful propositions listened to with complacency, the falsehoods of love which aided the forgetfulness of duty, the profane songs which excited the senses, the violins of the orchestra which, as it were, wept voluptuously under the brilliant lights.
She in her isolated life, like that of a cloistered nun—she had never even heard the free gossip of the neighbours, or the oath of a carman as he whips his horses. The only music that had ever entered her ears was that of the sacred hymns, the rumblings of the organs, the confused murmurings of prayers, with which at times vibrated all this fresh little house, so close to the side of the great church.
The Abbé, after having dried the ears with cotton, put that bit also into one of the white cornets.
Monseigneur now passed to the nostrils, the right and then the left, like two petals of a white rose, which he purified by touching them with the sacred oil and making on them the sign of the cross.