Susan did not read the note in my presence. I have no idea what she will do.
Sunday: before church.
Half my month is gone. This makes the fifteenth morning since I landed in France, yet I don't remember waking up once with a completely easy mind. From Mr. John Lamb onwards, I have dwelt in the midst of alarms.
To-day shall prove whether I have any will-power or not. Sunday is a day of rest, and I am determined to have twenty-four hours' rest from Ruddington.
Susan is very commendably docile. She sees I have had enough of it, and she hasn't even told me whether she posted my note or not. Fortunately she is making much more of a pal of Georgette. Georgette progresses with her English marvellously. She adores Susan because Susan never tries to utter a single syllable of French.
I mean to hear Mass this morning at Bérigny. Georgette is taking Susan to bewail once more the lack of "a nice service" at Sainte Véronique.
Sunday afternoon.
I like the Bérigny papists better than the papists at Sainte Véronique. Barely sixty people assisted at the Mass; but the faith of these few twentieth-century men and women was as solid as the fifteenth-century piers and vaults that rose above our heads.
Being English, I ought to exclaim against the Bérigny mass-house, and to call its pictures and images and altars gaudy. But I understood this morning that the place was first and foremost a refuge for the simple and the poor. Of course, the austerity of our own church at Traxelby suits my personal ideas of reverence better. But I'm afraid that, in England, there may be some selfishness in our always conforming the insides of our churches to the taste of the Hall or to the taste of the rector's ladies. No doubt it helps the fortunate few to feel religious when they exchange the cosy richness wherein they have snuggled all the week for the big, bare sternness of cold, undissembled stone, and the uncompromising whiteness of twenty surplices. An hour and a half of it once a week corrects luxury and tones up fibres that are becoming enervated through all-day-long indulgence. One even finds a subtle pleasure in the slight discomfort and restraint; just as the man who has dined well and wined well for eleven months enjoys the fashionable hardships of a month's "cure" at a German spa. But I wondered this morning if our church interiors are equally helpful to the poor. If a contrast between the home and the church stimulates devotion, where do the poor come in? The only contrast they get is the contrast between a small bleakness and a big one; the contrast between grey and white; between ashes and snow.
Bérigny church is a spacious, warm, brightly coloured drawing-room for all Bérigny. Not even the drawing-room at Alice's, with its absurd excess of water-colours and prints and screens and embroideries and statuettes and curios, holds such a store of things to look at as the drawing-room at Bérigny. Over and above all the regulation sights of a typical French church, Bérigny has Our Lady of Bérigny, in queenly silver-tissue and with a golden crown on her sorrowful brow. From the bosses of the vaults in the aisles hang five or six fully rigged little ships--votive offerings of mariners snatched from shipwreck. High up on the south wall there are coloured wooden images, carved in the sixteenth century, such as St. Nicolas with a tubful of red-cheeked, chubby, naked babies, and St. Antony with his pig. Bérigny has both the Antonys. Not far from him of the pig, stands a modern statue of St. Antony of Padua, with a face like an angel's, and with the Holy Child seated on St. Antony's open book and nestling against St. Antony's breast.