Et introibo ad altare Dei: ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam—very shortly they would be hearing these words in Church. They were solemn, sunny words well suited to the day, but, like the day, to Madeleine they seemed but a mockery. Ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam—To God who makes glad my youth! Where was the kind God of the Semi-Pelagians, and what joy did she have in her youth?
They walked in silence to their destination—the smug bourgeois Church Saint-André-des-Arts. Its atmosphere and furniture did not lend themselves to religious ecstasy. Among the congregation there was whispering and tittering and bows of recognition. The gallants were looking at the belles, and the belles were trying not to look at the gallants. From marble tombs smirked many a petrified magistrate, to whose vacuous pomposity the witty commemorative art of the day had added by a wise elimination of the third dimension, a flat, mocking, decorative charm.
Suddenly the frivolity vanished from the atmosphere. Monsieur Troqueville, who had been alternately yawning and spitting, pulled himself together and put on what Jacques called his ‘Mass face’—one of critical solemnity which seemed to say: ‘Here I am with a completely unbiassed mind, quite unprejudiced, and a fine judicial gift for sifting evidence. I am quite willing to believe that you have the power of turning bread into the Body and Blood of Christ, but mind! no hocus-pocus, and not one tiny crumb left untransubstantiated!’
The clergy in the red vestments, symbolic in France of the Blessed Sacrament, preceded by solemn thurifer, marched in procession from the sacristy to the altar. And then began the Sacrifice of High Mass.
The Introit melted into the Kyrie, the Kyrie swelled into the Gloria in excelsis. The subdeacon sang the Epistle, the deacon sang the Gospel. The Gospel and Epistle solidified into the fine rigidity of the Creed.
Madeleine, quite unmoved by the solemn drama, was examining the creases in the neck of a fat merchant immediately in front of her. There were three real creases—the small half ones did not count—and as there were three lines in her Litany she might use them as a sort of Rosary. She felt that she must ‘tell’ the three creases before he turned his head.
‘Blessed Virgin, Mother of Our Lord, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Guardian Angel that watchest over me, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Blessed Saint Magdalene, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.’
Suddenly ... the sweet, nauseating smell of incense and the strange music of the Preface—an echo of the music of Paradise, so said the legend, caught in dreams by holy apostolic men.
Quia per incarnati Verbi mysterium nova inentis nostræ oculis lux tuæ claritatis infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus per hunc in INVISIBILIUM AMOREM RAPIAMUR.
Dozens of times before had Madeleine heard these terse Latin words, but to-day, for the first time, she felt their significance. ‘Caught up to the love of invisible things’—rapiamur—a ghostly rape—the idea was beautiful and terrible. Suddenly a great longing swept over her for the still, significant life of the Spirit, for the shadowy lining of this bright, hard earth. Yet on earth itself strange lives had been led ... symbols, and bitter-sweet sacrifice, and little cells suddenly filled with the sound of great waters.