"It is superb," answered Durtal. And he said dreamily, "Would that one could have the whole complete! to bring here, instead of this uninteresting chapel, the apse of St. Severin; hang on the walls the pictures of Fra Angelico, Memling, Grünewald, Gerard David, Roger van den Weyden, Bouts; add to these, admirable sculptures such as those of the great door of Chartres, altar screens of sculptured wood, such as those of the Cathedral of Amiens, what a dream!"
"Yet," he went on after a silence, "this dream has been a reality, it is evident. This ideal church existed for ages, everywhere in the Middle Ages! The chant, the goldsmith's work, the panels, the sculptures, the tissues were all attractive; the liturgies possessed, to give them value, fabulous caskets, but all that is far off."
"But you certainly cannot say," replied M. Bruno, with a smile, "that the church ornaments are ugly here!"
"No; they are exquisite. First, the chasubles have not the shapes of a miner's apron, and they do not hoist themselves up on the shoulders of the priest, that excrescence, that puffing like the ear of a little donkey lying back, which the vestment makers use at Paris.
"Nor is it any more that cross in stripe or woven, filling all the stuff, falling like a sack-coat over the back of the celebrant; the Trappist chasubles have kept the old form, as the old image makers and the old painters preserved them in their religious scenes; and that cross with four leaves, like those which the Gothic style chiselled on the walls of its churches, is related to the very expanded lotus a flower so full-blown that its falling petals droop."
"Without counting," pursued Durtal, "that the stuff which seems cut in a sort of flannel or thick soft felt must have been plunged in threefold dyes, for it takes a depth, and a magnificent clearness of tone. The religious trimming-makers could trim these watered and plain silks with silver and gold, yet never attain to give a colour at once so vehement and so familiar to the eye as that crimson with sulphur-yellow flowers, which Father Maximin wore the other day."
"Yes, and the mourning chasuble with its lobed crosses, and its discreet white fullings, in which the Father abbot vested himself, the day on which he communicated us, is not it also a caress for the eyes?"
Durtal sighed: "Ah! if the statues in the chapel showed a like taste!"
"By the way," said the oblate, "come and salute that Notre Dame de l'Atre, of which I have spoken to you, found among the remains of the old cloister."
They rose from table, passed along a corridor, and struck into a lateral gallery, at the end of which they stopped before a statue of life size, in stone.