"They consist in keeping the accounts, in being the commercial agent, in travelling, in managing, alas! everything which does not concern the life of the cloister; but we are so few in number at Notre Dame de l'Atre, that we become necessarily Jacks-of-all-trades. For instance, Father Etienne is cellarer of the Abbey and guest-master, he is also sacristan and bell-ringer. I too, am first cantor and professor of plain song."
And while the carriage rolled along, shaken by the ruts, the procurator declared to Durtal, who told him how much the offices chanted at the monastery had delighted him,
"It is not with us that you ought to hear them; our choirs are too restricted, too weak to be able to raise the giant mass of those chants. You ought to go to the black monks of Solesmes or Ligugé if you wish to find the Gregorian melodies executed as they were in the Middle Ages. By the way, do you know in Paris, the Benedictine nuns in the Rue Monsieur?"
"Yes; but do you not think they coo a little?"
"I cannot say; all the same their collection of tunes is authentic, but at the little seminary at Versailles, you have better still, since they chant there exactly as at Solesmes; note this well, moreover, at Paris, when the churches decline to repudiate liturgical music, they use for the most part the false notation printed and spread in abundance in all the dioceses in France by the house of Pustet of Ratisbon."
"But the errors and frauds with which those editions abound are well known."
"The legend on which its partisans rely is incorrect. To assert, as they do, that this version is no other than that of Palestrina who was charged by Pope Paul V. to revive the musical liturgy of the Church, is an argument destitute of truth and void of force, for everyone knows that when Palestrina died, he had hardly begun the correction of the Gradual.
"I will add that even if that musician had finished his work, that would not prove that his interpretation ought to be preferred to that which has been recently constituted after patient researches by the Abbey of Solesmes, for the Benedictine texts are based on the copy preserved at the monastery of St. Gall of the antiphonary of Saint Gregory, which represents the most ancient and the most certain monument which the Church preserves of the true plain chant.
"This manuscript, of which photographic facsimiles exist, is the code of Gregorian melodies, and it ought to be, if I may use the expression, the neumatic Bible of choirs.
"The disciples of Saint Benedict are then absolutely right when they declare that their version alone is faithful, alone correct."