Fig. 195.—Procession of the Host, in Paris: “The procession proceeds from the Maison aux Piliers, the ancient Hôtel de Ville, to the Place de Grève. To the left may be seen Jean Juvénal des Ursins, on his knees before the host, which is carried on a species of litter by a couple of monks of the Sainte-Chapelle, and surrounded by the clerks of the brotherhood crowned with wreaths of roses and carrying large lighted tapers.... To the right, and towards the banks of the Seine, and in front of the floating piles of wood, is the great Croix de Grève. On the other side of the Seine may be seen the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.”—From a Miniature in the Manuscript of the “Hours of Juvénal des Ursins,” presented by M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot to the town of Paris, and burnt in 1871 in the conflagration of the Hôtel de Ville.
Fig. 196.—Solemn Procession made on the 7th September, 1513, by the clergy and inhabitants of Dijon, to obtain from Our Lady the relief of the town, at that time besieged by the Swiss. The ceremony was afterwards renewed every year at the same epoch; it was termed the “Festival of Our Lady of the Swiss.”—Tapestry of the Sixteenth Century, in the Dijon Museum.—From a copy in the possession of M. Ach. Jubinal.
The procession termed Litanies majeures, first instituted in 589 by Pope Pelagius II., owed its origin to a plague that desolated Rome after an inundation of the Tiber.
In 474 St. Mamert, Archbishop of Vienne, in Dauphiny, in order to thank God for having delivered his diocese from the scourges which desolated it, and from the wild beasts which ravaged it, founded the procession of Rogations, which took place during the three days which precede the feast of the Ascension. This procession was ordered for the whole of France by the Council of Orleans in 511; but it only came into use at Rome towards the close of the eighth century, under Pope Leo III.
Fig. 197.—Pentecost.—Fac-simile of a Miniature from the “Psalmody of St. Louis.”—Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century, in the National Library, Paris.
The procession which precedes the mass of Ascension Thursday is of the highest antiquity; but nowhere was it carried out with greater ceremony, or attended by a larger number of pilgrims, than at the church built in Palestine by St. Helen, mother of Constantine, on the very spot where the ascension took place, and where still might be seen on the stone the last footprints of our Saviour, as He left this earth and ascended to heaven.
