It is very old, is Toulven church. It stands up all grey in the blue sky, with its tall perforated granite steeple, which in places is yellowed by lichen. It overlooks a large pond, motionless and water-lilied, and a series of uniformly wooded hills which form, in the background, an immemorial horizon.
All around, an ancient enclosure: the cemetery. Crosses border the sacred pathway; they emerge from a carpet of flowers, carnations and white Easter daisies. And in the more neglected parts where time has levelled the little mounds of turf, there are still flowers for the dead: silenes, and the foxgloves of the fields of Brittany; the ground is pink with them. The tombs are thick near the door of the age-old church, as on the mysterious threshold of eternity; this tall grey thing rising up here, this steeple uplifted in eager aspiration, it seems as if it does in fact protest a little against annihilation; in raising itself into the sky, it appeals, it supplicates; it is like an eternal prayer immobilized in granite. And the poor tombs buried in the grass await there, with greater confidence, at this threshold of the church, the sound of the last trump and the voice of the Apocalypse.
There, also, no doubt, when I am dead or broken by old age, there also will they lay my brother Yves; he will give back to the Breton earth his unbelieving head and the body which he had taken from it. Later again little Pierre will find there his last resting-place—if the great sea shall not have kept him from us—and, on their tombs the pink flowers of the fields of Brittany, the wild foxgloves, the luxuriant grasses of June, will flourish as they do to-day, in the warm summer sunshine.
In the porch of the church were all the children of the village looking very solemn. And the parish priest was there too, awaiting us in his ceremonial vestments.
The architecture of the porch was very primitive, and the stones had been worn by many Breton generations; there were shapeless saints, carved in the granite, who were aligned like so many gnomes.
There was a protracted ceremony at the door. The owl-faced old woman had placed little Pierre in our hands and we held him between us, the godmother, according to prescribed usage, holding the feet and I the head. Yves, leaning against a granite pillar, watched us with an air of reverie, and indeed Anne looked very pretty, in this grey porch, with her handsome dress and her large ruff, caught in the full light of a ray of the sun.
Little Pierre made a slight grimace and passed the end of his tiny tongue over his lip with an air of distaste, when the salt, the emblem of the sorrows of life, was put in his mouth.
The priest recited long oremuses in Latin, after which he said in the same language to the little seagull: Ingredere, Petre, in domum Domini. And then we entered the church.
The saints there, in niches, dressed in the costume of the sixteenth century, watched little Pierre make his entry, with the same placid and mystic air with which they have seen born and die ten generations of men.
At the baptismal font there was again a very long ceremony and then Anne and I had to take our places before the screen of the choir, kneeling like a newly-wedded pair.