M. le Curé's usual hours are to dine at twelve, before which he takes nothing, and to sup about eight. He asked two or three clergy continually to meet us, at one of these meals, during the three days we were with him. His reason for taking nothing before noon, is that, after saying Mass, he is continually so occupied by his parishioners, that many times he would be unable to breakfast, so he thought it better to make the rule absolute. The confessional is a very heavy burden—a couple of hours daily, on an average; and, before great fêtes, sometimes seven hours at a time. Labbé told us he had once confessed for twenty-three successive hours. This is a duty to which they may be called at any hour of the day or night. M. Picard and his curate, M. de la Haye, could hardly find time to dine with the archbishop on Saturday, at seven in the evening, and stole away as soon as they could.
Saturday, July 15.—Our good M. Labbé returned to Ivetot this morning; he had surrendered to me his room. In the afternoon M. Picard took us about to the Hôtel de Ville—the ancient Benedictine abbey of S. Ouen: in the public library here we were shown the most magnificent gradual, full of very beautiful drawings. It had been used one hundred years before the Revolution, and, I should think, was unique, as we were told. The garden and corridors were occupied by National Guard; but M. le Curé's presence obtained us permission to survey the wonderful church, the masterwork of middle and late pointed Gothic, on that side, together with its portail des marmouzets, of matchless beauty. At S. Vincent's we saw eleven windows of very brilliant painted glass, which surround the choir, and are visible at once. We then walked up Mount St. Catherine, from whence the view of Rouen and the surrounding hills is charming. I have always thought the site of this city one of the finest I have ever seen, and it looked so to-day, under a July sun. We went on to Notre Dame de bon Secours, which is now nearly finished: the inside and western façade pleased us much. The latter has three portals, after the manner of the great mediæval churches dedicated in honour of Notre Dame, and is well combined and harmonised. The inside is of the architecture of our Edward II.; very good upon the whole: all the windows of painted glass, not unmixedly good, but the whole effect very striking. It has cost 40,000l., begged or given by the curé: a noble work indeed. The ex-votos are now inserted into the northern aisle. We should have liked to stay much longer here, but were hurried to return to the archbishop's dinner. We did not dine till half-past seven; nine in number, at a round table in a large hall. He apologised that it was a maigre. But, with the several kinds of fish, no one could have desired a better dinner. The archbishop, myself on his right, P. on his left, MM. Les Abbés Picard, De la Haye, Surgis, two others, and M. Barthélemi, the architect of bon Secours. We were struck by his conversation—he seemed a Christian architect, which is a rare and valuable thing. During the evening the deplorable state of France, the overthrow of fortunes, the general cessation of trade, and the frightful excesses of the late conflict, were talked of. The archbishop mentioned a man taken with arms in his hand, who was on the point of being executed by the soldiers, when the general officer interfered, and, by his solicitude, saved his life. The culprit took a pistol from his waist, said "Mercie, Colonel," and shot him dead. He was immediately cut to pieces. Every one seems to agree that the Republic cannot last—that there must be a monarchy; yet that minds are so embittered, and passions so excited, that France must come to this only through lassitude of suffering. No one knows what a day may produce. In Rouen there is great suffering—the shop-keepers sell nothing—the workmen have no employment. At Havre the warehouses are crammed with goods, for which there is no sale. Landed property, if forced to be sold, will not fetch half its value. No one can tell how long this will go on, or what will be the end of it. France is in complete paralysis. The source of all this misery is a wide-spread infidelity, united with the rage for material enjoyments, and a refined taste in pursuing them.
The scale of the archbishop's household seemed to me decent and proper, without being that of the Grand Seigneur in any respect. I liked and respected him much more than if he could have had the twenty liveried servants of his predecessor the Cardinal Archbishop Prince of Croï, when high almoner to Charles Dix. He is now the earnest and laborious head of a toiling and suffering but most charitable and devoted clergy. The one hope of France lies in her children being taught from the cradle the via crucis, via Regis.
Sunday, July 16.—Fête du sacré cœur de Jesu. After our own office in the morning we have been nearly six hours at the cathedral to-day, between High Mass in the morning—and Vespers, sermon, compline, and benediction in the evening. Certainly the key note of all the Roman services is, "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." The presence of the Incarnation broods like a spirit over all: gives meaning to every genuflection at the altar; life to every hymn; harmony to that wonderful array of saints, with the Virgin Mother at their head, who intercede with the most Holy Trinity, and join their praises with the angelic hosts, and the voices of feeble men suffering the conflict of the flesh. Around the Incarnation drawn out, applied to daily life, brought before the eye and the heart, enfolding the penitent at the confessional, exalting the priest at the altar, the whole worship revolves; children unconsciously live on it; mothers, through it, look on their children, till maternal love becomes itself deeper, warmer, and holier. Through it and by it the priest bears his life of toil and self-denial so easily, that charity seems like the breath by which he lives. What is the secret of this? It is that daily approach in the morning to the Most Holy One; that daily reception of Him, which deifies flesh and blood.
Such has been the impression of to-day's worship; it was devotion indeed: that is, the ascending of the heart to its own Lord: not a perpetual effort to work on the understanding, but the lifting of the higher power, the spirit in man, by which all are equal, to God. This begins with the holy Sacrifice in the morning, and ends with the exhibition of that same tremendous Sacrifice, the Incarnation of Love, in the evening. "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us," is the first and last: He comes amid a cloud of His saints: they are powerful because they are His: their works are mighty because He works in them, their supplications prevail because they, being flesh and blood, have become partakers of the Word made flesh. She, most of all, whose most pure substance He took to make His own for ever: so that what came of her is joined in hypostatic union with God, and is God. Thus seen, the communion of saints is a real thing, embracing our daily life at a thousand points, the extension and drawing out of the Incarnation, understood by it, and in it. To those who do not realise that tremendous Presence at the altar the saints are so many sinful men and women made gods and goddesses, and those who reverence them idolators. How much do people lose by such a misconception: how utterly do they fail to perceive the length and depth and breadth and height of the Truth: they halve and quarter the Incarnation and boast that they alone understand it. These multiplied prayers and hymns seem to them a form, the bowing of the body a mockery, for they discern not Him who walks amid the golden candlesticks—it is emptiness to them, for He is not there.
The archbishop was kind enough to have us placed in the choir, just below the sanctuary.
At dinner at twelve M. le Curé had invited M. Surgis, M. de la Haye, and his two other curates, one of whom preached in the afternoon on the necessity of the cross, first to the righteous and then to sinners: he enlarged upon the many ways in which God brings both to Him by the application of suffering, humiliation, &c.
In the evening M. le Curé took us to pay our respects to the archbishop once more. We heard much talk again of the deplorable state of France. He was very cordial to us, hoped we should not get near a barricade, and expressed his satisfaction at having met us.
Monday, July 17.—I had a quiet walk round St. Ouen and to the Lady Chapel there. I can fancy being able to retire to that church once a day being a consolation to many a life of toil. Yesterday, after the services, we seemed fit for nothing but to mount its roof and look on the great works of God around one there. At two we took a carriage to the seminaire of M. l'Abbé Lambert, Bois Guillaume. He is a person of fortune, who to satisfy his father entered the Ecole Polytechnique, and studied there for some time; but as soon as his father would consent, became a priest, to which he had always felt a vocation, and has given up his fortune to build a college for boys of the higher class. He has a beautiful spot on the top of the hill to the north of Rouen, covered with a garden, an orchard, and rows of beech trees of some sixty years' growth. He has now fifty-two boys, and eight priests, with himself, to instruct them. The object is to give a really Christian education, without directing the boys to enter into orders, which parents generally of that rank are much set against. Thus they only hear Mass twice on week days. We had a long conversation with him. He seemed much to regret the want of independence produced by, or at least existing in, French education. He receives a government inspector every year, though his house is his own. This inspector objected to the beds of his pupils having curtains, as making surveillance more difficult. I told him of my surprise to find at M. Poileau's academy, near Paris, a rule that two sick boys should never be in the infirmary alone. He said he should have expected such a rule. He inquired with interest about the independence of the English character. It struck me forcibly here what an immense advantage the rule of celibacy offers to the Church for education. Here were eight masters for fifty-two boys, and yet the pension so moderate as 1000 francs. At Eton, where the cost is nigh four times as great, the number of boys at the same proportion would require ninety-six masters, instead of about sixteen. But here all personal advancement is given up. There is no increasing family to be supported: personal gain or honour is neither the motive, nor a motive, but simply the higher one of fulfilling a great duty, and winning a bright crown. This complete self-devotion seems necessarily killed by the marriage tie, so that the highest works both of the priesthood and of education are thus cut off; and it may be doubted how far, in the present relation of the state to the Church all over the world, any body of ministers who are involved in the closest ties with the world can meet the exigencies of the times, or maintain the most necessary and fundamental liberties of the Church, either as to dogma or as to discipline. The great masses seem every where to be in such a state of irritation, or ignorance, or prejudice, that nothing but the spectacle of great and daily self-denial, of zeal and learning, combined with poverty, and exhibited in the persons of those drawn from the people itself, or of those who surrender a higher rank to belong to the people, will make any great and permanent impression on them. The more I reflect, the more it appears to me that the priesthood and the ecclesiastical colleges of France have in them this element of success.
M. Lambert's college is to be a quadrangle, of the style of the old chateaux in Louis XIV.'s time. Two sides are nearly finished. It will be a very pleasing and appropriate building when completed, and is from the design of M. Robert. The boys now sleep in two dormitories, which, like all the house, are scrupulously clean and neat, the masters among them, the only discernible difference being a little wider space between a master's and the adjoining bed.