Madame la Marquise de —— gave all her inimitable guipures to ornament the high altar, and Monsieur le Comte de ——, a great amateur in pictures, placed a true Mignard—a Madonna with a lovely smile—upon the walls, even before they dried.
So each and all offered homage in the new house of God.
Still the beautiful little church lacked a patron, a saint under whose invocation it might be placed, and the blessed one must be represented by his own venerable ashes, a relic of the past, a protection for the future.
The village of Coigny, therefore, spared neither pains nor expense to be satisfied in this regard, and the Holy Father was applied to to select the patron. The dear old man replied favorably to the little town he could scarcely find on the map, and which was more noted for bearing the cross than ringing the bell; and a curious and grave ceremony took place.
They opened the Roman Catacombs, and they descended into the vaults of the cemetery of S. Cyriac, and there they chose the mortal remains of a Christian martyr buried for many centuries.
The stone that closed the cell bore a palm branch and the inscription,
Hilary At Rest,
and indicated he had died for the faith in the early ages of Christianity. His bones and the size of his head denoted only the adolescent, scarcely more than a child; while the whole expressed the courage of the man united to the grace of the angel.
The account from which this is taken adds, this young soldier of Christ was found sleeping peacefully at his post, extended on his granite bier, with his forehead cleft asunder, his neck cut open, of which the little bottle by his side held the precious blood. The figure of the young martyr had been covered with virgin wax, carefully enclosing the sacred bones, and, attired in silk and embroidery, he is holding the palm branch in his hand. The wounded head inclines [pg 138] as if bending to his murderers, his throat lies open in its deep sword-wound, his hands and feet have bled, and the purple tide gushes from his wounds and trickles over his limbs; but his lips are shut with love, and his eyes are fixed, regarding with S. Stephen the heavens opening to receive him.
So this child of eighteen hundred years ago, this soldier of the faith, taken from the Roman Catacombs, was sent by the Pope to Coigny.