J.K. Huysmans

The Cathedral

translated by Clara Bell

Publishing History
First published in France in 1898
First English edition in 1898

[I] [II] [III] [IV] [V] [VI] [VII] [VIII] [IX] [X] [XI] [XII] [XIII] [XIV] [XV] [XVI]

CHAPTER I.

At Chartres, as you turn out of the little market-place, which is swept in all weathers by the surly wind from the flats, a mild air as of a cellar, made heavy by a soft, almost smothered scent of oil, puffs in your face on entering the solemn gloom of the sheltering forest.

Durtal knew it well, and the delightful moment when he could take breath, still half-stunned by the sudden change from a stinging north wind to a velvety airy caress. At five every morning he left his rooms, and to reach the covert of that strange forest he had to cross the square; the same figures were always to be seen at the turnings from the same streets; nuns with bowed heads, leaning forward, the borders of their caps blown back and flapping like wings, the wind whirling in their skirts, which they could hardly hold down; and shrunken women, in garments they hugged round them, struggling forward with bent shoulders lashed by the gusts.

Never at that hour had he seen anybody walking boldly upright, without straining her neck and bowing her head; and these scattered women gathered by degrees into two long lines, one of them turning to the left, to vanish under a lighted porch opening to a lower level than the square; the other going straight on, to be swallowed up in the darkness by an invisible wall.

Closing the procession came a few belated priests, hurrying on, with one hand gathering up the gown that ballooned behind them, and with the other clutching their

hats, or snatching at the breviary that was slipping from under one arm, their faces hidden on their breast, to plough through the wind with the back of their neck; with red ears, eyes blinded with tears, clinging desperately, when it rained, to umbrellas that swayed above them, threatening to lift them from the ground and dragging them in every direction.

The passage had been more than usually stormy this morning; the squalls that tear across the district of La Beauce, where nothing can check them, had been bellowing for hours; there had been rain, and the puddles splashed under foot. It was difficult to see, and Durtal had begun to think that he should never succeed in getting past the dim mass of the wall that shut in the square, by pushing open the door behind which lay that weird forest, redolent of the night-lamp and the tomb, and protected from the gale.

He sighed with satisfaction, and followed the wide path that led through the gloom. Though he knew his way, he walked cautiously in this alley, bordered by enormous trunks, their crowns lost in shadow. He could have fancied himself in a hothouse roofed with black glass, for there were flagstones under foot, and no sky could be seen, no breeze could stir overhead. The few stars whose glimmer twinkled from afar belonged to our firmament; they quivered almost on the ground, and were, in fact, earth-born.

In this obscurity nothing was to be heard but the fall of quiet feet, nothing to be seen but silent shades visible against the twilight like shapes of deeper darkness.

Durtal presently turned into another wide walk crossing that he had left. There he found a bench backed by the trunk of a tree, and on this he leaned, waiting till the Mother should awake, and the sweet interview interrupted yesterday by the close of the day should begin again.

He thought of the Virgin, whose watchful care had so often preserved him from unexpected risk, easy slips, or greater falls. Was not She the bottomless Well of goodness, the Bestower of the gifts of good Patience, the Opener of dry and obdurate hearts? Was She not, above all, the living and thrice Blessed Mother?

Bending for ever over the squalid bed of the soul, she washed the sores, dressed the wounds, strengthened the fainting weakness of converts. Through all the ages She

was the eternal supplicant, eternally entreated; at once merciful and thankful; merciful to the woes She alleviated, and thankful to them too. She was indeed our debtor for our sins, since, but for the wickedness of man, Jesus would never have been born under the corrupt semblance of our image, and She would not have been the immaculate Mother of God. Thus our woe was the first cause of Her joy; and this supremest good resulting from the very excess of Evil, this touching though superfluous bond, linking us to Her, was indeed the most bewildering of mysteries; for Her gratitude would seem unneeded, since Her inexhaustible mercy was enough to attach Her to us for ever.

Thenceforth, in Her immense humility, She had at various times condescended to the masses; She had appeared in the most remote spots, sometimes seeming to rise from the earth, sometimes floating over the abyss, descending on solitary mountain peaks, bringing multitudes to Her feet, and working cures; then, as if weary of wandering to be adored, She wished—so it had seemed—to fix the worship in one place, and had deserted Her ancient haunts in favour of Lourdes.

That town was the second stage of Her progress through France in the nineteenth century. Her first visit was to La Salette.

This was years ago. On the 19th of September, 1846, the Virgin had appeared to two children on a hill; it was a Saturday, the day dedicated to Her, which, that year, was a fast day by reason of the Ember week. By another coincidence, this Saturday was the eve of the Festival of Our Lady of Seven Dolours, and the first vespers were being chanted when Mary appeared as from a shell of glory just above the ground.

And she appeared as Our Lady of Tears in that desert landscape of stubborn rocks and dismal hills. Weeping bitterly, She had uttered reproofs and threats; and a spring, which never in the memory of man had flowed excepting at the melting of the snows, had never since been dried up.

The fame of this event spread far and wide; frantic thousands scrambled up fearful paths to a spot so high that trees could not grow there. Caravans of the sick and dying were conveyed, God knows how, across ravines to drink the water; and maimed limbs recovered, and tumours melted away to the chanting of canticles.

Then, by degrees, after the sordid debates of a contemptible lawsuit, the reputation of La Salette dwindled to nothing; pilgrims were few, miracles were less often proclaimed. The Virgin, it would seem, was gone; She had ceased to care for this spring of piety and these mountains.

At the present day few persons climb to La Salette but the natives of Dauphiné, tourists wandering through the Alps, or invalids following the cure at the neighbouring mineral springs of La Mothe. Conversions and spiritual graces still abound there, but bodily healing there is next to none.

"In fact," said Durtal to himself, "the vision at La Salette became famous without its ever being known exactly why. It may be supposed to have grown up as follows: the report, confined at first to the village of Corps at the foot of the mountain, spread first throughout the department, was taken up by the adjacent provinces, filtered over all France, overflowed the frontier, trickled through Europe, and at last crossed the seas to land in the New World which, in its turn, felt the throb, and also came to this wilderness to hail the Virgin.

"And the circumstances attending these pilgrimages were such as might have daunted the determination of the most persevering. To reach the little inn, perched on high near the church, the lazy rumbling of slow trains must be endured for hours, and constant changes at stations; days must be spent in the diligence, and nights in breeding-places of fleas at country inns; and after flaying your back on the carding-combs of impossible beds, you must rise at daybreak to start on a giddy climb, on foot or riding a mule, up zig-zag bridle-paths above precipices; and at last, when you are there, there are no fir trees, no beeches, no pastures, no torrents; nothing—nothing but total solitude, and silence unbroken even by the cry of a bird, for at that height no bird is to be found.

"What a scene!" thought Durtal, calling up the memories of a journey he had made with the Abbé Gévresin and his housekeeper, since leaving La Trappe. He remembered the horrors of a spot he had passed between Saint Georges de Commiers and La Mure, and his alarm in the carriage as the train slowly travelled across the abyss. Beneath was darkness increasing in spirals down to the

vasty deeps; above, as far as the eye could reach, piles of mountains invaded the sky.

The train toiled up, snorting and turning round and round like a top; then, going into a tunnel, was swallowed by the earth; it seemed to be pushing the light of day away in front, till it suddenly came out into a clearing full of sunshine; presently, as if it were retracing its road, it rushed into another burrow, and emerged with the strident yell of a steam whistle and deafening clatter of wheels, to fly up the winding ribbon of road cut in the living rock.

Suddenly the peaks parted, a wide opening brought the train out into broad daylight; the scene lay clear before them, terrible on all sides.

"Le Drac!" exclaimed the Abbé Gévresin, pointing to a sort of liquid serpent at the bottom of the precipice, writhing and tossing between rocks in the very jaws of the pit.

For now and again the reptile flung itself up on points of stone that rent it as it passed; the waters changed as though poisoned by these fangs; they lost their steely hue, and whitened with foam like a bran bath; then the Drac hurried on faster, faster, flinging itself into the shadowy gorge; lingered again on gravelly reaches, wallowing in the sun; presently it gathered up its scattered rivulets and went on its way, scaly with scum like the iridescent dross on boiling lead, till, far away, the rippling rings spread and vanished, skinned and leaving behind them on the banks a white granulated cuticle of pebbles, a hide of dry sand.

Durtal, as he leaned out of the carriage window, looked straight down into the gulf; on this narrow way with only one line of rails, the train on one side was close to the towering hewn rock, and on the other was the void. Great God! if it should run off the rails! "What a hash!" thought he.

And what was not less overwhelming than the appalling depth of the abyss was, as he looked up, the sight of the furious, frenzied assault of the peaks. Thus, in that carriage, he was literally between the earth and sky, and the ground over which it was moving was invisible, being covered for its whole width by the body of the train.

On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along interminable balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without

a patch of vegetation or a tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows of an axe—huge growths of petrified wood; in others they seemed sawn through shaley layers of slate.

And all round lay a wide amphitheatre of endless mountains, hiding the heavens, piled one above another, barring the way to the travelling clouds, stopping the onward march of the sky.

Some made a good show with their jagged grey crests, huge masses of oyster shells; others, with scorched summits, like burnt pyramids of coke, were green half-way up. These bristled with pine woods to the very edge of the precipices, and they were scarred too with white crosses—the high roads, dotted in places with Nuremberg dogs, red-roofed hamlets, sheepfolds that seemed on the verge of tumbling headlong, clinging on—how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides; while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks, with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out of their summits.

The landscape was ominous; the sight of it was strangely discomfiting; perhaps because it impugned the sense of the infinite that lurks within us. The firmament was no more than a detail, cast aside like needless rubbish on the desert peaks of the hills. The abyss was the all-important fact; it made the sky look small and trivial, substituting the magnificence of its depths for the grandeur of eternal space.

The eye, in fact, turned away with disappointment from the sky, which had lost its infinitude of depth, its immeasurable breadth, for the mountains seemed to touch it, pierce it, and uphold it; they cut it up, sawing it with the jagged teeth of their pinnacles, showing mere tattered skirts of blue and rags of cloud.

The eye was involuntarily attracted to the ravines, and the head swam at the sight of those, vast pits of blackness. This immensity in the wrong place, stolen from above and cast into the depths, was horrible.

The Abbé had said that the Drac was one of the most formidable torrents in France; at the moment it was

dormant, almost dry; but when the season of snows and storms comes it wakes up and flashes like a tide of silver, hisses and tosses, foams and leaps, and can in an instant swallow up villages and dams.

"It is hideous," thought Durtal. "That bilious flood must carry fevers with it; it is accursed and rotten with its soapy foam-flakes, its metallic hues, its scrap of rainbow-colour stranded in the mud."

Durtal now thought over all these details; as he closed his eyes he could see the Drac and La Salette.

"Ah!" thought he, "they may well be proud of the pilgrims who venture to those desolate regions to pray where the vision actually appeared, for when once they are there they are packed on a little plot of ground no bigger than the Place Saint Sulpice, hemmed in on one side by a church of rough stone daubed with cement of the colour of Valbonnais mustard, and on the other by a graveyard. The horizon is a circle of cones, of dry scoriæ, like pumice, or covered with short grass; above them, the glassy slope of perpetual ice and snow; to walk on, a scanty growth of grass moth-eaten by sand. In two words, to sum up the scene, it was nature's scab, the leprosy of the earth.

"From the artistic point of view, on this microscopic grand parade, close to the spring whose waters are caught in pipes with taps, three bronze statues stand in different spots. One, a Virgin, in the most preposterous garments, her headgear a sort of pastry-mould, a Mohican's bonnet, is on her knees weeping, with her face hidden in her hands. Then the same Woman, standing up, her hands ecclesiastically shrouded in her sleeves, looks at the two children to whom she is speaking; Maximin, with hair curled like a poodle, twirling a cap like a raised pie, in his hand; Mélanie buried in a cap with deep frills and accompanied by a dog like a paper-weight—all in bronze. Finally the same Person, once more alone, standing on tip-toe, her eyes raised to heaven with a melodramatic expression.

"Never has the frightful appetite for the hideous that disgraces the Church in our day been so resolutely displayed as on this spot; and if the soul suffered in the presence of the obtrusive outrage of this degrading work—perpetrated by one Barrême of Angers and cast in the steam foundries

of Le Creusot—the body too had something to endure on this plateau under the crushing mass of hills that shut in the view.

"And yet it was hither that thousands of sick creatures had had themselves hauled up to face the cruel climate, where in summer the sun burns you to a cinder while, two yards away, in the shade of the church, you are frozen.

"The first and greatest miracle accomplished at La Salette was that of bringing such an invasion to this precipitous spot in the Alps, for everything combines to forbid it.

"But crowds came there year after year, till Lourdes took possession of them; for it is since the apparition of the Virgin there that La Salette has fallen into disrepute.

"Twelve years after the vision at La Salette, the Virgin showed herself again, not in Dauphiné this time, but in the depths of Gascony. After the Mother of Tears, Our Lady of Seven Dolours, it was Our Lady of Smiles, of the Immaculate Conception, the Sovereign Lady of Joy in Glory, who appeared; and here again it was to a shepherdess that she revealed the existence of a spring that healed diseases.

"And here it is that consternation begins. Lourdes may be described as the exact opposite to La Salette; the scenery is magnificent, the hills in the foreground are covered with verdure, the tamed mountains permit access to their heights; on all sides there are shady avenues, fine trees, living waters, gentle slopes, broad roads devoid of danger and accessible to all; instead of a wilderness, a town, where every requirement of the sick is provided for. Lourdes may be reached without adventures in warrens of vermin, without enduring nights in country inns, or days of jolting in wretched vehicles, without creeping along the face of a precipice; and the traveller is at his destination when he gets out of the train.

"This town then was so admirably chosen for the resort of crowds, that it did not seem necessary that Providence should intervene with such strong measures to attract them.

"But God, who forced La Salette on the world without availing Himself of the means of fashionable notoriety, now changed His tactics; with Lourdes, advertisement appeared on the scene.

"

This it is that confounds the mind: Jesus condescending to make use of the wretched arts of human commerce; adopting the repulsive tricks which we employ to float a manufacture or a business.

"And we wonder whether this may not be the sternest lesson in humility ever given to man, as well as the most vehement reproof hurled at the American abominations of our day—God reduced to lowering Himself once more to our level, to speaking our language, to using our own devices that He may make Himself heard and obeyed; God no longer even trying to make us understand His purpose through Himself, or to uplift us to that height.

"In point of fact, the way in which the Lord set to work to promulgate the mercies peculiar to Lourdes is astounding. To make them known He is no longer content to spread the report of its miracles by word of mouth; no, and it might be supposed that in His eyes Lourdes is harder to magnify than La Salette—He adopted strong measures from the first. He raised up a man whose book, translated into every language, carried the news of the vision to the most distant lands, and certified the truth of the cures effected at Lourdes.

"To the end that this work should stir up the masses, it was necessary that the writer destined to the task should be a clever organizer, and at the same time a man devoid of individuality of style and of any novel ideas. In a word, what was needed was a man devoid of talent; and that is quite intelligible, since from the point of view of appreciating art the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the profane public. And our Lord did the thing well; he selected Henri Lasserre.

"Consequently the mine exploded as required, rending souls and bringing crowds out on to the road to Lourdes.

"Years went by. The fame of the sanctuary is an established fact. Indisputable cures are effected by supernatural means and certified by clinical authorities, whose good faith and scientific skill are above suspicion. Lourdes has its fill; and yet, little by little, in the long run, though pilgrims do not cease to flow thither, the commotion about the Grotto is diminishing. It is dying out, if not in the religious world, at any rate in the wider world of the careless or the doubting, who must be convinced. And our

Lord thinks it desirable to revive attention to the benefits dispensed by His Mother.

"Lasserre was not such an instrument as could renew the half-exhausted vogue enjoyed by Lourdes. The public was soaked in his book; it had swallowed it in every vehicle and in every form; the end was achieved; this budding-knife of miracles was a tool that might now be laid aside.

"What was now wanted was a book entirely unlike his; a book that would influence the vaster public, whom his homely prosiness would never reach. Lourdes must make its way through denser and less malleable strata, to a public of higher class, and harder to please. It was requisite, therefore, that this new book should be written by a man of talent, whose style nevertheless should not be so transcendental as to scare folks. And it was an advantage that the writer should be very well known, so that his enormous editions might counterpoise those of Lasserre.

"Now in all the realm of literature there was but one man who could fulfil these imperative conditions: Émile Zola. In vain should we seek another. He alone with his battering push, his enormous sale, his blatant advertisement, could launch Lourdes once more.

"It mattered little that he would deny supernatural agency and endeavour to explain inexplicable cures by the meanest hypotheses; it mattered little that he mixed mortar of the medical muck of a Charcot to make his wretched theory hold together; the great thing was that noisy debates should arise about the book of which more than a hundred and fifty thousand copies proclaimed the name of Lourdes throughout the world.

"And then the very disorder of his arguments, the poor resort to a 'breath that heals the people,' invented in contradiction to all the data of positive science on which he prided himself, with the purpose of making these extraordinary cures intelligible—cures which he had seen, and of which he dared not deny the reality or the frequency—were admirable means of persuading unprejudiced and candid inquirers of the authenticity of the recoveries effected year after year at Lourdes.

"This avowed testimony to such amazing facts was enough to give a fresh impetus to the masses. It must be remarked, too, that the book betrays no hostility to the

Virgin, of whom it speaks only in respectful terms on the whole; so is it not very credible that the scandal to which this work gave rise was profitable?

"To sum up: it may be asserted that Lasserre and Zola were both useful instruments; one devoid of talent, and for that very reason penetrating to the very lowest strata of the Catholic methodists; the other, on the contrary, making himself welcome to a more intelligent and cultivated public, by those splendid passages where the flaming multitude of processions moves on, and amid a cyclone of anguish, the triumphant faith of the white ranks is exultant.

"Oh, yes! She is fond of Her Lourdes, is Our Lady, and pets it. She seems to have centred all Her powers there, all Her favours; Her other sanctuaries are perishing that this one may live!

"Why?

"Why, above all, have created La Salette and then sacrificed it, as it were?

"That She should have appeared there is quite intelligible," thought Durtal, answering himself. "The Virgin is more highly venerated in Dauphiné than in any other province; chapels dedicated to Her worship swarm in those parts, and She meant perhaps to reward their zeal by Her gracious presence.

"On the other hand, She appeared there with a special and very definite end in view: to preach repentance to mankind, and especially to priests. She ratified by certain miracles the evidence of this mission which She confided to Mélanie, and then, that being accomplished, She could desert the spot where She had, no doubt, never intended to remain.

"And after all," he went on, after a moment's reflection, "may we not admit an even simpler solution, namely, this:—

"Mary vouchsafes to appear under various aspects to satisfy the tastes and cravings of each soul. At La Salette, where She descended in a distressful spot, all in tears, She revealed Herself no doubt to certain persons, more especially to the souls in love with sorrow, the mystical souls that delight in reviving the anguish of the Passion and following the Mother in Her heart-breaking way to the Cross. She would thus seem less attractive to the vulgar who do not

love woe or weeping; it may be added that they still less love reproof and threats. The Virgin of La Salette could not become popular, by reason of Her aspect and address, while She of Lourdes, who appeared smiling, and prophesied no catastrophes, was easy of access to the hopes and gladness of the crowd.

"She was, in short, in that sanctuary, the Virgin of the world at large, not the Virgin of mystics and artists, the Virgin of the few, as at La Salette.

"What a mystery is this direct intervention of the Christ's Mother on earth!" thought Durtal.

And he went on: "It is clear, on reflection, that the churches founded by Her may be classed in two very distinct groups.

"One group where She has revealed Herself to certain persons, where waters spring and bodily ills are healed: La Salette and Lourdes.

"The other, where She has never been gazed on by human beings, or where Her appearance occurred in immemorial times, in forgotten centuries, the dead ages. In those chapels prayer alone is in force, and Mary answers it without the help of any waters. Indeed, She effects more moral than physical cures. Notre Dame de Fourvières at Lyon, Notre Dame de Sous-Terre at Chartres, Notre Dame des Victoires at Paris, to mention only three.

"Wherefore this difference? None can understand, and probably none will ever know. At most may we suppose that in compassion for the everlasting craving of our hapless souls wearied with prayer without sight, She would fain confirm our faith and help to gather in the flock by showing Herself.

"In all this obscurity," Durtal went on, "is it at least possible to discern some dim landmarks, some vague law?

"As we gaze into the darkness, two spots of light appear," he replied to himself.

"In the first place, this: She appears to none but the poor and humble; She addresses the simple souls who have in a way handed down the primitive occupation, the biblical function of the Patriarchs; She unveils herself to the children of the soil, to the shepherds, to girls as they watch the flock. Both at La Salette and at Lourdes She chose little pastors for Her confidants, and this is intelligible,

since, by acting thus, she confirms the known will of Her Son; the first to behold the infant Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem were in fact shepherds, and it was from among men of the lowest class that Christ chose His apostles.

"And is not the water that serves as a medium of cure prefigured in the Sacred Books—in the Old Testament by the River Jordan, which cleansed Naaman of his leprosy; and in the New by the probationary pool stirred by an angel?

"Another law seems no less probable. The Virgin is, as far as possible, considerate of the temperament and individual character of the persons She appears to. She places Herself on the level of their intellect, is incarnate in the only material form that they can conceive of. She assumes the simple aspect these poor creatures love, accepting the blue and white robes, the crown and wreaths of roses, the trinkets and garlands and frippery of a first Communion, the ugliest garb.

"There is not indeed a single case where the shepherd maids who saw Her described Her otherwise than as a 'beautiful lady' with the features of the Virgin of a village altar, a Madonna of the Saint-Sulpice shops, a street-corner Queen.

"These two rules are more or less universal," said Durtal to himself. "As to the Son, it would seem that He never now will reveal Himself in human form to the masses. Since His appearance to the Blessed Mary Margaret, whom He employed as a mouthpiece to address the people, He has been silent. He keeps in the background, giving precedence to His Mother.

"He, it is true, reserves for Himself a dwelling in the secret places, the hidden regions, the strongholds of the soul, as Saint Theresa calls them; but His presence is unseen and His words spoken within us, and generally not apprehended by means of the senses."

Durtal ceased speaking, confessing to himself how inane were these reflections, how powerless the human reason to investigate the inconceivable purposes of the Almighty; and again his thoughts turned to that journey to Dauphiné which haunted his memory.

"Ah! but the chain of the High Alps and the peaks of La Salette," said he to himself; "that huge white hotel, that

church coloured with dirty yellow lime-wash, vaguely Byzantine and vaguely Romanesque in its architecture, and that little cell with the plaster Christ nailed to a flat black wooden Cross—that tiny Sanctuary plainly white-washed, and so small that one could step across it in any direction—they were pregnant with her presence, all the same!"

"Surely She revisited that spot, in spite of Her apparent desertion, to comfort all comers; She seemed so close at hand, so attentive and so grieving, in the evening as one sat alone by the light of a candle, that the soul seemed to burst open like a pod shedding the fruit of sin, the seeds of evil deeds; and repentance, that had been so tardily evolved, and sometimes so indefinite, became so suddenly despotic and unmistakable that the penitent dropped on his knees by the bed, and buried his head sobbing in the sheets. Ah, those were evenings of mortal dulness and yet sweetly sad! The soul was rent, its very fibres laid bare, but was not the Virgin at hand, so pitiful, so motherly, that after, the worst was over She took the bleeding soul in her arms and rocked it to sleep like a sick child.

"Then, during the day, the church afforded a refuge from the frenzy of giddiness that came over one; the eye, bewildered by the precipices on every side, distracted by the sight of the clouds that suddenly gathered below and steamed off in white fleece from the sides of the rocks, found rest under the shelter of those walls.

"And finally, to make up for the horrors of the scene and of the statues, to mitigate the grotesqueness of the inn-servants, who had beards like sappers and clothes like little boys—the caps, and holland blouses with belts, and shiny black breeches, like cast iron, of the children at the Saint Nicolas school in Paris—extraordinary characters, souls of divine simplicity expanded there."

And Durtal recollected the admirable scene he had watched there one morning.

He was sitting on the little plateau, in the icy shade of the church, gazing before him at the graveyard and the motionless swell of mountain tops. Far away, in the very sky, a string of beads moved on, one by one, on the ribbon of path that edged the precipice. And by degrees these specks, at first merely dark, assumed the bright hues of dresses, assumed the form of coloured bells surmounted by

white knobs, and at last took shape as a line of peasant women wearing white caps.

And still in single file they came down the square.

After crossing themselves as they passed the cemetery, they went each to drink a cup of water at the spring and then turned round; and Durtal, who was watching them, saw this:

At their head walked an old woman of at least a hundred, very tall and still upright, her head covered by a sort of hood from which her stiff, wavy hair escaped in tangled grey locks like iron wire. Her face was shrivelled like the peel of an onion, and so thin that, looking at her in profile, daylight could be seen through her skin.

She knelt down at the foot of the first statue, and behind her, her companions, girls of about eighteen for the most part, clasped their hands and shut their eyes; and slowly a change came over them.

Under the breath of prayer, the soul, buried under the ashes of worldly cares, flamed up, and the air that fanned it made it glow like an inward fire, lighting up the thick cheeks, the stolid, heavy features. It smoothed out the crackled surface of wrinkles, softened in the younger women the vulgarity of chapped red lips, gave colour to the dull brown flesh, overflowed in the smile on lips half parted in silent prayer, in timid kisses offered with simple good faith, and returned no doubt in an ineffable thrill by the Holy Child they had cherished from His birth, who, since the martyrdom of Calvary, had grown to be the Spouse of Sorrows.

They felt, perhaps, something of the raptures of the Blessed Virgin who is Mother and Wife and at the same time the beatified Handmaid of God.

And in the silence a voice as from the remotest ages arose, and the ancestress said, "Pater Noster," and they all repeated the prayer, and then dragged themselves on their knees up the steps of the way of crosses, where the fourteen upright posts, each with its cast metal bas-relief, bordered a serpentine path, dividing the statues from the groups. Thus they went forward, stopping long enough to recite an Ave on each step they climbed, and then, helping themselves with their hands, they mounted to the next. And when the rosary was ended the old woman rose, and

they solemnly followed her into the church, where they all prayed a long time, prostrate before the altar; and the grandmother stood up, gave each holy water at the door, led her flock to the spring where they all drank again, and then they went away, without speaking a word, one after another up the narrow path, ending as black specks just as they had come, and vanishing on the horizon.

"Those women have been two days and two nights crossing the mountains," said a priest, coming up to Durtal. "They started from the depths of Savoy, and have travelled almost without rest to spend a few minutes here; they will sleep to night in a cow-house or a cave, as chance may direct, and to-morrow by daybreak they will start again on their weariful way."

Durtal was overpowered by the radiant splendour of such faith.

It was possible, then, to find souls ever young, souls ever new, souls as of undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not, outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges, and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who, without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God, while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas, hardly able to express themselves, hardly knowing how to read, wept with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, whom they compelled by their humility and single-heartedness to appear, to become actual to their mind.

"Yes, it was but just that the Virgin should cherish them and choose them above all others to be Her vessels of election.

"Yes. For they are unburdened with the dreadful weight of doubt, they are endowed with almost total ignorance of evil.

"And yet are there not some souls too experienced, alas! in the culture of wrong-doing, who nevertheless find mercy at Her feet? Has not the Virgin other sanctuaries less frequented, less well known, which yet have outlived the wear of time, the various caprice of the ages; very ancient

churches where She welcomes you if you love Her in solitude and silence?"

And Durtal, coming back to Chartres once more, looked about him at the persons who were waiting in the warm shade of the indefinite forest till the Virgin should awake, to worship Her.

With dawn, now beginning to break, this forest of the church under whose shade he was sitting became absolutely unintelligible. The shapes, faintly sketched, were transformed in the gloom which blurred every outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in wells that held them tightly in the rigid circle of their margin; and the night, now almost diaphanous on the level of the ground, was thicker as it rose, cutting them off at the spring of the branches, which were still invisible.

Durtal, as he raised his head, gazed into deep obscurity unlighted by moon or star.

Looking up still, but straight before him, he saw in the air, through the hazy twilight, sword-blades already bright, gigantic blades without hilts or handles, thinner towards the point; and these blades, standing on end at an immense height, appeared in the gloom they cut, to be patterned with vague intaglios or in ill-defined relief.

As he peered into space to the right and left, he was aware of a gigantic panoply on each side at a vast height, resting on blocks of darkness, and consisting of a colossal shield riddled with holes, hanging above five broader swords, without hilts, but damascened on their flat blades with indefinite designs of bewildering niello.

Little by little the tentative sun of a doubtful winter's day pierced the fog, which vanished in blueness; the shield that hung to the left of Durtal, the north, was the first to come to life; rosy fires and the lurid flames of punch gleamed in its hollows, while below, in the middle blade, there started forth in the steel-grey arch, the gigantic image of a negress robed in green with a brown mantle. Her head, wrapped in a blue kerchief, was set in a golden glory, and she stared out, hieratic and wild-looking, with white, wide-open eyes.

And this engimatical Ethiop had on her knees a black

infant whose eyes, in the same way, stood out like snowballs from the dusky face.

All about her, very gradually, the other swords, still so dim, began to glow, blood rippling from their crimsoned points as if from recent slaughter; and this trickling red formed a setting for the shapes of beings come, no doubt, from the distant shores of Ganges: on one side a king playing on a golden harp; on the other a monarch wielding a sceptre ending in the turquoise-blue petals of a fabulous lily.

Then, to the left of the royal musician there was another man, bearded, with a walnut-stained face, the eye-sockets vacant and covered by round spectacles; on his head were a diadem and a tiara, in his hands a chalice and a paten, a censer and a loaf; while to the right of the other sovereign who held the sceptre, a still more harassing shape came forth against the blue background of the sword—a sort of oriental brigand, escaped perhaps from the prison cells of Persepolis or Susa, a bandit as it seemed, wearing a little scarlet cap edged with yellow, in shape like an inverted jam-pot, and a tan-coloured gown with white stripes on the skirt; and this clumsy and ferocious personage bore a green palm and a book.

Durtal turned away to sound the depths of darkness, and before him, at a giddy height on the horizon, more sword-blades gleamed. The scrawls which might have been mistaken in the darkness for patterns embossed or incised on the surface of the steel, developed into figures draped in long, straight, pleated robes; and at the highest point of the firmament there hovered amid a sparkle of rubies and sapphires a woman crowned, pale of face, dressed like the Moorish mother of the northern side in Carmelite-brown and green; and she too held an infant, a child, like herself, of the white race, clasping a globe in one hand, and extending the other in benediction.

Last of all, the still dark side, the late side, to Durtal's right hand and further south, till now wrapped in the half-dispelled morning haze, was lighted up; the shield opposite to that on the north caught the blaze, and below it, against the polished metal of the broad blade facing that which presented the negress queen, appeared a woman of somewhat olive hue, in raiment like the others, of myrtle-green

and brown, holding a sceptre, and with her, too, there was a child. And round her again emerged images of men piled up one above the other, shouldering each other in the narrow field they filled.

For a quarter of an hour nothing was clearly defined; then the real things asserted themselves. In the middle of the swords, which were in fact mosaic of glass, the figures stood out in broad daylight. In the field of each window with its pointed arch bearded faces took form, motionless in the midst of fire; and on all sides, in the thicket of flames, as it were the burning bush of Horeb where God showed His glory to Moses, the Virgin was seen in an unchangeable attitude of imperious sweetness and pensive grace, mute and still, and crowned with gold.

She was, indeed, many; She came down from the empyrean to lower levels, to be closer to Her flock, and at last found a place where they might almost kiss Her feet, at the corner of an aisle that was always in gloom; but there She wore a different aspect.

She stood forth in the middle of a window, like a tall, blue plant, and the garnet-red foliage was supported by black iron rods.

Her colour was slightly coppery, almost Chinese, with a long nose and rather narrow eyes; on the head there was a black coif, and She looked steadily before Her, while the lower part of the face with its short chin, the mouth rather drawn by two grave lines, gave it an expression of suffering that was even a little morose. And here again, under the immemorial name of Notre Dame de la belle Verrière, she held an infant in a dress of raisin-purple, a child barely visible in the mixture of dark hues all about it.

In short, She to whom all appealed was there; everywhere under the forest roof of this cathedral the Virgin was present. She seemed to have come from all the ends of the earth, under the semblance of every race known in the Middle Ages: black as an African, tawny as a Mongolian, pale coffee colour as a half-caste, and white as an European, thus declaring that, as mediator for the whole human race, She was everything to each, everything to all; and promising by the presence of Her Son, whose features bore the character of each race, that the Messiah had come to redeem all men without distinction.

And it seemed as though the sun, as it mounted higher, followed the growth of the Virgin, taking its birth in the window where She was still a babe in that northern transept where Saint Anne, her mother, of the black face, sat between David, the king of the golden harp, and Solomon, the bearer of the blue-lilied sceptre, each against a background of purple, to prefigure the royal birth of the Son; between Melchizedec, the mitred patriarch, holding the censer, and Aaron, in the curious red cap bordered with lemon yellow, representing prophetically the Priesthood of Christ.

And at the end of the apse, quite high up, there was another Mary—triumphant, looking down the sacred grove, supported by figures from the Old Testament and by Saint Peter. It was She again who in the south transept faced Saint Anne, She, now a woman and herself a mother, amid four enormous men bearing pick-a-back on their shoulders four smaller figures; these were the four Greater Prophets who had foretold the coming of the Messiah—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel, bearing the four Evangelists, and thus artlessly expressing the parallelism of the Old and New Testaments, and the support given by the Old Covenant to the New.

And then, as though Her presence were not fully ubiquitous, as though She desired that, turn where they might, Her worshippers should ever see Her, the Virgin was to be found on a smaller scale in less important positions; enthroned in the centre of the shields, in the heart of the great rose-windows, and finally, ceasing to appear as a mere picture, took shape, materialized as a statue of black wood standing on a pedestal in a full hooped skirt like a silver bell.

The sheltering forest had vanished with the darkness; the tree-trunks remained, but rose with giddy flight from the ground, unbroken pillars to the sky, meeting at a vast height under the groined vault; the forest was seen as an immense church blossoming with roses of fire, pierced with glowing glass, crowded with Virgins and apostles, patriarchs and saints.

The genius of the middle ages had devised the skilful and pious lighting of this edifice, and harmonized the ascending march of day to some extent with its windows. The walls

and the aisles were very dark, the daylight creeping, mysteriously subdued, along the body of the church. It was lost in the stained glass, checked by dark bishops, and opaque saints completely filling the dusky-bordered windows with the dead hues of a Persian rug; the panes absorbed the sun's rays, refracting none, arrested the powdered gold of the sunbeams in the dull violet of purple egg-fruit, the tawny browns of tinder or tan, the too-blue greens, and the wine-coloured red stained with soot, like the thick juice of mulberries.

As it reached the chancel, the light came in through brighter and clearer colours, through the blue of translucent sapphires, through pale rubies, brilliant yellow, and crystalline white. The gloom was relieved beyond the transepts near the altar. Even in the centre of the cross the sun pierced clearer glass, less storied with figures, and bordered with almost colourless panes that admitted it freely.

At last, in the apse, forming the top of the cross, it poured in, symbolical of the light that flooded the world from the top of the Tree; and the pictures were diaphanous, just lightly covered with flowing lines and aerial tints, to frame in a sheaf of coloured sparks the image of a Madonna, less hieratic and barbaric than the others, and a fairer Infant, blessing the earth with uplifted hand.

By this time the Cathedral of Chartres was alive with the clatter of wooden shoes, the rustle of petticoats, and the tinkle of mass-bells.

Durtal left the corner of the transept where he had been sitting with his back to a pillar, and turned to the left, towards a bay where there was a framework ablaze with lighted tapers before the statue of the Virgin.

And schools of little girls under the guidance of Sisters, troops of peasant women and countrymen, poured out of every aisle, knelt in front of the image, and then came up to kiss the pedestal.

The appearance of these folks suggested to Durtal that their prayers were not like those that are sobbed out at evening twilight, the supplications of women worn and dismayed by the weary hours of day. These peasant souls prayed less as complaining than as loving; these people, kneeling on the flags, had come for Her sake rather than for their own. There was here and now a pause from grieving,

a sort of reprieve from tears; and this attitude was in harmony with the special aspect adopted by Mary in this cathedral; She was seen there, in fact, under the form of a child and of a young mother; She was the Virgin of the Nativity, rather than our Lady of Dolour. The old artists of the Middle Ages seemed to have feared to sadden Her by reminding Her of memories too painful, to have striven to prove by this delicate reserve, their gratitude to Her who in this sanctuary had ever shown Herself to be the Dispenser of Mercies, the Lady Bountiful of Grace.

Durtal felt in himself an answering thrill, the echo of the prayers chanted all round him by these loving souls; and he let himself melt away in the soothing sweetness of the hymns, asking for nothing, silencing his ungratified desires, smothering his secret repining, thinking only of bidding an affectionate good-morning to the Mother to whom he had returned after such distant wanderings in the land of sin, after such a long absence.

And now that he had seen Her, that he had spoken to Her, he withdrew, making room for others who came in greater numbers as the day grew. He went home to get some food; and as he cast a last sweeping glance at the beautiful church, remembering the warlike imagery of its details, the buckler-shape of the rose-windows, the sword-blades of the lower lights, the casque and helmet forms of the ogee, the resemblance of some grisaille glass with its network of lead to a warrior's shirt of mascled mail; as, outside, he gazed at one of the two belfries carved into scales like a pine cone—like scale-armour—he said to himself that the "Builders for God" must have borrowed their ideas from the military panoply of the knights; that thus they had endeavoured to perpetuate the memory of their exploits by representing the magnified image of the armour with which the Crusaders girt themselves when they sailed to win back the Holy Sepulchre.

And the interior of the church seemed, as a whole, to impress the same idea and complete the symbolical images of the details by its vaulted nave, of which the groined roof was so like the reversed hull of a vessel, suggesting the graceful form of the ships that made sail for Palestine.

Only, in the present day, such memories of heroic times were vain. In this city of Chartres, where Saint Bernard

preached the second crusade, the vessel was stranded for ever, her hull overset, her anchor out.

And looking down on the unthinking city, the Cathedral kept watch alone, beseeching pardon for the inappetency for suffering, for the inertia of faith that her sons displayed, uplifting her towers to the sky like two arms, while the spires mimicked the shape of joined hands, the ten fingers all meeting and upright one against another, in the position which the image-makers of old gave to the dead saints and warriors they carved upon tombs.

[!-- Page 24 --]CHAPTER II.

Durtal had already been living at Chartres for three months.

On his return to Paris from La Trappe he had fallen into a fearful state of spiritual anemia. His soul kept its room, rarely rose, lounged on a couch, was torpid with the tepid langour still lulled by the sleepy mutter of mere lip-service, and prayers reeled off as by a worn-out machine of which the spring releases itself, so that it works all alone with no result, and without a touch to start it.

Sometimes, however, in a rebellious mood he managed to check himself, to stop the ill-regulated clockwork of his prayers, and then he would try to examine himself, to get above himself, and to see in a comprehensive glance the puzzling perspective of his nature.

And facing these chambers of the soul, dim with mist, he was struck by a strange association of the Revelations of Saint Theresa and a tale by Edgar Poe.

Those chambers of the inner man were empty and cold, and like the halls of the House of Usher, surrounded by a moat whence the fog rose, forcing its way in at last and cracking the worn shell of wall. Alone and uneasy, he prowled about the ruined cells, with closed doors that refused ever to open again; thus his walks about his own mind were very limited, and the panorama he could see was strangely narrowed, shrunk close and near to him, almost nothing. And he knew full well that the ruins surrounding the central cell, the Master's Room, were bolted and fastened with rivets that could not be unscrewed, and triple bars—inaccessible. So he restricted himself to wandering in the halls and passages.

At Notre Dame de l'Atre he had ventured further; he had gone into the enclosure round about the abode of Christ; he had seen in the distance the frontiers of Mysticism, and, too weak to go on his road, he had fallen; and now this was to be lamented, for, as Saint Theresa truly remarks, "in the spiritual life, if we do not go forward, we go back." He had, in fact, retraced his steps, and lay half paralyzed, no longer even in the vestibule of his mansion, but in the outer court.

Till this time the phenomena described by the matchless Abbess had been exactly repeated. In Durtal, the Chambers of the Soul were deserted as after a long mourning; but in the rooms that had remained open, phantoms of sins confessed, of buried evil-doing, wandered like the sister of the tormented Usher.

Durtal, like Edgar Poe's unhappy sufferer, listened with horror to the rustle of steps on the stairs, the piteous weeping behind the doors.

And yet these ghosts of departed crimes were no more than indefinite shapes; they never consolidated nor took a definite form. The most persistent miscreant of them all, which had tormented him so long, the sin of the flesh, at last was silenced, and left him in peace. La Trappe had rooted up the stock of those debaucheries. The memory of them, indeed, haunted him still, on his most distressing, most ignoble side; but he could see them pass, his heart in his mouth, wondering that he could so long have been the dupe of such foul delusions, no longer understanding the power of those mirages, the illusions of those carnal oases as he met them in the desert of a life shut up in seclusion, in solitude, and in books.

His imagination could still put him on the rack; still, without merit, without a struggle, by the help of divine grace, he had escaped a fall ever since his return from the monastery.

On the other hand, though he had, to some extent, emasculated himself, though he was exempt from his chief torment, he discerned, flourishing within him, another crop of tares, of which the spread had till now been hidden behind the sturdier growth of other vices. In the first instance, he had believed himself to be less enslaved by sin, less utterly vile; and he was nevertheless as closely bound

to evil as ever, only the nature and character of the bonds were different, and no longer the same.

Besides that dryness of the heart which made him feel as soon as he entered a church or knelt down in his room, that a cold grip froze his prayers and chilled his soul, he detected the covert attacks, the mute assaults of ridiculous pride.

In vain did he keep watch; he was constantly taken by surprise without having time even to look round him.

It began under the most temperate guise, the most benign reflections.

Supposing, for instance, that he had done his neighbour a service at some inconvenience to himself, or that he had refrained from retaliating on anybody against whom he believed he had a grievance, or for whom he had no liking, a certain self-satisfaction stole, sneaked into his mind, a certain vain-glory, ending in the senseless conclusion that he was superior to many another man; and then, on this feeling of petty vanity, pride was engrafted—the pride of a virtue he had not even struggled to acquire, the arrogance of chastity, so insidious that most of those who indulge it do not even suspect themselves.

And he was never aware of the end of these assaults till too late, when they had become definite, and he had forgotten himself and succumbed; and he was in despair at finding that he constantly fell into the same snare, telling himself that the little good he could do must be wiped out of the balance of his life by the outrageous extravagance of this vice.

He was frenzied, he reasoned with the old mad arguments, and cried out at his wits' end,—

"La Trappe crushed me! It cured me of sensuality, but only to load me with disorders of which I knew nothing before I submitted to that treatment! It is humble itself, but it puffed up my vanity and increased my pride tenfold—then it set me free, but so weak, so wearied, that I have never since been able to conquer that inanition, never have been fit to enjoy the Mystical Nourishment which I nevertheless must have if I am not to die to God!"

And for the hundredth time he asked himself,—

"Am I happier than I was before I was converted?"

And to be truthful to himself he was bound to answer "Yes." He lived on the whole a Christian life, prayed but

badly, but at any rate prayed without ceasing; only—only—Alas! How worm-eaten, how arid were the poor recesses of his soul! He wondered, with anguish, whether they would not end like the Manor in Edgar Poe's tale, by crumbling suddenly, one fatal day, into the dark waters of the pool of sin which was undermining the walls.

Having reached this stage of his round of meditations, he was compelled to throw himself on the Abbé Gévresin, who required him, in spite of his coldness, to take the Communion. Since his return from Notre Dame de l'Atre his friendship with the Abbé had become much closer, altogether intimate.

He knew now the inner man of this priest, who, in the midst of modern surroundings, led a purely mediæval life. Formerly, when he rang at his bell, he had paid no heed to the housekeeper, an old woman, who curtsied to him without a word when she opened the door.

Now he was quite friendly with this singular and loving creature.

Their first conversation had arisen one day when he called to see the Abbé, who was ill. Seated by the bedside, with spectacles on the alert at the tip of her nose, she was kissing, one by one, the pious prints that illustrated a book wrapped in black cloth. She begged him to be seated, and then, closing the volume, and replacing her spectacles, she had joined in the conversation; and he had left the room quite amazed by this woman, who addressed the Abbé as "Father," and spoke quite simply of her intercourse with Jesus and the Saints as if it were a natural thing. She seemed to live in perfect friendship with them, and spoke of them as of companions with whom she chatted without any embarrassment.

Then the countenance of this woman, whom the priest introduced to him as Madame Céleste Bavoil, was, strange to say, the least of it. She was thin and upright, but short. In profile, with her strong Roman nose and set lips, she had the fleshless mask of a dead Cæsar; but, seen in front, the sternness of the features was softened into a familiar peasant's face, and melted into the kindliness of an old nun, quite out of keeping with the solemn strength of her features.

It seemed as though with that clean-cut, imperious nose, small white teeth, and black eyes sparkling with light, busy

and inquisitive as those of a mouse, under fine long lashes, the woman ought, notwithstanding her age, to have been handsome; it seemed at least as though the combination of these details would have given the face a stamp of distinction. Not so; the conclusion was false to the premises; the whole betrayed the combined effect of the details.

"This contradiction," thought he, "evidently is the result of other peculiarities which nullify the harmony of the more important features; in the first place the thinness of the cheeks and their hue of old wood dotted here and there with freckles, calm stains of the colour of stale bran; then the flat braids of white hair drawn smooth under a frilled cap, and finally the modest dress, a black dress clumsily made, dragging across the bosom, and showing the lines of her stays stamped in relief on the back.

"And perhaps, in her, it is not so much incongruity of features, as a crying contrast between the dress and the face, the head and the body," thought he.

Altogether, as he summed her up, she was equally suggestive of the chapel and the fields. Thus she had something of the Sister and something of the peasant.

"Yes," he went on to himself, "that is very near the mark; but that is not all, for she is both less dignified and less common, inferior and yet more worthy. Seen from behind she is more like a woman who hires out the chairs in church than like a nun; seen in front she is conspicuously superior to the natives of the soil. Also it may be noted that when she speaks of the saints she is loftier, quite different; she soars up in a flame of the spirit. But all these hypotheses are in vain," he concluded, "for I cannot judge of her from one brief impression, one rapid view. What is quite certain is that, though she is not in the least like the Abbé, she too is in two halves—two persons in one. He, with the innocent gaze, the pure eyes of a girl at her first Communion, has the sometimes bitter mouth of an old man; she is proud of feature and humble of heart; they both, though by different outward signs and acts, achieve the same result, an identical semblance of paternal indulgence and mature goodness."

And Durtal had gone again and again to see them. His reception was always the same; Madame Bavoil greeted him with the invariable formula: "Here is our friend,"

while the priest's eyes smiled as he grasped his hand. Whenever he saw Madame Bavoil she was praying: over her stove, when she sat mending, while she was dusting the furniture, as she opened the door, she was always telling her rosary, without pause.

The chief delight of this rather silent woman consisted in talking of the Virgin to whom she had vowed worship; on the other hand she could quote by memory long passages from a mystic and somewhat eccentric writer of the end of the sixteenth century: Jeanne Chézard de Matel, the foundress of the Order of the Incarnate Word, an Institution of which the Sisters display a conspicuous costume—a white dress held round the waist by a belt of scarlet leather, a red cloak and a blood-coloured scapulary on which the name of Jesus is embroidered in blue silk, with a crown of thorns, a heart pierced with three nails, and the words Amor Meus.

At first Durtal thought Madame Bavoil slightly crazy, and while she poured out a passage by Jeanne de Matel on Saint Joseph, he looked at the priest—who gave no sign.

"Then Madame Bavoil is a saint?" he asked one morning when they were alone.

"My dear Madame Bavoil is a pillar of prayer," replied the Abbé gravely.

And one afternoon, when Gévresin was away in his turn, Durtal questioned the woman.

She gave him an account of her long pilgrimages across Europe, pilgrimages that she had spent years in making on foot, begging her way by the roadside.

Wherever the Virgin had a sanctuary, thither she went, a bundle of clothing in one hand, an umbrella in the other, an iron Crucifix on her breast, a rosary at her waist. By a reckoning which she had kept from day to day she had thus travelled ten thousand five hundred leagues on foot.

Then old age had come on, and she had "lost her old powers," as she said; Heaven had formerly guided her by inward voices, fixing the dates of these expeditions; but journeying was no longer required of her. She had been sent to live with the Abbé that she might rest; but her manner of life had been laid down for her once for all: her bed a straw mattress on wooden planks; her food such rustic and monastic fare as beseemed her, milk, honey and

bread, and at seasons of penance she was to substitute water for milk.

"And you never take any other nourishment?"

"Never." And then she would add,—

"Aha! our friend, you see I am in disgrace up there!" and she would laugh cheerfully at herself and her appearance "If you had but seen me when I came back from Spain, where I went to visit Our Lady of the Pillar at Saragoza! I was a negress. With my large Crucifix on my breast, my gown looking like a nun's—every one asked: 'What can that woman be?' I looked like a charcoal-burner out for a holiday; no white to be seen but my cap, collar and cuffs; all the rest—face, hands and petticoats—quite black."

"But you must have been very dull travelling about alone?"

"Not at all, our friend, the Saints kept me company on the way; they told me at which house I should find a lodging for the night, and I was sure of being well received."

"And you never were refused hospitality?"

"Never. To be sure I did not ask for much; when I was wandering I only begged for a piece of bread and a glass of water, and to rest on a truss of straw in the cow-house."

"And Father Gévresin—how did you first know him?"

"That is quite a long story. Fancy! Heaven, as a punishment, deprived me of the Communion for a year and three months to a day. When I confessed to a priest, I owned to my intercourse with Our Saviour, and the Virgin and the Angels; then he at once treated me as a mad woman, unless he accused me of being possessed by the devil; to conclude, he refused me absolution, and I thought myself happy if he did not slam the little wicket of the confessional roughly in my face at my very first words.

"I believe I should have died of grief if the Lord had not at last had pity on me. One Saturday, when I was in Paris, He sent me to Notre Dame des Victoires, where the Father was in the confessional. He listened to me, he put me through long and severe tests, and then he granted me Communion. I often went to him again as a penitent, and then the niece who kept house for him retired into a

convent, and I took her place; and I have been his housekeeper near on ten years now—"

She told her story with many breaks. Since she had ceased to wander about the country, she followed the pilgrimages in Paris in honour of the Blessed Virgin, and she had a list of the most popular sanctuaries: Notre-Dame des Victoires, Notre-Dame de Paris; Our Lady of Good Hope at Saint-Séverin, of Ever-present Help at L'Abbaye au Bois, of Peace at the convent in the Rue Picpus, of the Sick at the church of Saint-Laurent, of Happy Deliverance—a black Virgin from the church of Saint-Etienne des Grès—in the care of the Sisters of Saint-Thomas de Villeneuve, Rue de Sèvres; and outside Paris the shrines in the suburbs: Our Lady of Miracles at Saint-Maur, of the Angels at Bondy, of the Virtues at Aubervilliers, of Good Keeping at Long Pont, and those of Notre-Dame at Spire, at Pontoise, &c.

On another occasion, as he seemed suspicious of the severity of the rule imposed on her by Christ, she replied,—

"Remember, our friend, what happened to an illustrious handmaid of the Lord, Maria d'Agreda; being very ill, she yielded to the wishes of her daughters in the faith and sucked a mouthful of chicken, but she was forthwith reproved by Jesus, who said to her: 'I will not have my Spouses dainty.'

"Well, and I should run the risk of a similar reproof, if I attempted to touch a morsel of meat or to drink a drop of coffee or wine."

"And yet," said Durtal to himself as he came away, "it is quite evident that the woman is not mad. She has nothing the matter with her, either hysterical or mental: she is fragile and very thin, but she is scarcely nervous, and in spite of the laconic character of her meals she is in very good health, indeed is never ailing; nay more, she is a woman of good sense and an admirable manager. Up by daybreak, after Communion she soaps and washes all the linen herself, makes the sheets and shirts, mends the Abbé's gowns, and lives with amazing economy, while taking care that her master wants for nothing. Such a sagacious apprehension of the conduct of life has no connection with lunacy or delirium."

He knew too that she would never take any wages. It is true that in the sight of a world which gives its whole mind to legalized larceny this woman's disinterestedness might be enough to prove her insanity; but Durtal, in contradiction to received ideas, did not think that a contempt for money was necessarily allied with madness, and the more he thought of it the more was he convinced that she was a saint, and not a strait-laced saint, but indulgent and cheerful.

What he could positively assert was that she was very good to him; ever since his return from La Trappe she had helped him in every way, encouraging his spirits when she saw him depressed, and going, in spite of his protesting, to look over his wardrobe when she suspected that there might be sutures to operate upon, and buttons to replace.

This intimacy had become even closer since their life in common, all three together, on the occasion of Durtal's accompanying them, at their entreaty, to La Salette. And then suddenly their affectionate familiarity was endangered, for the Abbé Gévresin left Paris.

The Bishop of Chartres died, and his successor was one of Gévresin's oldest friends. On the very day when the Abbé Le Tilloy des Mofflaines was promoted to the episcopal throne, he begged Gévresin to accompany him to Chartres. There was an anxious struggle in the old priest's mind. He was ailing, weary, good for nothing, and at the bottom of his heart longed only never to move; but on the other hand he had not the courage to refuse his poor support to Monseigneur des Mofflaines. He tried to mollify the prelate by his advanced age, but the Bishop would not listen; all he would concede was that, instead of being appointed Vicar-general, the Abbé should be no more than a Canon. Still Gévresin mildly shook his head. Finally the prelate had his way, appealing to his friend's charity, and declaring that he ought to accept the post, in the last resort as a mortification and penance.

And when his departure was decided on, it became the Abbé's turn to circumvent Durtal and persuade him to leave Paris and come to settle near him at Chartres.

Although he was deeply grieved at this move, which he had done his utmost to hinder, Durtal was refractory, and refused to bury himself in a country town.

"

But why, our friend," said Madame Bavoil, "I wonder why you are so obstinately bent on remaining here; you live in perfect solitude at home with your books. You can do the same if you come with us."

And when, his arguments exhausted, after a vehement diatribe against provincial life, Durtal ended by saying,—

"Then at Paris there are the quays, Saint Séverin, Notre Dame; there are delightful convents—"

"You would find equally good things at Chartres," answered the Abbé. "You will have one of the finest cathedrals in the world, monasteries such as you love, and as for books, your library is so well furnished that I can hardly think that you can add to it by wandering along the quays. Besides, as you know even better than I, no work of the class you seek is ever to be disinterred from the boxes of second-hand books. Their titles figure only in the catalogues of sales, and there is nothing to hinder their being sent to you at Chartres."

"I do not deny it—but there are other things on the quays besides old books; there are curiosities to be seen, and the Seine—a landscape—"

"Well, if you are homesick for that particular walk, you have only to take a train, and spend a whole afternoon lounging by the parapet over the river; it is easy to get from Chartres to Paris; there are express trains morning and evening which make the journey in less than two hours."

"And besides," cried Madame Bavoil, "what does all that matter? The great thing is that you leave a town just like any other town, to inhabit the very home of the Virgin. Just think! Notre Dame de Sous-Terre is the most ancient chapel to Mary in all France; think! you will live near Her, with Her, and She will load you with mercies!"

"And after all," the Abbé went on, "this exile cannot interfere with any of your schemes in art. You talk of writing the Lives of Saints; will you not work at them far better in the silence of the country than in the uproar of Paris?"

"The country—the provinces! The mere idea overpowers me," exclaimed Durtal. "If you could but imagine the impression it suggests to me, the sort of atmosphere, the kind of smell it presents to my brain. You know the

huge cupboards you find in old houses, with double doors, and lined within with blue paper that is always damp. Well, at the mere name of the provinces I feel as if one of these were opened in my face, and I got a full blast of the stuffiness that comes out of it!—And to put the finishing touch to the vision by combining taste and smell, I have only to bite one of the biscuits they make nowadays of Lord knows what, reeking the moment you taste them, of fish glue and plaster that has been rained upon, I have only to eat that cold, insipid paste and sniff at a musty closet, and at once the lugubrious picture rises before me of some Godforsaken place!—Your Chartres will no doubt smell like that—Pah!"

"Oh, oh!" cried Madame Bavoil. "But you cannot know much about it, since you have never been to the place."

"Let him be!" said the Abbé, laughing. "He will get over his prejudices." And he went on,—

"Just explain this inconsistency: here is a Parisian who likes his city so little that he seeks out the most deserted nook to live in, the quietest, the least frequented, the spot that is most like a provincial retreat. He has a horror of the Boulevards, of public promenades, and of theatres; he buries himself in a hole, and stops his ears that he may not hear the noises around him; but, when he has a chance of improving on this scheme of existence, of ripening in real silence far from the crowd, when he can invert the conditions of life, and, instead of being a provincial Parisian, can become a Parisian of the provinces, he shies and kicks!"

"It is a fact," Durtal admitted when he was alone, "a positive fact that the capital is unprofitable to me. I never see anybody now, and shall be reduced to still more utter solitude when these friends are gone. I shall, for all purposes, be quite as well off at Chartres; I can study at my ease amid peaceful surroundings, within reach of a cathedral of far greater interest than Notre Dame de Paris. And besides—besides—there is another question of which the Abbé Gévresin says nothing, but which disturbs me greatly. If I remain here, alone, I shall have to find a new confessor, to wander through the churches, just as I wander through work-a-day life in search of dining-places and tables d'hôte. No, no; I have had enough at last of this day-by-day

diet, spiritual and material! I have found a boarding-house for my soul where it is content, and it may stay there!

"And there is yet another argument. I can live more inexpensively at Chartres, and, without spending more than I spend here, I can settle myself once for all, dine with my feet on my own fender, and be waited on!"

So he had ended by deciding to follow his two friends, and had secured fairly spacious rooms facing the Cathedral; and then he, who had always lived cramped in tiny apartments, at last understood the provincial comfort of vast spaces and books ranged against the walls, with ample elbow-room.

Madame Bavoil had found him a servant, familiar and voluble indeed, but a good and pious woman. And he had begun his new existence lost in constant amazement at that wonderful Cathedral, the only one he had never before seen, probably because it was so near Paris, and, like all Parisians, he never took the trouble to set out on any but longer journeys. The town itself seemed to him devoid of interest, having but one secluded walk, a little embankment where, below the suburbs and near the old Guillaume Gate, washerwomen sang while they soaped the linen in a stream that blossomed, as they rubbed, with flecks of iridescent bubbles.

Hence he determined to walk out only very early in the morning or in the evening; then he could dream alone in the town, which by the afternoon was already half dead.

The Abbé and his housekeeper were lodged in the episcopal palace, under the shadow of the Cathedral apse. They occupied a first floor, with nothing over it, above some empty stables; a row of cold, tiled rooms which the Bishop had had redecorated.

Some time after their arrival at Chartres the Abbé had replied to Durtal, who had remarked that he was anxious,—

"Yes, I am certainly going through a difficult time; I have had to live down certain prejudices—but indeed I was prepared for them. And that was another reason why I did not wish to leave Paris. But the Blessed Virgin is good! Everything is coming right—"

And when Durtal persisted,—

"As you may suppose," said the priest, "the appointment of a Canon from another diocese was not looked upon

with indifferent eyes by the clergy of Chartres. Such suspicions with regard to an unknown priest brought by a new Bishop are not after all unnatural; it is inevitably feared that he may play the part of a ruler without a robe; each one is on his guard, and they sift his least word and pick over his least action."

"And then," said Durtal, "is it not another mouth to feed out of the wretched pittance allowed by the State?"

"So far as that goes, no. I draw no stipend, and damage no man's interest; in fact I would not accept it. The only pecuniary advantage I derive from being about the Bishop's person is that I have no rent to pay, since I am lodged for nothing in the episcopal building.

"I could not in any case have drawn a stipend, for the allowance granted to Canons by the Government has ceased to be given, since a measure was passed, on March 22nd, 1885, decreeing the suppression of such emoluments as the incumbents died off. Hence only those who held such benefices before the passing of the law now draw on the funds devoted to the maintenance of the Church; and they are dying off one by one, so that the time is fast approaching when there will not be a single Canon left who is salaried by the State. In some dioceses these lapsed benefices are compensated for by the revenues from some religious foundation, or, as you may call it, a prebend. But there are none at Chartres. The Chapter has at the utmost the use of a varying income which it divides among those who have no benefice, giving them, good years with bad, a sum of about three hundred francs each, and that is all."

"And the Canons have no perquisites?"

"None whatever."

"Then I wonder how they live."

"If they have no private fortune they live more penuriously than the poorest labourers in Chartres. Most of them simply vegetate; some perform Mass for Sisterhoods, or are convent chaplains, but that brings in very little, two hundred or two hundred and fifty francs perhaps. Another holds the post of secretary to the diocese, by which he gets rooms and as much, perhaps, as six hundred francs. Yet another conducts the services of the holy week known as the Voice of Our Lady of Chartres, and acts as precentor; and some find employment as the Bishop's officials.

Each one, in short, has a struggle to earn his food and lodging."

"What exactly is a Canon; what are his functions, and the origin of his office?"

"The origin? It is lost in the night of ages. It is supposed that Colleges of Canons existed in the time of Pépin le Bref; it is at any rate certain that during his reign Saint Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, assembled the clerks of his cathedral and obliged them to live together, in a house in common, as though it were a convent, under a rule of which Charlemagne makes mention in his Capitularies.—A Canon's functions? They consist in the solemn celebration of the Canonical services, and the direction of all processions. As a matter of conscience every Canon is required in the first place to reside in the town where the church is situated to whose service he is attached; then to be present at the Canonical hours when Mass is said; finally to sit on the meetings of the Chapter on certain fixed days. But to tell the truth, their part has almost fallen into desuetude. The Council of Trent speaks of them as the 'Senatus Ecclesiæ,' the Senate of the Church, and they then formed the necessary Council of the Bishop. In these days the prelates do not even consult them.

"They only exercise a small part of their lost prerogatives when the See is vacant. At that time the Chapter acts in the place of the Bishop, and even then its rights are greatly restricted. As it has not Episcopal Orders, it can exercise none of the powers inherent in them. It cannot consequently ordain or confirm."

"And if the See remains long vacant?"

"Then the Chapter requests the Bishop of a neighbouring diocese to ordain its seminarists, and confirm the children it presents to him. In short, as you see, a Canon is not a very important gentleman.

"I am not speaking, of course, of Honorary Canons, or Titular Canons. They have no duties to fulfil; they merely enjoy an honorary title which allows them to wear the Canon's hood, by permission of their own Bishop when, as frequently happens, they belong to another diocese.

"The Chapter of this Cathedral of Chartres is said to have been founded in the sixth century by Saint Lubin. It then consisted of seventy-two Canons, and the number was

added to, for when the Revolution broke out it amounted to seventy-six, and included seventeen dignitaries: the Dean, the sub-Dean, the Precentor, the sub-Precentor, the chief Archdeacon of Chartres, the Archdeacons of Beauce-en-Dunois, of Dreux, of Le Pincerais, of Vendôme, and of Blois; the gatekeeper, the Chancellor, the Provosts of Normandy, of Mézangey, of Ingré, and of Auvers; and the Chancel Warden. These priests, most of them men of family and wealth, were a nursery ground of Bishops; they owned all the houses round the Cathedral and lived independently in their cloister, devoting themselves to history, theology, and the Canon law—they are now indeed fallen!"

The Abbé was silent, shaking his head. Then he went on,—

"To return to my subject—I was naturally somewhat hurt by the coldness I met with on my arrival at Chartres. As I told you, I had to allay many apprehensions. But I think I have succeeded. And I thank God, too, for having given me a valuable supporter in the person of a subordinate priest of the Cathedral, who has done me invaluable service with my colleagues—the Abbé Plomb; do you know him?"

"No."

"He is a highly intelligent priest, very learned, a passionate mystic, thoroughly acquainted with the Cathedral, of which he has examined every corner."

"Ah ha! I am interested in that priest! Perhaps he is one of those I have already noticed. What is he like?"

"Short, young, pale, slightly marked with the small-pox, with spectacles that you may recognize by this peculiarity: the arch which rests on the nose is shaped like a loop, or, if you choose to say so, like a horseman's legs astride in the saddle."

"That man!"—and Durtal, left to himself, thought about the priest whom he had repeatedly seen in the church or the square.

"Certainly," said he to himself, "there is always the risk of a mistake when we judge of people by appearances; but how startling is the truth of that commonplace remark when applied to the clergy! This Abbé Plomb looks like a scared sacristan; he goes about gaping at invisible crows, and he seems so ill at ease, so loutish, so awkward—and this is

our learned man and devoted mystic, in love with his Cathedral! Certainly it is not safe to judge of an Abbé from appearances. Now that it is to be my fate to live in this clerical world, I must begin by throwing prejudice overboard, and wait till I know all the priests of the diocese, before allowing myself to form an opinion of them."

[!-- Page 40 --]CHAPTER III.

"In point of fact," said Durtal to himself as he stood dreaming on the market-place, "no one exactly knows what was the origin of the Gothic forms of a cathedral. Archæologists and architects have exhausted hypotheses and systems in vain; they seem to agree in attributing the Romanesque to Oriental parentage, and that in fact maybe proven. That the Romanesque should be an offshoot of the Latin and Byzantine styles, and be, as Quicherat defines it, 'the style which has ceased to be Roman and is not yet Gothic, though it already has something of the Gothic,' I am ready to admit; and indeed, on examining the capitals, and studying their outline and drawing, we perceive that they are Assyrian or Persian rather than Roman or Byzantine and Gothic; but as to discovering the paternity even of the pointed and flamboyant styles, that is quite another thing. Some writers assert that the pointed arch based on an equilateral triangle existed in Egypt, Syria, and Persia; others regard it as descended from Saracen and Arab art; nothing certainly is provable.

"Again, it must be clearly stated that the pointed equilateral arch, which some persons still suppose to be the distinctive characteristic of an era in architecture, is not so in fact, as Quicherat has very clearly demonstrated, and, since him, Lecoy de la Marche. The study of archives has, on this point, completely overset the hobbies of architects, and demolished the twaddle of the Bonzes. Besides, there is abundant evidence of the employment of the pointed arch side by side with the round arch in a perfectly systematic design, in the construction of many Romanesque churches; in the Cathedrals of Avignon and Fréjus, in Notre Dame at

Aries, in Saint Front at Périgueux, at Saint Martin d'Ainay, at Lyon, in Saint Martin des Champs in Paris, in Saint Etienne at Beauvais, in the Cathedral of Le Mans; and in Burgundy, at Vézelay, at Beaune, in Saint Philibert at Dijon, at La Charité-sur-Loire, in Saint Ladre at Autun, and in most of the basilicas erected by the monastic school of Cluny.

"Still, all this throws no light on the lineage of the Gothic, which remains obscure—possibly because it is perfectly clear; setting aside the theory which restricts itself to discerning in this question a merely material and technical problem of stability and resistance, solved by monks who discovered one fine day that the strength of their roofs would be increased by the adoption of the mitre-shaped vaulting of the pointed arch instead of the semicircular arch, would it not seem that the romantic hypothesis—Chateaubriand's explanation—which was so much laughed at, and which is nevertheless the simplest and the most natural, may really be the most obvious and the true one?

"To me," thought Durtal, "it is almost certain that it was in the forest that man found the prototype of the nave and the pointed arch. The most amazing cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumièges. There, close to the splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact, while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary boles extend in parallel lines; one in the middle, very wide, the two others, one on each side, somewhat narrower; they exactly represent a church nave with its two side aisles, upheld by black columns and roofed with verdure. The ribs of the arches are accurately represented by the branches which meet above, as the columns which support them are simulated by the great shafts. It must be seen in winter, with the groining outlined and powdered with snow, and the pillars as white as the trunks of birch-trees, to understand the primitive idea, the seed of art which could give rise in the mind of an architect to the conception of similar arcades, and lead to the gradual refining of the Romanesque till the pointed arch had entirely superseded the round.

"

And there is not a park, whether older or more recent than the groves of Jumièges, which does not exhibit the same forms with equal exactitude; but what Nature could not give was the prodigious art, the deep symbolical knowledge, the over-strung but tranquil mysticism of the believers who erected cathedrals. But for them the church in its rough-hewn state, as Nature had formed it, was but a soulless thing, a sketch, rudimentary; the embryo only of a basilica, varying with the seasons and the days, at once living and inert, awaking only to the roaring organ of the wind, the swaying roof of boughs wrung with the slightest breath; it was lax and often sullen; the yielding victim of the breeze, the resigned slave of the rain; it was lighted only by the sunshine that filtered between the diamond and heart-shaped leaves, as if through the meshes of a green network. Man's genius collected the scattered gleams, condensed them in roses and broad blades, to pour it into his avenues of white shafts; and even in the darkest weather the glass was splendid, catching the very last rays of sunset, dressing Christ and the Virgin in the most fabulous magnificence, and almost realizing on earth the only attire that beseems the glorified Body, a robe of mingled flame.

"Really, when you come to think of it, a cathedral is a superhuman thing!

"Starting in our lands from the old Roman crypt, from the vault, crushed like the soul by humility and fear, and bowed before the infinite Majesty whose praise they hardly dared to sing, the churches gradually waxed bolder; they gave an upward spring to the semicircular arch, lengthening it to an almond shape, leaping from the earth, uplifting roofs, heightening naves, breaking out into a thousand sculptured forms all round the choir, and flinging heavenward, like prayers, their rapturous piles of stones! They symbolized the loving tenderness of orisons; they became more trusting, more playful, more daring in the sight of God.

"Each and all seemed to smile, as soon as they gave up their dismal skeleton and strove upwards.

"The Romanesque, I fancy, must have been born old," Durtal went on after a pause. "At any rate it has always remained gloomy and timid.

"Although at Jumièges, for instance, it has attained

grandiose dimensions with its enormous span opening like a vast portal to the sky, it still is depressing. The semicircular arch, in fact, bends to the earth, for it has not the point, soaring upwards, of the lancet arch.

"Oh! to think of the tears, the dolorous murmurs of those thick partitions, those smoky vaults, those arches resting on squat pillars, those almost speechless blocks of stone, those sober ornaments expressing their symbolism so curtly! The Romanesque is the La Trappe of architecture; we find it sheltering the austerest Orders, the sternest Brotherhoods, kneeling in ashes, and chanting in an undertone with bowed heads none but penitential Psalms. These massive cellars speak of the fear of sin, but also of the dread of a God whose wrath could only be appeased by the Advent of the Son. The Romanesque seems to have preserved from its Oriental origin an element antedating the Birth of Christ; prayer seems to rise there to the implacable Adonaï rather than to the pitying Infant, the gentle Mother. The Gothic, on the contrary, is less timid, more captivated by the two other Persons and the Virgin; it is the home of less rigorous and more artistic Orders. Bowed shoulders are straightened, downcast eyes are raised, sepulchral voices become seraphic. It is, in fact, the expansion of the spirit, while the Romanesque symbolizes its repression. At least, to me, that is the interpretation of these styles," Durtal repeated to himself.

"Nor is that all," he went on. "Yet another distinction may be deduced from these observations.

"The Romanesque is allegorical of the Old Testament, as the Gothic is of the New.

"The parallel, when you consider it, is exact. Is not the Bible—the inflexible Book of Jehovah, the awful Code of the Father, well expressed by the stern and penitential Romanesque; and the consoling, tender Gospel by the Gothic, full of effusiveness and invitation, full of humble hope?

"If the symbols are these, it would seem that time very often plays the part of man's purpose in evolving the completed idea and uniting the two styles, as, in Holy Scripture, the two Books are united; thus certain cathedrals present a very curious result. Some, austere at their birth, are cheerful and even smiling as they are completed. All that is

left of the old Abbey church of Cluny is from this point of view a typical instance. This, next to that of Paray-le-Monial, which remains entire, is undoubtedly one of the most magnificent examples of the Burgundian Romanesque, which, with its fluted pilasters, unfortunately betrays the distressing tradition of Greek art imported into France by the Romans. Still, allowing that these basilicas—which may have been built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries—are purely Romanesque, as Quicherat opines, mentioning them as examples, their structure is already of a mingled type, and the joyousness of the vaulted arch is already to be seen there.

"Nor have we here, as at Notre Dame la Grande at Poitiers, a Romanesque façade, minutely elaborate, flanked at each wing by a low tower supporting a heavy stone spire cut into facets, like a pine-apple. At Paray there is none of the puerile ornament and heavy richness that we see at Poitiers. The barbaric dress of the little toy church of Notre Dame la Grande gives way to the winding-sheet of a flat wall, but the exterior is none the less remarkably impressive with its solemn simplicity of outline. And those two square towers, pierced with narrow windows and overlooked by a round tower resting so calmly, so firmly on an open arcade of columns joined by round arches, are a belfry at once dignified and rustic, spirited and strong.

"And the august simplicity of the exterior is repeated in the interior of the church.

"Here, however, the Romanesque has already lost its crushed, crypt-like character, its obscure aspect as of a Persian cellar. The strong structural lines are the same; the capitals still display the inflorescence of Mussulman involutions, the fabulous entanglements of Assyrian patterns, reminiscences of Asiatic art transplanted to our soil; but we already see the union of dissimilar bays; columns struggle upwards, pillars are taller, the wide arches are less rigid, and have a lighter and longer trajectory; and the plain walls, enormous but already light, are pierced at prodigious heights with holes admitting the day.

"At Paray the round arch is to be seen in harmony with the pointed arch which appears in the higher summits of the structure, announcing the advent of a less plaintive phase of the soul, a tenderer and less harsh idea of Christ,

who is preparing, and already revealing, the Mother's indulgent smile.

"But then," said Durtal, suddenly, to himself, "if my theories are correct, the architecture which could, by itself alone, symbolize Catholicism as a whole, and represent the complete Bible in both Testaments, must be either Romanesque with the pointed arch, or a transition style, half Romanesque and half Gothic.

"The deuce!" thought he, thus led to an unforeseen conclusion. "To be sure, it is not necessary perhaps that the church itself should offer so complete a parallel, or that the Old and New Testaments should be bound up in one volume; here, indeed, at Chartres the work, though integral, is in two separate volumes, since the crypt on which the Gothic church rests is Romanesque. Nay, it is thus even more symbolical, and it emphasizes the idea of the windows in which the prophets bear on their shoulders the four Evangelists; once more the Old Testament appears as the base, the foundation of the New.

"What a fulcrum for dreams is this Romanesque!" Durtal went on. "Is it not also the smoke-stained shrine, the gloomy retreat, constructed for black Virgins? This seems all the less doubtful because all the Mauresque Virgins are thick-set and heavy; they are not sylphs, like the fair Virgins of Gothic art. The Byzantine School conceived of Mary as swarthy, 'of the hue of polished brown ebony,' as the old historians say; only, in opposition to the text in Canticles, it painted or carved Her as black, indeed, but not comely. Thus figured, She is truly a gloomy Virgin, eternally sorrowing, in harmony with the Romanesque catacombs. Her presence naturally beseems the crypt of Chartres; but in the Cathedral itself, on the pillar where She stands to this day, does She not appear strange? For She is not in Her true home under the soaring white vault."

"Well, our friend, you are dreaming!"

Durtal started like a man roused from sleep.

"Ah! It is you, Madame Bavoil?"

"To be sure. I am going home from market, and from your lodgings."

"From my lodgings?"

"Yes, to invite you to breakfast. The Abbé Plomb's

housekeeper is to be out this afternoon, so he is coming to take his morning meal with us; and the Father thought it would be a good opportunity to make you acquainted."

"I am much obliged to him; but I must go home and tell Mother Mesurat, that she may not cook my cutlet."

"You need not do that, as I have just come from her; not finding you, I left word and told Madame Mesurat. Are you still satisfied with her?"

"Once upon a time," said he, laughing, "I had, to manage my house in Paris, one Sieur Rateau, a drunkard of the first class, who turned everything upside down, and led the furniture a life! Now I have this worthy woman, who sets to work on a different system, but the results are identically the same. She works by persuasion and gentle means; she does not overthrow the furniture, or bellow as she turns the mattress, or rush at the wall with a broom as if she were charging with fixed bayonet; no, she quietly collects the dust and stirs it round and ends by piling it in little heaps that she hides in the corners of the rooms; she does not rummage the bed, but restricts herself to patting it with the tip of her fingers, stroking the creases out of the sheets, puffing up the pillows and coaxing them out of their hollows. The man turned everything topsy-turvy; she moves nothing."

"Well, well; but she is a good woman!"

"Yes, and in spite of it all, I am glad to have her."

As they talked they had reached the entrance to the Bishop's residence. They went through a little gate by the lodge into a large forecourt strewn with small river pebbles, in front of a vast building of the seventeenth century. There were no flowers of stone-work, no sculpture, no decorative doorways—nothing but a frontage of shabby brick and stone, a bare, uninviting structure evidently neglected, with tall windows, behind which the shutters could be seen, painted grey. The entrance was on the level of the first floor; double outside steps led up to the door, and under the landing, in the arch below, there was a glass door, through which, framed in the square, could be seen the trunks of trees beyond.

This courtyard was bordered with tall poplars, which the late Bishop, who had frequented the Tuileries, used to speak of with a smile as his hundred guards.

Madame Bavoil and Durtal crossed this forecourt, sloping to the left towards a wing of the building, roofed with slate.

There, on the first floor, with only a loft above lighted by round dormers, lived the Abbé Gévresin.

They went up a narrow staircase with a rusty iron balustrade. The walls were trickling with damp, they secreted drops, distilled spots like black coffee; the steps were worn hollow, and thin at the ends like spoons; they led up to a door smeared yellow, with a cast-iron knob as black as ink. A copper ring swung in the wind at the end of a bell-rope, knocking the chipped plaster of the wall. An indescribable smell of stale apples and stagnant water came up the middle of the staircase from the little outer hall below, which was paved with rows of bricks set on edge, eaten into patterns like madrepores, while the ceiling looked like a map, furrowed with seas that were traced in yellow by the soaking through of the rain.

And the Abbé's little apartment, lately "done up" with a vile red-checked paper, reeked of the tomb. It was evident that under the shadow of the Cathedral that overhung this wing no sunshine ever dried the walls, of which the skirting boards were rotting into powder like brown sugar, crumbling slowly, on the icy cold polish of the floor.

"How sad to see an old man, a victim to rheumatism, housed here!" thought Durtal.

When he went into the Abbé's room, he found the chill somewhat taken off by a large coke fire; the priest was reading his breviary, wrapped in a wadded gown, close to the window, of which he had drawn back the blind to see a little better.

This room was furnished with a small iron bedstead hung with white cotton curtains looped back by bands of red cretonne; opposite the bed were a table covered with a cloth, and on it a desk, and a prie-dieu below a Crucifix nailed to the wall; the remainder of the room was fitted with bookshelves up to the ceiling. Three arm-chairs, such as are nowhere to be seen nowadays but in religious houses or seminaries, made of walnut wood with straw bottoms like church chairs, were set round the table, and two more, with round rush mats for the feet, stood one on each side of the

fireplace. On the chimney-shelf was an Empire clock between two vases, and from these rose the faded stems of some dried grasses stuck upright into sand.

"Come to the fire," said the Abbé, "for in spite of the brazier it is fearfully cold."

And in answer to Durtal, who spoke of his rheumatism, he resignedly shrugged his shoulders.

"All the residence is the same," said he. "Monseigneur, who is almost a cripple, could not find a single dry room in the whole palace. Heaven forgive me, but I believe his rooms are even damper than mine. In point of fact there ought to be hot-air pipes all over the place, and it will never be done for lack of money."

"But at any rate Monseigneur might have stoves put into the rooms, here and there."

"He!" cried the Abbé, laughing, "but he has no private means whatever. He draws a stipend of ten thousand francs a year and not another penny; for there is no endowment at Chartres, and the revenue from the fees on the ecclesiastical Acts is nothing. In this rich, but irreligious town he can hope for no assistance; the gardener and porter are paid by him; he is obliged for economy's sake to employ Sisters from a convent as cook and linen-keeper. Add to that his inability to keep a carriage, so that he has to hire a conveyance for his pastoral rounds. And how much then do you suppose he has left to live on, if you deduct his charities? Why, he is poorer than you or I!"

"But then Chartres is the fag end of Church preferment, a mere raft for the shipwrecked and starving."

"Thou hast said! Bishop, canons, priests, everybody here is poverty-stricken."

The bell rang, and Madame Bavoil showed in the Abbé Plomb. Durtal recognized him. He looked even more scared than usual; he bowed, backing away, and did not know what to do with his hands, which he buried in his sleeves.

By the end of half an hour, when he was more at his ease, he expanded into smiles, and at last he talked; Durtal, much surprised, saw that the Abbé Gévresin was right. This priest was highly intelligent and well-informed, and what made the man even more attractive was his perfect freedom from the want of breeding, the narrow

ideas, the goody nonsense which make intercourse so difficult with the ecclesiastics in literary circles.

They had settled themselves in the dining-room, as dismal a room as the rest, but warmer, for an earthenware stove was roaring and puffing hot gusts from its open ventilators.

When they had eaten their boiled eggs, the conversation, hitherto discursive as to subject, turned on the Cathedral.

"It is the fifth erection over a Druidical cave," said the Abbé Plomb. "It has a strange history.

"The first, built at the time of the Apostles by Bishop Aventinus, was razed to the ground. Rebuilt by another Bishop named Castor, it was partly burnt down by Hunaldus Duke of Aquitaine, then restored by Godessaldus; again injured by fire, by Hastings, the Norman chief; repaired once more by Gislebert, and finally destroyed utterly by Richard Duke of Normandy when he sacked the city after the siege.

"We have no very authentic records of these two basilicas; at most are we certain that the Roman Governor of the land of Chartres completely destroyed the first and at the same time slaughtered a great number of Christians, among them his own daughter Modesta, throwing the corpses into a well dug near the cave, and thence known as le Puits des Saints Forts.

"A third fabric, built by Bishop Vulphardus, was burnt down in 1020, when Fulbert was Bishop, and he founded the fourth Cathedral. This was blasted by lightning in 1194; nothing remained but the two belfries and the crypt.

"The fifth structure, finally, built in the reign of Philippe Auguste, when Régnault de Mouçon was Bishop of Chartres, is that we still see; it was consecrated on the 17th of October, 1260, in the presence of Saint Louis. This again has passed through the fire. In 1506 the northern spire was struck by lightning; the structure was of wood covered with lead; a terrific storm raged from six in the evening till four in the morning, fanning the fire to such violence that the six bells were melted like cakes of wax. The flames were, however kept within limits, and the church was refitted. But the scourge returned many times; in 1539, in 1573, and in 1589 lightning fell on the

new belfry. Then a century elapsed before the visitation was repeated; in 1701 the same spire was struck again.

"It then stood uninjured till 1825, when a thunder-bolt fell and shook it severely on Whit Monday while the Magnificat was being chanted at Vespers.

"Finally, on the 4th of June, 1836, a tremendous fire broke out, caused by the carelessness of two plumbers working under the roof. It lasted eleven hours, and destroyed all the timbers, the whole forest that supported the roof; it was by a miracle that the church was not entirely consumed in this fury of fire."

"You must allow, Monsieur, that there is something strange in this disaster without respite."

"Yes, and what is still more strange," said the Abbé Gévresin, "Is the persistency of fire from heaven, bent on destroying it."

"How do you account for that?" asked Durtal.

"Sébastien Rouillard, the author of Parthénie, believes that these visitations were permitted as a punishment for certain sins, and he insinuates that the conflagration of the third Cathedral was justified by the misconduct of some pilgrims who at that time slept in the nave, men and women together. Others believe that the Devil, who can command the lightning, was bent on suppressing this sanctuary at any cost."

"But why, then, did not the Virgin protect Her particular church more effectually?"

"You may observe that She has several times preserved it from being utterly reduced to cinders; however, it is, all the same, very strange when we remember that Chartres is the first place where the Virgin was worshipped in France. It goes back to Messianic times, for, long before Joachim's daughter was born, the Druids had erected, in the cave which has become our crypt, an altar to the Virgin who should bear a child—Virgini Pariturae. They, by a sort of grace, had intuitive foreknowledge of a Saviour whose Mother should be spotless; thus it would seem that at Chartres, above all places, there are very ancient bonds of affection with Mary. This makes it very natural that Satan should be bent on breaking them."

"Do you know," said Durtal, "that this grotto is prefigured in the Old Testament by a human structure of

almost official character? In her "Life of Our Lord," that exquisite visionary, Catherine Emmerich, tells us that there was, hard by Mount Carmel, a grotto with a well, near which Elias saw a Virgin; and it was to this spot, she says, that the Jews who expected the Advent of the Redeemer made pilgrimages many times a year.

"Is not this the prototype of the cave of Chartres and the well of the Strong Saints?

"Observe, too, on the other hand, the tendency of the thunder to fall, not on the old belfry, but on the new one. No meteorological reason, I suppose, can account for this preference; but on carefully considering the two spires, I am struck by the delicate foliage, the slender lacework of the new spire, the elegant and coquettish grace of the whole of that side. The other, on the contrary, has no ornament, no carved tracery; it is simply carved in scallops like scale armour; it is sober, stern, stalwart and strong. It might really almost be thought that one is female and the other of the male sex. And then might we not conclude that the first is symbolical of the Virgin and the second of Her Son? In that case my inference would be akin to that offered to us by Monsieur l'Abbé: the fires are to be ascribed to Satan, who would wreak himself on the image of Her who has the power to crush his head."

"Pray have a slice of beef, our friend," said Madame Bavoil, coming in with a bottle in her hands.

"No, thank you."

"And you, Monsieur l'Abbé?"

The Abbé Plomb bowed, but declined.

"Why, you eat nothing!"

"What! I? I may even confess that I am rather ashamed of having eaten so heartily, after reading this morning the life of Saint Laurence of Dublin, who, by way of food, was content to dip his bread in the water clothes had been washed in."

"Why?"

"Well, in order to be able to say with the Prophet-King that he fed on ashes—since ashes are used for lye; that is a penitential banquet which is very unlike that we have just consumed," he added, laughing.

"Well, my dear Madame Bavoil, that puts even you to shame," said the Abbé Gévresin. "You are not yet covetous

of so meagre a feast; you are really quite dainty! You must have milk or water to dip your sop in!"

"Dear me," said Durtal, "by way of high feeding I can improve on that. I remember reading in an old book the story of the Blessed Catherine of Cardona, who, without using her hands, cropped the grass, on her knees, among the asses."

It had not struck Madame Bavoil that the friends were speaking in fun, and she replied quite humbly,—

"God Almighty has never yet required me to strew my bread with ashes or to graze the field—if He should give me the order, I should certainly obey it.—But it does not matter."

And she was so far from enthusiastic that they all laughed.

"Then the Cathedral as a whole," said the Abbé Gévresin after a short silence, "dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, excepting, of course, the new spire and numerous details."

"Yes."

"And the names of the architects are unknown?"

"As are those of almost all the builders of great churches," replied the Abbé Plomb. "It may, however, be safely assumed that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Benedictines of the Abbey of Tiron directed the building of our church, for that monastery had established a House at Chartres in 1117; we also know that this convent contained more than five hundred Brothers practising all the arts, and that sculptors, image-makers, stone-cutters, or workers in pierced stone, were numerous. It would therefore seem very natural that these monks sent to live at Chartres were the men who drew the plans of Notre Dame, and employed the horde of artists whom we see represented in one of the old windows of the apse—men in furred caps shaped like a jelly bag, who are busily carving and polishing the statues of kings.

"Their work was finished at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Jehan Le Texier, known as Jehan de Beauce, who erected the northern belfry, called the New Belfry, and the decorative work inside the church, forming the niches for the groups on the walls of the choir-aisles or ambulatory."

"And has no one ever been able to discover the name of

any one of the original architects, sculptors, or glass-makers of this Cathedral?"

"It has been the subject of much research, and I, personally, may say that I have grudged neither time nor trouble, but all in vain.

"This much we know: At the top of the southern belfry, the Old Belfry as it is called, near the window-bay looking towards the New Belfry, this name was deciphered: 'Harman, 1164.' Is it that of an architect, of a workman, or of a night watchman on the look-out at that time in the tower? We can but wonder. Didron, again, discovered on the pilaster of the eastern porch, above the head of a butcher slaughtering an ox, the word 'Rogerus' in twelfth century characters. Was he the architect, the sculptor, the donor of this porch—or the butcher? Another signature, 'Robir,' is to be seen on the pedestal of a statue in the north porch. Who was Robir? None can say.

"Langlois, too, mentions a glass-worker of the thirteenth century, Clément of Chartres, whose signature he found on a window of the Cathedral at Rouen—Clement Vitrearius Carnutensis; but it is a wide leap to infer, as some would do, that merely because this Clément was a native of Chartres, he must have painted one or more of the glass pictures in Notre Dame here. And at any rate we have no information as to his life or his works in this city. It may also be remarked that on a pane in our church we read Petrus Bal ...; is this the name, complete or defaced, of a donor or of a painter? Once more we must confess ourselves ignorant.

"If I add to this that two of Jehan de Beauce's colleagues have been traced: Thomas Le Vasseur, who assisted him in the building of the new spire, and one Sieur Bernier, whose name occurs in ancient accounts; that from some old contracts, discovered by Monsieur Lecoq, we know that Jehan Soulas, image-maker, of Paris, carved the finest of the groups that are the glory of the choir-aisles, and can verify the names of other sculptors who succeeded this admirable artist, but who are less interesting, since with them pagan art reappears and mediocrity is evident: François Marchant, image-maker, of Orleans, and Nicolas Guybert, of Chartres—we have mentioned almost all the records worthy of preservation as to the great artists who

laboured at Chartres from the twelfth till the close of the first half of the fifteenth century."

"And after that period the names that have been handed down to us deserve nothing but execration. Thomas Boudin, Legros, Jean de Dieu, Berruer, Tuby, Simon Mazières—these were the men that dared to carry on the work begun by Soulas! Louis, the Duc d'Orléans' architect, who debased and ravaged the choir, and the infamous Bridan, who, to the contemptible delight of some of the Canons, erected his blatant and wretched presentment of the Assumption!"

"Alas!" said the Abbé Gévresin, "and they were Canons who thought fit to break two ancient windows in the choir and fill them with white panes, the better to light that group of Bridan's!"

"Will you eat nothing more?" asked Madame Bavoil, who, at a negative from the guests, cleared away the cheese and preserves, and brought in coffee.

"Since you are so much charmed by our Cathedral, I shall be most happy to take you over it and explain its details," said the Abbé Plomb to Durtal.

"I shall accept with pleasure, Monsieur l'Abbé, for it fairly haunts me, it possesses me—your Notre Dame! You know, no doubt, Quicherat's theories of Gothic art?"

"Yes, and I believe them to be correct. Like him, I am convinced that if the essential character of the Romanesque is the substitution of the vaulted roof for the truss, the distinctive element and principle of the Gothic is the buttress, and not the pointed arch.

"I reserve my opinion, indeed, as to the accuracy of Quicherat's declaration that 'the history of architecture in the middle ages is no more than the history of the struggle of architects against the thrust and weight of vaulting,' for there is something in this art beyond material industry and a problem of practice; at the same time he is certainly right on almost every point.

"It may be added as a general principle, that in our use of the terms Ogee and Gothic, we are misapplying words which have lost their original meaning; since the Goths have nothing to do with the style of architecture which has taken their name, and the word ogee or ogyve, which strictly means the semicircular form, is inaccurate as

applied to the arch with a double curve, which has for so long been regarded as the basis, nay, as the characteristic stamp of a style."[^[1]]

"After all," the Abbé went on, after a short silence, "how can we judge of the works of a past age, but by such help as we may obtain from the arcades pierced in shoring walls or from vaulting on round or pointed arches? for they are all debased by centuries of repair, or left unfinished. Look at Chartres; Notre Dame was to have had nine spires, and it has but two! The cathedrals of Reims, of Paris, of Laon, and many more, were to have had spires rising from their towers; and where are they? We can form no exact idea of the effect their architects intended to produce. And then, again, these churches were meant to be seen in a setting which has been destroyed, an environment that has ceased to exist; they were surrounded by houses of a character resembling their own; they are now in the midst of barracks five stories high, gloomy, ignoble penitentiaries!—and we constantly see the ground about them cleared, when they were never intended to stand isolated on a square. Look where you will, there is a total misapprehension of the conditions in which they were placed, of the atmosphere in which they lived. Certain details, which seem to us inexplicable in some of these buildings, were, no doubt, imperatively required by the position and needs of the surroundings. In fact, we stumble, we feel our way—but we know nothing—nothing!"

"And at best," said Durtal, "archæology and architecture have only done a secondary work; they have simply set before us the material organism, the body of the cathedrals; who shall show us the soul?"

"What do you mean by the word?" said the Abbé Gévresin.

"I am not speaking of the soul of the building at the moment when man by Divine help had created it; we know nothing of that soul—not indeed as regards Chartres, for some invaluable documents still reveal it; but of the soul of other churches, the soul they still have, and which

we help to keep alive by our more or less regular presence, our more or less frequent communion, our more or less fervent prayers.

"For instance, take Notre Dame at Paris; I know that it has been restored and patched from end to end, that its sculpture is mended where it is not quite new; in spite of Hugo's rhetoric it is second-rate, but it has its nave and its wondrous transept; it is even endowed with an ancient statue of the Virgin before which Monsieur Olier had knelt, and very often. Well, an attempt was made to revive there the worship of Our Lady, to incite a spirit of pilgrimage thither; but all is dead! That Cathedral no longer has a soul; it is an inert corpse of stone; try attending Mass there, try to approach the Holy Table—you will feel an icy cloak fall on you and crush you. Is it the result of its emptiness, of its torpid services, of the froth of runs and trills they send up there, of its being closed in a hurry in the evening and never open till so late in the morning, long after daybreak? Or has it something to do with the permitted rush of tourists, of London gapers that I have seen there talking at the top of their voice, sitting staring at the altar when the Holy Elements were being consecrated just in front of them? I know not—but of one thing I am certain, the Virgin does not inhabit there day and night and always, as she does Chartres.

"Look at Amiens, again, with its colourless windows and crude daylight, its chapels enclosed behind tall railings, its silence rarely broken by prayer, its solitude. There too is emptiness; and why I know not, but to me the place exhales a stale odour of Jansenism. I am not at large there, and prayer is difficult; and yet the nave is magnificent, and the sculptures in the ambulatory, finer even than those of Chartres, may be pronounced unique.

"But here, too, the soul is absent.

"It is the same with the Cathedral of Laon—bare, ice-bound, dead past hope; while some are in an intermediate state, dying, but not yet cold: Reims, Rouen, Dijon, Tours, and Le Mans for instance; even in these there is some refreshment; and Bourges, with its five porches opening on a long perspective of aisles, and its vast deserted spaces; or Beauvais, a melancholy fragment, having no more than a head and arms flung out in despair like an appeal for ever

ignored by Heaven, have still preserved some of the aroma of olden days. Meditation is possible there; but nowhere, nowhere is there such comfort as there is here, nowhere is prayer so fervent as at Chartres!"

"Those are heaven-sent words!" cried Madame Bavoil. "And you shall have a glass of old black currant liqueur for your pains! Yes, indeed, he is quite right—our friend is right," she went on, addressing the priests, who laughed. "Everywhere else, excepting at Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris and, more especially, Notre Dame de Fourvière at Lyon, when you go to meet Her, you wait and wait; and often enough She does not come. Whereas in our Cathedral She receives you at once, just as She is. And I have told him, told our friend, that he should attend the first morning Mass in the crypt, and he will see what a welcome our Mother gives her visitors."

"Chartres is a marvellous place," said the Abbé Gévresin, "with its two black Madonnas—Notre Dame of the Pillar, above in the body of the church, and Notre Dame de Sous-Terre below, in the vault over which the basilica is built. No other sanctuary, I believe, possesses the miraculous images of Mary, to say nothing of the antique relic known as the Shift or Tunic of the Virgin."

"And what in your opinion constitutes the soul of Chartres?" asked the Abbé Plomb.

"Certainly not the souls of the citizens' wives and the church servants that are poured out there," replied Durtal. "No, its vitality comes from the Sisterhoods, the peasant women, the pious schools, the pupils of the Seminary, and perhaps more especially from the children of the choir, who crowd to kiss the Pillar and kneel before the Black Virgin. As for the devotion of the respectable classes! It would scare away the angels!"

"With a few rare exceptions the fine flower of female Pharisaism is no doubt the outcome of that class," said the Abbé Plomb, and he added in a half jesting, half sorrowful tone,—

"And I, here at Chartres, am the distressful gardener of these souls!"

"To return to our starting point," said the Abbé Gévresin: "what was the birthplace of the Gothic?"

"France: so Lecoy de la Marche emphatically asserts.

'The buttress made its appearance as the essential basis of a style in the early years of Louis le Gros, in the district lying between the Seine and the Aisne.' In his opinion the first practice of this form was in the Cathedral of Laon; other authorities regard it as merely supplementary to earlier basilicas, instancing Saint-Front at Périgueux, Vézelay, Saint-Denis, Noyon, and the ancient college chapel at Poissy; but no two agree. One thing is certain, Gothic art is the art of the North; it made its way into Normandy, and from thence into England. Then it spread to the Rhine in the twelfth century, and to Spain by the beginning of the thirteenth. Gothic churches in the South are but an importation, evidently ill-assorted with the men and women who frequent them, and the merciless blue sky which spoils them."

"And observe," said Durtal, "that in our country that aspect of mysticism is discordant with the rest."

"How is that?"

"Well, you see, in the distribution of the sacred arts France received architecture only. Consider the pre-Raphaelite painters. All the early painters were Italians, Spaniards, Flemings, or Germans. Those whom some writers try to represent as our fellow-countrymen are Flemings transplanted to Burgundy, or docile Frenchmen whose imitative work bears an unmistakable Flemish stamp. Look in the Louvre at our primitive artists; look at Dijon, especially at what remains from the time when northern art was introduced by Philippe le Hardi into his own province. It is impossible to feel a doubt. Everything came from Flanders—Jean Perréal, Bourdichon, even Fouquet are whatever you please, only not the inventors of an original Gallic art.

"It is the same with the mystic writers. Of what use would it be to mention the nationalities to which they belong? They too are Spanish, Italian, German, Flemish—not one is French."

"I beg your pardon, our friend!" cried Madame Bavoil, "there was the Venerable Jeanne de Matel, who was born at Roanne."

"Yes, but she was the daughter of an Italian father who was born at Florence," said the Abbé Gévresin, who, hearing the bell ring for Nones, now folded up his table napkin.

They all stood up and said grace, and Durtal made an appointment with the Abbé Plomb to visit the Cathedral. Then he went home, meditating, as he walked, on this strange division of art in the middle ages, and the supremacy given to France in architecture, when as yet she was so inferior in every other art.

"And it must be owned," he concluded, "that she has now lost this superiority; for it is long indeed since she produced an architect. The men who assume the name are mere thieving bunglers, builders devoid of all individuality and learning. They are not even able to pilfer skilfully from their precursors. What are they nowadays? Patchers up of chapels, church cobblers, botchers and blunderers!"

[!-- Page 60 --]CHAPTER IV.

Madame Bavoil was right; to understand the welcome the Virgin could bestow on Her visitors, the early Mass in the crypt must be attended; above all, the Communion should be received.

Durtal made the experiment; one day when the Abbé Gévresin enjoined on him to approach the Table, he followed the housekeeper's advice and went to the crypt at early dawn.

The way down was by a cellar-stair lighted by a small lamp with a sputtering wick darkening the chimney with smoke; having safely reached the bottom, he turned to the left in the darkness; here and there, at an angle, a floating wick threw a ruddy light on the circuit which he made in alternate light and shade, till at last he had some notion of the general outline of the crypt. Its plan would be fairly represented by the nave of a wheel whence the spokes radiated in every direction, joining the outer circle or tyre. From the circular path in which he found himself passages diverged like the sticks of a fan, and at the end little fogged glass windows were visible, looking almost bright in the opaque blackness of the walls.

And by following the curve of the corridor, Durtal came to a green baize door which he pushed open. He found himself in the side aisle of a nave ending in a semicircle, where there was a high altar. To the right and left two little recesses formed the arms or transept of a small cross. The centre aisle, forming a low nave, had chairs on either side, leaving a narrow space to give access to the altar.

It was scarcely possible to see; the sanctuary was lighted only by tiny lamps from the roof in little saucers of lurid

orange or dull gold. An extraordinarily mild atmosphere prevailed in this underground structure, which was also full of a singular perfume in which a musty odour of hot wax mingled with a suggestion of damp earth. But this was only the background, the canvas, so to speak, of the perfume, and was lost under the embroidery of fragrance which covered it, the faded gold, as it were, of oil in which long kept aromatic herbs had been steeped, and old, old incense powder dissolved. It was a weird and mysterious vapour, as strange as the crypt itself, which, with its furtive lights and breadths of shadow, was at once penitential and soothing.

Durtal went up the broader aisle to the left arm of the cross and sat down; the tiny transept had its little altar, with a Greek cross in relief against a purple disk. Overhead the enormous curve of the vaulting hung heavy, and so low that a man could touch it by stretching an arm; it was as black as the mouth of a chimney, and scorched by the fires that had consumed the cathedrals built above it.

Presently the clap-clap of sabots became audible, and then the smothered footfall of nuns; there was silence but for sneezing and nose-blowing stifled by pocket-handkerchiefs, and then all was still.

A sacristan came in through a little door opening into the other transept, and lighted the tapers on the high altar; then strings of silver-gilt hearts became visible in the semicircle all along the walls, reflecting the blaze of flames, and forming a glory for a statue of the Virgin sitting, stiff and dark, with a Child on Her knees. This was the famous Virgin of the Cavern, or rather a copy of it, for the original was burnt in 1793 in front of the great porch of the Cathedral, amid the delirious raving of sans-culottes.

A choir-boy came in, followed by an old priest; and then, for the first time, Durtal saw the Mass really as a service, and understood the wonderful beauty that lies inherent in a devout commemoration of the Sacrifice.

The boy on his knees, his soul aspiring and his hands clasped, spoke aloud and slowly, rehearsing the responses of the Psalm with such deep attention and respect, that the meaning of this noble liturgy, which has ceased to amaze us, because we are so used to hearing it stammered out in hot haste, was suddenly revealed to Durtal.

And the priest himself, unconsciously, whether he would or no, took up the child's tone, imitating him, speaking slowly, not merely tripping the verses off the tip of his tongue, but absorbed in the words he had to repeat; and he seemed overwhelmed, as though it were his first Mass, by the grandeur of the rite of which he was to be the instrument.

In fact, Durtal heard the celebrant's voice tremble when standing before the altar in the presence of the Father, like the Son Himself whom he represented, and imploring forgiveness for all the sins of the world which He bore on His shoulders, supported in his grief and hope by the innocence of the child whose loving care was less mature and less lively than the man's.

And as he spoke the despairing words, "My God, my God, wherefore is my spirit heavy, and why dost Thou afflict me?" the priest was indeed the image of Jesus suffering on the hill of Calvary, but the man remained in the celebrant—the man, conscious of himself, and himself experiencing, in behoof of his personal sins and his own shortcomings, the impressions of sorrow contained in the inspired text.

Meanwhile his little acolyte had words of comfort, bid him hope; and after repeating the Confiteor in the face of the congregation, who on their part purified their souls by the same ablution of confession, the priest with revived assurance went up the altar steps and began the Mass.

Positively, in this atmosphere of prayers crushed in by the heavy roof, Durtal, in the midst of kneeling Sisters and women, was struck with a sense as of some early Christian rite buried in the catacombs. Here were the same ecstatic tenderness, the same faith; and it was possible even to imagine some apprehension of surprise, and some eagerness to profess the faith in the face of danger. And thus, as in a vague image, this sacred cellar held the dim picture of the neophytes assembled so long since in the underground caverns of Rome.

The service proceeded before Durtal's eyes, and he was amazed to watch the boy, who, with half closed eyes and the reserve of timid emotion, kissed the flagons of wine and of water before presenting them to the priest.

Durtal would look no more; he tried to concentrate his mind while the priest was wiping his hands, for the only

prayers he could honestly offer up to God were verses and texts repeated in an undertone.

This only had he in his favour, but this he had: that he passionately loved mysticism and the liturgy, plain-song and cathedrals. Without falsehood or self-delusion, he could in all truth exclaim, "Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house, and the place where Thine honour dwelleth." This was all he had to offer to the Father in expiation of his contumely and refractoriness, his errors and his falls.

"Oh!" thought he, "how could I dare to pour out the ready-made collects of which the prayer-books are full, how say to God, while addressing Him as 'Lovely Jesus,' that He is the beloved of my heart, that I solemnly vow never to love anything but Him, that I would die rather than ever displease Him?

"Love none but Him!—If I were a monk and alone, possibly; but living in the world!—And then who but the Saints would prefer death to the smallest sin? Why then humbug Him with these feints and grimaces?

"No," said Durtal, "apart from the personal outpourings, the secret intimacy in which we are bold to tell Him everything that comes into our head, the prayers of the liturgy alone can be uttered with impunity by any man, for it is the peculiarity of these inspirations that they adapt themselves in all ages to every state of the mind and every phase of life. And with the exception of the time-honoured prayers of certain Saints, which are as a rule either supplications for pity or for help, appeals to God's mercy or laments, all other prayers sent forth from the cold insipid sacristies of the seventeenth century, or, worse still, composed in our own day by the piety-mongers who insert in our books of prayer the pious cant of the Rue Bonaparte—all these inflated and pretentious petitions should be avoided by sinners who, in default of every other virtue, at least wish to be sincere.

"Only that wonderful child could thus address the Lord without hypocrisy," he went on, looking at the little acolyte, and understanding truly for the first time what innocent childhood meant—the little sinless soul, purely white.

"The Church, which tries to find beings absolutely

ingenuous and immaculate to wait upon the altar, had succeeded at Chartres in moulding souls and transforming ordinary boys on their admission to the sanctuary into exquisite angels. There must certainly be, above and besides their special training, some blessing and goodwill from Our Lady, to mould these little rogues to the service, to make them so unlike others, and endow them in the middle of the nineteenth century with the fire of chastity and primitive fervour of the middle age."

The service proceeded slowly, soaking into the abject silence of the worshippers, and the child, more reverent and attentive than ever, rang the bell; it was like a shower of sparks tinkling under the smoky vault, and the silence seemed deeper than ever behind the kneeling boy, upholding with one hand the chasuble of the celebrant, who bowed over the altar. The Host was elevated amid the shower of silver sound; and then, above the prostrate heads, in the clear sparkle of bells, the golden tulip of a chalice flashed out till, to a final hurried peal, the gilded flower was lowered, and the prostrate worshippers looked up.

And Durtal was thinking,—

"If only He to whom we refused shelter when the Mother who bore Him was in travail, could find a loving refuge in our souls to-day! But alas! apart from these nuns, these children, these priests, and these peasant women who cherish Him so truly, how many here present are, like me, embarrassed by His presence, and at all times incapable of making ready the chamber He requires, of receiving Him in a room swept and garnished?

"Alas! to think that things are always the same, always going back to the beginning! Our souls are still the crafty synagogues who betrayed Him, and the vile Caiaphas that lurks within us rises up at the very moment when we fain would be humble and love Him while we pray! My God! My God! Would it not be better to depart than to drag myself thus, with such a bad grace, into Thy presence? For, after all, it is all very well for the Abbé Gévresin to insist that I should communicate, he is not I—he is not in me; he does not know the wild doings in my hidden lairs, or the turmoil in my ruins. He believes it to be mere nervelessness, indolence. Alas! That is not all. There is a dryness, a coldness, which are not altogether

free from a certain amount of irritation and rebelliousness against the rules he insists on."

The moment of Communion was at hand. The little boy had gently thrown the white napkin back on the table; the nuns and poor women and peasants went forward, all with clasped hands and bowed heads, and the child took a taper and passed in front of the priest, his eyes almost shut for fear of seeing the Host.

There was in this little creature such a glow of love and reverence that Durtal gazed with admiration and trembled with awe. Without in the least knowing why, in the midst of the darkness that fell on his soul, of the impotent and wavering feeling that thrilled it without there being any word to describe them, he felt a tide bearing him to the Saviour, and then a recoil.

The comparison was inevitably forced upon him between that child's soul and his own. "Why, it is he, not I, who should take the Sacrament!" cried he to himself; and he crouched there inert, his hands folded, not knowing how to decide, in a frame at once beseeching and terrified, when he felt himself gently drawn to the table and received the Sacrament. And meanwhile he was trying to collect himself, and to pray, and at the same time, at the same instant, was in the discomfort of the shuddering fears that surge up within us, and that find expression physically in a craving for air, and in that peculiar condition when the head feels as if it were empty, as if the brain had ceased to act, and all vitality was driven back on the heart, which swells to choking; when it seems, in the spiritual sense, that as energy returns so far as to allow of self-command once more, of introspection, we peer down in appalling silence into a black void.

He painfully rose and returned to his place, not without stumbling. Never, not even at Chartres, had he been able to hinder the torpor that overpowered him at the moment of receiving the Sacrament. His powers were benumbed, his faculties arrested.

In Paris, at the core of his soul, which seemed rolled up in itself like a chrysalis, there had always been a sort of restraint, an awkwardness in waiting, and in approaching Christ, and then an apathy which nothing could shake off. And this state was prolonged in a sort of cold, enveloping

mist, or rather in a vacuum all round the soul, deserted and swooning on its couch.

At Chartres this state of collapse was still present, but some indulgent tenderness presently enwrapped and warmed the spirit. The soul as it recovered was no longer alone; it was encouraged and perceptibly helped by the Virgin, who revived it. And this impression, peculiar to this crypt, permeated the body too; it was no longer a feeling of suffocation for lack of air; on the contrary, it was the oppression of inflation, of over-fulness, which would be mitigated by degrees, allowing of easy breathing at last.

Durtal, comforted and relieved, rose to go. By this time the crypt had become a little lighter from the growing dawn; the passages, ending in altars backing against the windows, were still dark, as a result of the ground plan, but in the perspective of each a moving gold cross was to be seen almost distinctly, rising and falling with a priest's back, between two pale stars twinkling one on each side above the tabernacle; while a third, lower and with redder flame, lighted up the book and the white napery.

Durtal wandered away to meditate in the Bishop's garden, where he had permission to walk whenever he pleased.

The garden was perfectly still, with tomb-like avenues, pollard poplars, and trampled lawns—half dead. There was not a flower, for the Cathedral killed everything under its shadow. Its vast deserted apse, without a statue, rose amid a flight of buttresses flung out like huge ribs, inflated as it were by the breath of incessant prayer within; shade and damp always clung round the spot; in this funereal Close, where the trees were green only in proportion as they were distant from the church, lay two microscopic ponds like the mouths of two wells; one covered to the brim with yellow-green duck-weed, the other full of brackish water of inky blackness, in which three goldfish lay as in pickle.

Durtal was fond of this neglected spot, with its reek of the grave and the salt marsh, and the mouldy smell, that earthy scent that comes up from a rotting soil of wet leaves.

He paced the alleys, where the Bishop never came, and where the children of the household, rushing about at play, destroyed the fragments of grass-plots spared by the Cathedral. Slates cracked underfoot, flung down from the roofs

by the wind, and the jackdaws croaked in answer to each other across the silent park.

Durtal came out on a terrace overlooking the city, and he rested his elbows on a parapet of grey time-eaten stone, as dry as pumice and patterned with orange and sulphur-coloured lichens.

Beneath him spread a valley crowded with smoking chimneys and roofs, veiling this upper part of the town in a tangle of blue. Further down all was still and lifeless; the houses were asleep, not so far awake even as to show the transient flash of glass when a window is thrown open, nor was there such a spot of red as is often seen in a country street when an eider-down quilt hangs out to air across the bar of a balcony; everything was closed and dull and soundless; there was not even the hive-like hum that hangs over inhabited places. But for the distant rumble of a cart, the crack of a whip, the bark of a dog, all was still: it was a town asleep, a land of the dead.

And beyond the valley, on the further bank, the scene was still more sullen and silent; the plains of La Beauce stretched away as far as the eye could reach, mute and melancholy, without a smile, under a heartless sky divided by an ignoble barrack facing the Cathedral.

The dreariness of these plains, an endless level without a mound, without a tree! And you felt that even beyond the horizon they still stretched away as flat as ever; only the monotony of the landscape was emphasized by the raging fury of the tempestuous winds, sweeping the hillside, levelling the tree-tops, and wreaking themselves on this basilica, which, perched on high, had for centuries defied their efforts. To uproot it the lightning had been needed to help, firing its towers, and even the combined attacks of the hurricane and the flames had been unable to destroy the original stock, which, replanted after each disaster, had always sprouted in fresh verdure with reinvigorated growth.

That morning, in the dawn of a rainy autumn day, lashed by a bitter north wind, Durtal, shivering and ill at ease, left the terrace and took refuge in the more sheltered walks, going down presently into a garden-slope where the brushwood afforded some little protection from the wind; these shrubberies wandered at random down the hill, and an inextricable tangle of blackberries clung with the cat's-claws

of their long shoots to the saplings that were scattered about.

It was evident that since some immemorial time the Bishops, for lack of funds, had neglected these grounds. Of all the old kitchen garden, overgrown by brambles, only one plot was more or less weeded, and rows of spinach and carrots alternated with the frosted balls of cabbages.

Durtal sat down on a stump that had once supported a bench, and tried to look into his own soul; but he found within, look where he might, only a spiritual Beauce; it seemed to him to mirror the cold and monotonous landscape; only it was not a mighty wind that blew through his being; but a sharp, drying little blast. He knew that he was cross-grained and could not make his observations calmly; his conscience harassed him and insisted on vexatious argument.

"Pride! Ah, how is it to be kept under till the day shall come when it shall be quelled? It insinuates itself so stealthily, so noiselessly, that it has ensnared and bound me before I can suspect its presence; and my case too is somewhat peculiar, and hard to cure by the religious treatment commonly prescribed in such cases. For in fact," said he to himself, "my pride is not of the artless and overweening kind, elated, audacious, boldly displaying, and proclaiming itself to the world; no, mine is in a latent state, what was called vain-glory in the simplicity of the Middle Ages, an essence of pride diluted with vanity and evaporating within me in transient thoughts and unexpressed conceit. I have not even the opportunity afforded by swaggering pride for being on my guard and compelling myself to keep silence. Yes, that is very true; talk leads to specious boasting and invites subtle praise; one is presently aware of it, and then, with patience and determination, it is in one's power to check and muzzle oneself. But my vice of pride is wordless and underground; it does not come forth. I neither see nor hear it. It wriggles and creeps in without a sound, and clutches me without my having heard its approach!

"And the good Abbé answers: 'Be watchful and pray;' well, I am more than willing, but the remedy is ineffectual, for aridity and outside influences deprive it of its efficacy!

"As for outside suggestions—they never seem to come to

me but in prayer. It is enough that I kneel down and try to collect my thoughts, they are at once dissipated. The mere purpose of prayer is like a stone flung into a pool; everything is stirred up and comes to the top!

"And people who have not habits of religious practice fancy that there is nothing easier than prayer. I should like to see them try. They could then bear witness that profane imaginings, which leave them in peace at all other times, always surge up unexpectedly, during prayer.

"Besides, what use is therein disputing the fact? Merely looking at a sleeping vice is enough to wake it."

And his thoughts went back to that warm crypt. "Yes, no doubt, like all the buildings of the Romanesque period, it is symbolical of the Old Testament; but it is not simply gloomy and sad, for it is enveloping and comforting, warm and tender! Admitting even that it is the figure in stone of the older Dispensation, would it not seem that it symbolizes it less as a whole, than as embodying more especially a select group of the Holy Women who prefigured the Virgin in the earlier Scriptures? Is it not the expression in stone of those passages in which the illustrious women of the Bible are most conspicuous, who were, in a way, prophetic incarnations of the New Eve?

"Hence this crypt would reproduce the most consoling and the most heroic passages of the Sacred Book, for the Virgin is supreme in this underground sanctuary; it is Hers rather than the terrible Adonaï's, if one may dare say so.

"And again, She is a very singular Virgin, who has inevitably remained in harmony with Her surroundings: a Virgin black and rugged, and stunted, like the rough-hewn shrine She inhabits.

"She is therefore, no doubt, the outcome of the same idea that conceived of Christ as black and ugly because He had assumed the burthen of all the sins of the world, the Christ of the first ages of the Church, who in His humility put on the vilest aspect. In that case Mary would have conceived Her Son in Her own image; She too had chosen to be ugly and obscure, out of humility and loving-kindness, that She might the better console the disfigured and despised creatures whose image She had borrowed."

And Durtal went on:—

"

What a crypt is this where, in the course of so many centuries, kings and queens have come to worship!

"Philip Augustus and Isabella of Hainault, Blanche of Castille and Saint Louis, Philippe de Valois, Jean le Bon, Charles V., Charles VI., Charles VII., Charles VIII. and Anne de Bretagne; then François I., Henri III. and Louise de Vaudemont, Catherine de' Medici; Henri IV., who was crowned in this Cathedral, Anne of Austria, Louis XIV., Maria Leczinska, and so many others—all the nobility of France; and Ferdinand of Spain, and Léon de Lusignan, the last King of Armenia, and Pierre de Courtenay, Emperor of Constantinople—all kneeling like the poor folks of to-day, and like them beseeching Notre Dame de Sous-Terre."

And what was more interesting still was that the Virgin had wrought many miracles on this spot. She had saved children who had fallen into the well of the Strong Saints, had preserved the guardians who had charge of the relic of Her garment when the edifice was blazing above them, and had cured crowds, half maddened by the Burning plague in the Middle Ages, shedding Her benefits with a lavish hand.

Times were changed indeed, but fervent worshippers had knelt before the Image, had relinked the bonds broken in the course of years, had, so to speak, recaptured the Virgin in a net of prayer; and so, instead of departing, as She had done elsewhere, She had remained at Chartres.

By some incredible effect of clemency She had endured the insult of the tenth-day festivals and the outrage of seeing the Goddess of Reason installed in her place on the altar, had suffered the infamous liturgy of obscene canticles rising with the thundering incense of gunpowder. And She had forgiven it all, no doubt for the sake of the love shown Her by preceding generations, and the awed, but real affection of the humble believers who had come back to Her when the storm was over.

This cavern was crowded with memories. The coating of those walls had been formed of the vapours of the soul, of the exhalations of accumulated desires and regrets, even more than of the smoke of tapers; how foolish it was then to have painted this crypt in squalid imitation of the

catacombs, to have defaced the glorious darkness of these stones with colours which were indeed fast vanishing, leaving only traces as of palette scrapings in the consecrated soot on the roof!

Durtal was expatiating on these reflections as he went out of the garden, when he met the Abbé Gévresin walking along and reading his breviary. He asked whether Durtal had taken the Sacrament. And perceiving that his penitent always came back to his shame of the inert and torpid grief that came over him in contemplation of the Holy Sacrament, the old priest said to him,—

"That is no concern of yours; all you have to do is to pray to the best of your power. The rest is my concern—if the far from triumphant state of your soul only makes you a little humble, that is all I ask of you."

"Humble! I am like a water cooler; my vanity sweats out at every pore as the water oozes from the clay."

"It is some consolation to me that you perceive it," said the Abbé, smiling. "It would be far worse if you did not know yourself, if you were so proud as to believe that you had no pride."

"But how then am I to set to work? You advise me to pray; but teach me at least how not to dissipate myself in every direction, for as soon as I try to collect myself I go to pieces; I live in a perpetual state of dissolution. It is like a thing arranged on purpose; as soon as I try to shut the cage all my thoughts fly off—they deafen me with their chirping."

The Abbé was thinking.

"I know," said he; "nothing is more difficult than to free the spirit from the images that take possession of it. Still, and in spite of all, you may achieve concentration of mind if you observe these three rules:

"In the first place you must humble yourself, by owning the frailty of your mind, unable to preserve itself from wandering in the presence of God; next you must not be impatient or restless, for that would only stir up the dregs and bring other objects of frivolity to the surface; finally, it is well not to investigate the nature of the distractions that trouble your prayers till they are over. This only prolongs the disturbance, and in a way recognizes

its existence. You thus run the risk, in virtue of the law of association of ideas, of inviting new diversions, and there would be no way of escape.

"After prayer you may examine yourself with benefit; follow my advice, and you will find the advantage of it."

"That is all very fine," thought Durtal, "but when it comes to putting the advice into practice it is quite another thing. Are not these mere old women's remedies, precious ointments, quack medicines, for which the pious and virtuous have a weakness?"

They walked on in silence across the forecourt of the palace to the priest's rooms. As they went in, they found Madame Bavoil at the foot of the stairs, her arms in a tub full of soap-suds. As she rubbed the clothes, she turned to look at Durtal, and, as if she could read his thoughts, she mildly asked,—

"Why, our friend, wear such a graveyard face when you took the Sacrament this morning?"

"So you heard I had been to Communion?"

"Yes, I went into the crypt while Mass was going forward, and saw you go up to the Holy Table. Well, shall I tell you the truth? You do not know how to address our Holy Mother."

"Indeed!"

"No. You are shy when She is doing her best to put you at your ease; you creep close to the wall when you ought to walk boldly up the middle aisle to face Her. That is not the way to approach Her!"

"But if I have nothing to say to Her?"

"Then you simply chatter to Her like a child; some pretty speech, and She is satisfied. Oh, these men! How little they know how to pay their court, how greatly they lack little coaxing ways, and even honest artfulness! If you can invent nothing on your own part, borrow from another. Repeat after the Venerable Jeanne de Matel:

"'Holy Virgin, this abyss of iniquity and vileness invokes the abyss of strength and splendour to praise Thy preeminent Glory.' Well, is that pretty well expressed, our friend? Try; recite that to Our Lady and She will unbind you; then prayer will come of itself. Such little ways are permitted by Her, and we must be humble enough not to presume to do without them."

Durtal could not help laughing.

"You want me to become a trickster, a sneak in spiritual life!" said he.

"Well, where would be the harm? Does not the Lord know when we mean well? Does not He take note of our intentions? Would you, yourself, repulse anyone who paid you a compliment, however clumsily, if you thought he meant to please you by it? No, of course not."

"Here is another thing," said the Abbé, laughing. "Madame Bavoil, I saw Monseigneur this morning; he grants your petition and authorizes you to dig in as many parts of the garden as you choose."

"Aha!" and amused by Durtal's surprise she went on: "You must have seen for yourself that excepting a little plot of ground where the gardener plants a few carrots and cabbages for the Bishop's table, the whole of the garden is left to run wild; it is sheer waste and of no use to anybody. Now instead of buying vegetables, I mean to grow some, since Monseigneur gives me leave to turn over his ground, and by the same token I will give some to your housekeeper."

"Thank you. Then do you understand gardening?"

"I? Why, am I not a peasant? I have lived in the country all my life, and a kitchen garden is just my business! Besides, if I were in difficulties, would not my Friends Above come to advise me?"

"You are a wonderful woman, Madame Bavoil," said Durtal, somewhat disconcerted in spite of himself by the answers of a cook who so calmly asserted that she was on intimate terms with the divine Beyond.

[!-- Page 74 --]CHAPTER V.

It rained without ceasing. Durtal breakfasted under the assiduous watchfulness of his servant, Madame Mesurat. She was one of those women whose stalwart build and masculine presence would allow of their dressing in men's clothes without attracting attention. She had a pear-shaped head, cheeks that hung flabby as if they had been emptied of air, a pompous nose that drooped till it very nearly touched a projecting underlip like a bracket, giving her an expression of determined contempt which she very certainly had never felt. In short, she suggested the absurd idea of a solemn, gawky Marlborough disguised as a cook.

She served unvarying meats with inglorious sauces; and as soon as the dish was on the table she stood at attention, waiting to know whether it was good. She was imposing and devoted—quite insufferable. Durtal, on edge with irritation, found it all he could do not to dismiss her to the kitchen, and finally buried his nose in a book that he might not have to answer her, might not see her.

This day, provoked by his silence, Madame Mesurat lifted the window curtain, and for the sake of saying something, exclaimed,—

"Good heavens! What weather! Impossible!"

And in fact the sky offered no hope of consolation. It was all in tears. The rain fell in uninterrupted streams, unwinding endless skeins of water. The Cathedral was standing in a pool of mud lashed into leaping drops by the falling torrent, and the two spires looked drawn together, almost close, linked by loose threads of water. This indeed was the prevailing impression—a briny atmosphere full of strings holding the sky and earth together as if tacked

with long stitches, but they would not hold; a gust of wind snapped all these endless threads, which were whirled in every direction.

"My arrangement to meet the Abbé Plomb to go over the Cathedral is evidently at an end," said Durtal to himself. "The Abbé will certainly not turn out in such weather."

He went into his study; this was his usual place of refuge. He had his divan there, his pictures, the old furniture he had brought from Paris; and against the walls, shelves, painted black, held thousands of books. There he lived, looking out on the towers, hearing nothing but the cawing of the rooks and the strokes of the hours as they fell one by one on the silence of the deserted square. He had placed his table in front of a window, and there he sat dreaming, praying, meditating, making notes.

The balance of his personal account was struck by internal damage and mental disputations; if the soul was bruised and ice-bound, the mind was no less afflicted, no less fagged. It seemed to have grown dull since his residence at Chartres. The biographies of Saints which Durtal had intended to write, remained in the stage of charcoal sketches; they blew off before he could fix them. In reality he had ceased to care for anything but the Cathedral; it had taken possession of him.

And besides, the lives of the Saints as they were written by the inferior Bollandists were enough to disgust anybody with saintliness. Offered to publisher after publisher, carted from the Paris libraries to the provincial workshops, this barrow of books had at first been hauled by a single nag, Father Giry; then a second horse had been added, the Abbé Guérin, and, harnessed to the same shafts, these two men pulled their heavy truck over the broken road of souls.

He had only to open a bale of this prosy dulness, taking down a volume at random, to light on sentences of this quality:

"Such an one was born of parents not less remarkable for their rank than for their piety;" or, on the other hand, "His parents were not of illustrious birth, but in them might be seen the distinction of all the virtues which are so far above rank."

And then the dreadful style of the Pont Neuf: "His historian does not hesitate to say he would have been mistaken for an angel if the maladies with which God afflicted him had not shown that he was a man."—"The Devil, not enduring to see him advancing by rapid leaps on the way of perfection, adopted various means of hindering him in the happy progress of his career."

And on turning over to a fresh page he came upon a passage in the life of one of the Elect who was mourning for his mother, excusing him in this solemn rigmarole: "After granting to the feelings of nature such relief as grace cannot forbid on these occasions—"

Or again, here and there were such pompous and ridiculous definitions as this, which occurs in the life of César de Bus: "After a visit to Paris, which is not less the throne of vice than the capital of the kingdom—" And this went on in meagre language through twelve to fifteen volumes, ending by the erection of a row of uniform virtue, a barrack of pious idiotcy. Now and again the two poor nags seemed to wake up and trot for a little space, though gasping for breath, when they had some detail to record which no doubt moved them to rapture; they expatiated complacently on the virtues of Catherine of Sweden or Robert de la Chaise-Dieu, who as soon as they were born cried for sinless wet-nurses, and would suck none but pious breasts; or they spoke with ravishment of the chastity of Jean the Taciturn, who never took a bath, that he might not shock "his modest eyes," as the text says, by seeing himself; and the bashful purity of San Luis de Gonzagua, who had such a terror of women that he dared not look at his mother for fear of evil thoughts!

In consternation at the poverty of these distressing non-sequiturs, Durtal turned to the less familiar biographies of the Blessed Women; but here again, what a farrago of the commonplace, what glutinous unction, what a hash by way of style! There was certainly some curse from Heaven on the old women of the Sacristy who dared take up a pen. Their ink at once turned to stickiness, to bird-lime, to pitch, which smeared all it touched. Oh, the poor Saints! the hapless Blessed Women!

His meditations were interrupted by a ring at the bell:

"

Why, has the Abbé Plomb really come out in spite of the gale?"

It was indeed the priest that Madame Mesurat showed in.

"Oh," said he to Durtal, who lamented over the rain, "the weather will clear up all in good time; at any rate, as you had not put me off I was determined not to keep you waiting."

They sat chatting by the fire; and the room took the Abbé's fancy, no doubt, for he settled himself at his ease. He threw himself back in an arm-chair, tucking his hands into his cincture. And when, in answer to his question as to whether Durtal were not too dull at Chartres, the Parisian replied, "It seems to me that I live more slowly, and yet am not such a burthen to myself," the Abbé went on,—

"What you must feel painfully is the lack of intellectual society; you, who in Paris lived in the world of letters—how can you endure the atmosphere of this provincial town?"

Durtal laughed.

"The world of letters! No, Monsieur l'Abbé, I should not be likely to regret that, for I had given it up many years before I came to live here; and besides, I assure you it is impossible to be intimate with those train-bands of literature and remain decent. A man must choose—them or honest folks; slander or silence; for their speciality is to eliminate every charitable idea, and above all to cure a man of friendship in the winking of an eye."

"Really?"

"Yes, by adopting a homœopathic pharmacopœia which still makes use of the foulest matter—the extract of wood-lice, the venom of snakes, the poison of the cockchafer, the secretions of the skunk and the matter from pustules, all disguised in sugar of milk to conceal their taste and appearance; the world of letters, in the same way, triturates the most disgusting things to get them swallowed without raising your gorge. There is an incessant manipulation of neighbours' gossip and play-box tittle-tattle, all wrapped up in perfidious good taste to mask their flavour and smell.

"These pills of foulness, exhibited in the required doses, act like detergents on the soul, which they almost immediately purge of all trustfulness. I had enough of this

regimen, which acted on me only too successfully, and I thought it well to escape from it."

"But the pious world, too, is not absolutely free from gossip," said the Abbé, smiling.

"No doubt, and I am well aware that devotion does not always sweeten the mind, but—

"The truth is," said he after reflection, "that the assiduous practice of religion generally results in some intense effects on the soul. Only they may be of two kinds. Either it develops the soul's taint and evolves in it the final ferments which putrefy it once for all, or it purifies the spirit and makes it clean and clear and exquisite. It may produce hypocrites or good and saintly people; there is really no medium.

"But when such divine husbandry has completely cleansed souls, how guileless and how pure they may be! Nor am I speaking of the Elect, such as I saw at La Trappe—merely of young novices, little priestlings whom I have known. They had eyes like clear glass, undimmed by the haze of a single sin; and, looking into them, behind those eyes you would have seen their open soul burning like a soaring crown of fire framing the smiling face in a halo of white name.

"In fact, Jesus simply fills up all the room in their soul. Do not you think, Monsieur l'Abbé, that these youths occupy their bodies just enough for suffering and to expiate the sins of others? Without knowing it, they have been sent into the world to be safe tenements of the Lord, the resting-place where Jesus finds a home after wandering over the frozen steppes of other souls."

"Yes," said the Abbé, taking off his spectacles to wipe them on his bandana, "but to acquire so fine a strain of being, how much mortification, penance, and prayer have been needed in the generations that have ended by giving them birth! The spirits of whom you speak are the flower of a stem long nourished in a pious soil. The Spirit, of course, bloweth where it listeth, and may find a saint in the heart of a listless family; but this mode of operation must always be an exception. The novices you have known must certainly have had grandmothers and mothers who frequently incited them to kneel and pray by their side."

"I do not know—I knew nothing of the origin of these

lads—but I feel that you are right. It is obvious, indeed, that children, slowly brought up from their earliest years, and sheltered from the world under the shadow of such a sanctuary as this at Chartres, must end in the blossoming of an unique flower."

And when Durtal told him of the impression made on him by the angelic service of the Mass, the Abbé smiled.

"Though our boys are not unique, they are no doubt rare. Here, the Virgin Herself trains them, and note, the little lad you saw is neither more diligent nor more conscientious than his fellows; they are all alike. Dedicated to the priesthood from the time when they can first understand, they learn quite naturally to lead a spiritual life from their constant intimacy with the services."

"What then is the system of this Institution?"

"The Foundation of the Clerks of Our Lady dates from 1853, or rather it was reconstituted in that year—for it existed in the Middle Ages—by the Abbé Ychard. Its purpose is to increase the number of priests by admitting poor boys to begin their studies. It receives intelligent and pious children of every nationality, if they are supposed to show any vocation for Holy Orders. They remain in the choir school till they are in the third class, and are then transferred to the Seminary.

"Its funds?—are, humanly speaking, nothing, based on trust in Providence, for it has altogether, for the maintenance of eighty pupils, nothing but the pay earned by these children for various duties in the Cathedral, and the profits from a little monthly magazine called 'The Voice of the Virgin,' and finally and chiefly the charity of the faithful. All this does not amount to a very substantial income; and yet, to this day, money has never been lacking."

The Abbé rose and went to the window.

"Oh, the rain will not cease," said Durtal. "I am very much afraid, Monsieur l'Abbé, that we cannot examine the Cathedral porches to-day."

"There is no hurry. Before going into the details of Notre Dame, would it not be well to contemplate it as a whole, and let its general purpose soak into the mind before studying each page of its parts?

"Everything lies contained in that building," he went on, waving his hand to designate the church; "the scriptures,

theology, the history of the human race, set forth in broad outline. Thanks to the science of symbolism a pile of stones may be a macrocosm.

"I repeat it, everything exists within this structure, even our material and moral life, our virtues and our vices. The architect takes us up at the creation of Adam to carry us on to the end of time. Notre Dame of Chartres is the most colossal depository existing of heaven and earth, of God and man. Each of its images is a word; all those groups are phrases—the difficulty is to read them."

"But it can be done?"

"Undoubtedly. That there may be some contradictions in our interpretations I admit, but still the palimpsest can be deciphered. The key needed is a knowledge of symbolism."

And seeing that Durtal was listening to him with interest, the Abbé came back to his seat, and said,—

"What is a symbol? According to Littré it is a 'figure or image used as a sign of something else;' and we Catholics narrow the definition by saying with Hugues de Saint Victor that a symbol is an allegorical representation of a Christian principle under a tangible image.

"Now symbolism has existed ever since the beginning of the world. Every religion adopted it, and in ours it came into being with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first chapter of Genesis, while it still is in full splendour in the last chapter of the Apocalypse.

"The Old Testament is an anticipatory figure of all the New Testament tells us. The Mosaic dispensation contains, as in an allegory, what the Christian religion shows us in reality; the history of the People of God, its principal personages, its sayings and doings, the very accessories round about it, are a series of images; everything came to the Hebrews under a figure, Saint Paul tells us. Our Lord took the trouble to remind His disciples of this on various occasions, and He Himself, when addressing the multitude, almost always spoke in parables as a means of conveying one thing by an illustration from another.

"Symbols, then, have a divine origin; it may be added that from the human point of view this form of teaching answers to one of the least disputable cravings of the human mind. Man feels a certain enjoyment in giving proof of his intelligence, in guessing the riddle thus presented to him,

and likewise in preserving the hidden truth summed up in a visible formula, a perdurable form. Saint Augustine expressly says: 'Anything that is set forth in an allegory is certainly more emphatic, more pleasing, more impressive, than when it is formulated in technical words.'"

"That is Mallarmé's idea too," thought Durtal, "and this coincidence in the views of the saint and the poet, on grounds at once analogous and different, is whimsical, to say the least."

"Thus in all ages," the Abbé went on, "men have taken inanimate objects, or animals and plants, to typify the soul and its attributes, its joys and sorrows, its virtues and its vices; thought has been materialized to fix it more securely in the memory, to make it less fugitive, more near to us, more real, almost tangible.

"Hence the emblems of cruelty and craft, of courtesy and charity, embodied by certain creatures, personified by certain plants; hence the spiritual meanings attributed to precious stones, and to colours. And it may be added that in times of persecution, in the early Christian times, this hidden language enabled the initiated to hold communication, to give each other some token of kinship, some password which the enemy could not interpret. Thus, in the paintings discovered in catacombs, the Lamb, the Pelican, the Lion, the Shepherd, all meant the Son; the Fish Ichthys, of which the characters express the Greek formula: 'Jesus, Son of God, Saviour,' figures, in a secondary sense, the believer, the rescued soul, fished out from the sea of Paganism; the Redeemer having told two of His Apostles that they should be fishers of men.

"And of course the period when human beings lived in closest intercourse with God—the Middle Ages—was certain to follow the revealed tradition of Christ, and express itself in symbolical language, especially in speaking of that Spirit, that essence, that incomprehensible and nameless Being who to us is God. At the same time it had at its command a practical means of making itself understood. It wrote a book, as it were, intelligible to the humblest, superseding the text by images, and so instructing the ignorant. This indeed was the idea put into words by the Synod of Arras in 1025: 'That which the illiterate cannot apprehend from writing shall be shown to them in pictures.'

"

The Middle Ages, in short, translated the Bible and Theology, the lives of the Saints, the apocryphal and legendary Gospels into carved or painted images, bringing them within reach of all, and epitomizing them in figures which remained as the permanent marrow, the concentrated extract of all its teaching."

"It taught the grown-up children the catechism by means of the stone sentences of the porches," exclaimed Durtal.

"Yes, it did that too. But now," the Abbé went on, after a pause, "before entering on the subject of architectural symbolism, we must first establish a distinct notion of what Our Lord Himself did in creating it, when, in the second chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John, He speaks of the Temple at Jerusalem, and says that if the Jews destroy it He will rebuild it in three days, expressly prefiguring by that parable His own Body. This set forth to all generations the form which the new temples were thenceforth to take after His death on the Cross.

"This sufficiently accounts for the cruciform plan of our churches. But we will study the inside of the church later; for the present we must consider the meanings of the external parts of a cathedral.

"The towers and belfries, according to the theory of Durand, Archbishop of Mende in the thirteenth century, are to be regarded as preachers and prelates, and the lofty spire is symbolical of the perfection to which their souls strive to rise. According to other interpreters of the same period, such as Saint Melito, Bishop of Sardis, and Cardinal Pietro of Capua, the towers represent the Virgin Mary, or the Church watching over the salvation of the Flock.

"It is a certain fact," the Abbé went on, "that the position of the towers was never rigidly laid down once for all in mediæval times; thus different interpretations are admissible according to their position in the structure. Still, perhaps the most ingeniously refined, the most exquisite idea is that which occurred to the architects of Saint Maclou at Rouen, of Notre Dame at Dijon, and of the Cathedral at Laon, for example, who built rising from the centre of the transepts—that is above the very spot where, on the Cross, the breast of Christ would lie, a lantern higher than the rest of the roof, often finishing outside in a tall and slender spire, starting as it were from the Heart of Christ to leap with one

spring to the Father, to soar as if shot up from the bow of the vaulting in a sharp dart to reach the sky.

"The towers, like the buildings they overshadow, are almost always placed on a height that commands the town, and they shed around them like seed into the soil of the soul, the swarming notes of their bells, reminding all Christians by this aerial proclamation, this bead-telling of sound, of the prayers they are commanded to use and the duties they must fulfil; nay, at need, they may atone before God for man's apathy by testifying that at least they have not forgotten Him, beseeching Him with uplifted arms and brazen tongues, taking the place as best they may of so many human prayers, more vocal perhaps than they."

"With its ship-like character," said Durtal, who had thoughtfully approached the window, "this Cathedral strikes me as amazingly like a motionless vessel with spires for masts and the clouds for sails, spread or furled by the wind as the weather changes; it remains the eternal image of Peter's boat which Jesus guided through the storm."

"And likewise of Noah's Ark—the Ark outside which there is no safety," added the Abbé.

"Now consider the church in all its parts. Its roof is the symbol of Charity, which covereth a multitude of sins; its slates or tiles are the soldiers and knights who defend the sanctuary against the heathen, represented by the storm, its stones, all joined, are, according to Saint Nilus, emblematic of the union of souls, or, as the Rationale of Durand of Mende has it, of the multitude of the faithful; the stronger stones figuring the souls that are most advanced in the way of perfection and hinder the weaker brethren, represented by the smaller stones, from slipping and falling. However, to Hugues de Saint Victor, a monk of the abbey of that name in the twelfth century, this collection of stones is merely the mingled assembly of the clerks and the laity.

"Again, these blocks of stone of various shapes are bound and held together by mortar, of which Durand of Mende will tell you the meaning. 'Mortar,' saith he, 'is compounded of lime and sand and water; lime is the burning quality of charity, and it combines by the aid of water, which is the Spirit, with the sand, of the earth earthy.'

"Thus these united stones form the four walls of the church, which Prudentius of Troyes tells us are the four

evangelists; or, according to other interpreters, they represent in stone the cardinal virtues of religion: Justice, Fortitude, Prudence, and Temperance, already prefigured by the walls of the City of God in the Apocalypse.

"Thus you see each part may be regarded as having more than one meaning, but all included in one general idea common to all."

"And the windows?" asked Durtal.

"I am coming to them; they are emblematic of our senses, which are to be closed to the vanities of the world and open to the gifts of Heaven; they are also provided with glass, giving passage to the beams of the true Sun, which is God. But Dom Villette has most clearly set forth their symbolical meaning: 'They are,' says he, 'the Scriptures, which receive the glory of the sun and keep out the wind, the hail and the snow, the images of false doctrine and heresies.'

"As to the buttresses, they symbolize the moral force that sustains us against temptation; they are likewise the hope which upholds the soul and strengthens it; others see in them the image of the temporal powers who are called upon to defend the power of the Church; and others again, regarding more especially the flying buttresses which resist the thrust of the span, say that they are imploring arms clinging to the safe-keeping of the Ark in time of danger.

"The principal entrance, the great portal of so many churches, such as those of Vézelay, Paray-le-Monial and Saint German l'Auxerrois, in Paris, was approached through a covered vestibule, often very deep and intentionally dark, called the Narthex. The baptismal pool was in this porch. It was a place for probation and forgiveness, emblematical of Purgatory, an ante-room to Heaven, where, before being permitted access to the sanctuary, penitents and neophytes had their place.

"Such, briefly, is the allegorical meaning of the parts. If we now regard it again as a whole, we may observe that the cathedral, built over a crypt symbolical of the contemplative life, and also of the tomb in which Christ was laid, was naturally obliged to have its apse towards that point of the heavens where the sun rises at the equinox, so as to convey, says the Bishop of Mende, that it is the Church's mission to show moderation in its triumphs as in its reverses. All the liturgical commentators are agreed that

the high altar must be placed at the eastern end, so that the worshippers, as they pray, may turn their eyes towards the cradle of the Faith; and this rule was held absolute, and so well approved by God that He confirmed it by a miracle. The Bollandists in fact have a legend that Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, seeing a church that had been built on another axis, made it turn to the East by a push with his shoulder, thus placing it in its right position.

"The church has generally three doors, in honour of the Holy Trinity; and the portal in the middle, called the Royal Porch, is divided by a pier and a pillar surmounted by a statue of Our Lord, who says of Himself in the Gospel, 'I am the door,' or of the Virgin, if the Church is consecrated to Her, or even of the patron Saint in whose name it is dedicated. The door, thus divided, typifies the two roads which man is free to follow. Indeed, in most cathedrals this symbol is emphasized by a representation of the Last Judgment placed above the entrance.

"This is the case in Paris, at Amiens, and at Bourges. At Chartres, on the contrary, the Judgment of Souls is relegated, as at Reims, to the tympanum of the northern porch; but here it is to be seen in the rose-window over the western portal, in contradiction to the system usual in the Middle Ages of treating in the windows above the doors the subject carved in the porch; thus presenting on the same side a repetition of the same symbols, in glass as seen from within, and in stone without."

"Good; but how then can you account, by the ternary rule so universally adopted, for that marvellous cathedral at Bourges, where, instead of three porches and three aisles, we find five?"

"Nothing can be simpler—we cannot account for it. At most can we suppose that the architect of Bourges intended by those five doors to figure the five wounds of Christ. Even then we should be left to wonder why he placed all the wounds in a single line; for that church has no transept, no arms at the end of which the holes in the hands may be symbolized by doors, which is the usual course."

"And the cathedral at Antwerp, which has two more aisles?"

"They no doubt typify the seven avenues, the seven gifts

of the Paraclete. This question of number leads me to speak of theological enumeration, a peculiar element which plays a part in the varied subject of symbolism," the Abbé went on. "The allegorical science of numbers is a very old one. Saint Isidor of Seville, and Saint Augustine studied it. Michelet, who talks nonsense as soon as he has to do with a cathedral, is hard on the mediæval architects for their belief in the meaning of figures. He accuses them of having observed mystic rules in the arrangement of certain parts of the buildings; of having, for instance, restricted the number of windows, or arranged pillars and bays in accordance with some arithmetical combination. Not understanding that each detail of a church had a meaning and was a symbol, he could not understand that it was important to calculate each, since its meaning might be modified or even completely altered. Thus a pillar by itself may not necessarily typify an Apostle, but if there should be twelve, they evidently show the meaning attributed to them by the builder, since they recall the exact number of Christ's disciples. Sometimes, indeed, to prevent any mistake, the answer is supplied with the problem; as in an old church at Étampes, where I read, inscribed on the twelve Romanesque shafts, the names of the Apostles in relief, in the traditional setting of a Greek cross.

"At Chartres they had adopted a still better plan: statues of the twelve Apostles were placed in front of the pillars of the nave: but the Revolution took offence at these figures, overthrew and destroyed them.

"In considering the system of symbolism it is necessary to study the significance of numbers. The secrets of church building can only be discerned by recognizing the mysterious idea of the unity of the figure I., which is the image of God Himself. The suggestion of II., which figures the two natures of the Son, the two dispensations, and, according to Saint Gregory the Great, the two-fold law of love of God and man. Three is the number of the Persons of the Trinity, and of the theological virtues. Four typifies the cardinal virtues, the four Greater Prophets, the Gospels and the elements. Five is the number of Christ's wounds, and of our senses, whose sins He expiated by a corresponding number of wounds. Six records the days devoted by God to the creation, determines the number of the Commandments

promulgated by the Church, and, according to Saint Melito, symbolizes the perfection of the active life. Seven is the sacred number of the Mosaic law; it is the number of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, of the Sacraments, of the words of Jesus on the Cross, of the canonical hours, and of the successive orders of priesthood. Eight, says Saint Ambrose, is the symbol of regeneration, Saint Augustine says of the Resurrection, and it recalls the idea of the eight Beatitudes. Nine is the number of the angelic hierarchy, of the special gifts of the Spirit as enumerated by Saint Paul; and it was at the ninth hour that Christ died. Ten is the number of laws given by Jehovah, the law of fear; but Saint Augustine explains it otherwise, saying that it includes the knowledge of God, since it may be decomposed into three, the symbol of a triune God, and seven, figuring the day of rest after the Creation. Eleven, the same saint explains as an image of transgressing the law and an emblem of sin; and Twelve is the great mystic number, the tale of the patriarchs and the Apostles, of the tribes, the minor prophets, the virtues, the fruits of the Holy Ghost, and the articles of faith embodied in the Credo. And this might be repeated to infinity. Hence it is quite evident that the artists of the Middle Ages added to the meaning they assigned to certain creatures and certain things, that of quantity, supporting one by the other, emphasizing or moderating a suggestion by this added-means, working back sometimes on a former idea, and expressing this duplication in a different form or concentrating it in the energetic conciseness of a cipher. They thus produced a whole at once speaking to the eye and, at the same time, giving synthetical expression to the complete text of a dogma in a compact allegory."

"But what hermetic concentration!" exclaimed Durtal.

"Very true; these various meanings of persons and objects, resulting from numerical differences, are at first very puzzling."

"And do you suppose that, on the whole, the height, breadth, and length of a cathedral reveal a specialized idea, a particular purpose on the part of the architect?"

"Yes; but I must at once confess that the key to these religious calculations is lost. Those archæologists who

have racked their brains to find it have vainly added together the measurements of naves and clerestories; they have not yet succeeded in formulating the idea they expected to see emerge from the sums total.

"In this matter we must confess ourselves ignorant. Besides, have not the standards of measurement been different at different times? As with the value of coins in the Middle Ages, we know nothing about them. So, in spite of some very interesting investigations carried out from this point of view by the Abbé Crosnier at the Priory of Saint Gilles, and the Abbé Devoucoux at the Cathedral of Autun, I remain sceptical as to their conclusions, which I regard as very ingenious, but far from trustworthy.

"The method of numbers is to be seen in perfection only in the details, such as the pillars of which I spoke just now; it is no less evident when we find the same number prevailing throughout the edifice, as for instance at Paray-le-Monial, where all things are in threes. There the designer has not been content to reproduce the sacred number in the general scheme of the structure; he has applied it in every part. The church has, in fact, three aisles; each aisle has three compartments; each compartment is formed by three arches surmounted by three windows. In short, it is the principle of the Trinity, the primary Three, applied to every part."

"Well, but do you not think, Monsieur l'Abbé, that, apart from such instances of indisputable meaning, there are in such symbolism some very fine-drawn and obscure similitudes?"

The Abbé smiled.

"Do you know," said he, "the theories of Honorius of Autun as to the symbolism of the censer?"

"No."

"Well, then, after having pointed out the natural and very proper interpretation that may be applied to this vessel, as representing the Body of Our Lord, while the incense signifies His Divinity, and the fire is the Holy Spirit within Him; and after having defined the various interpretations of the metal of which it is made—if of gold, it answers to the perfection of His Divinity; if of silver, to the matchless excellence of His Humility; if of copper, to the frailty of the flesh He assumed for our salvation; if of iron, to the

Resurrection of that Body which conquered death—the scholiast comes to the chains.

"And then, indeed, his elucidation becomes somewhat thin and fine-drawn.

"If there are four chains, he says, they represent the four cardinal virtues of the Lord, and the chain by which the cover is lifted from the vessel answers to the Soul of Christ quitting His Body. If, on the other hand, there are but three chains, it is because the Person of the Saviour includes three elements: a human organism, a soul, and the Godhead of the Word. And Honorius adds: 'the ring through which the chains run represents the Infinite in which all these things are included.'"

"That is subtle, with a vengeance!"

"Less so than Durand de Mende when he speaks of the snuffers," replied the Abbé; "after that, we will kick away that ladder.

"The snuffers for trimming the lamps are, he asserts, 'the divine words off which we cut the letter of the law, and by so doing reveal the Spirit which giveth light.' And he adds, 'the pots in which the snuff is extinguished are the hearts of the faithful who observe the law literally.'"

"It is the very madness of Symbolism!" cried Durtal.

"At least, it is a too curious excess of it; but if this interpretation of the snuffers is certainly grotesque, if even the theory of the censer seems beaten somewhat thin on the whole, you must admit that it is fascinating and exact so far as it is applied to the chain which lifts the upper part of the vessel in a cloud of fragrance, and thus symbolizes the ascent of Our Lord into Heaven.

"That certain exaggerations should creep in through this use of parables was difficult to prevent; but, on the other hand, what marvels of analogy, and what purely mystical notions are revealed through the meanings given by the liturgy to certain objects used in the services.

"To the tapers, for instance, when Pierre d'Esquilin explains the purport of the three component parts: the wax, which is the spotless Body of the Saviour born of a Virgin; the wick, which, enclosed in the wax, is His most Holy Soul hidden in the veil of the flesh; and the light, which is emblematic of His Godhead.

"Or, again, take the substances used by the Church in

certain ceremonies: water, wine, ashes, salt, oil, balsam, incense. Incense, besides representing the divinity of the Son, is likewise the symbol of prayer, 'thus devotio orationis' as it is described by Raban Maur, Archbishop of Mayence in the ninth century. I happen to remember also, à propos of this resin and the censer in which it is burnt, a verse I read long since in the 'Monastic Distinctions' of the anonymous English writer of the thirteenth century, which sums up their signification more neatly than I can:

'vas notatur,
Mens pia; thure preces; igne supernus amor.'

The vase is the spirit of piety; the incense, prayer; the fire, divine love.

"As to water, wine, ashes, and salt, they are used in compounding a precious ointment used by the bishop when consecrating a church. They are mingled to sign the altar with the cross, and to sprinkle the aisles: the water and wine symbolize the two natures united in Our Lord; the salt is divine wisdom; the ashes are in memory of His Passion.

"Balsam, as you know, is emblematical of virtue and good repute, and is combined with oil, signifying peace and wisdom, to compose the sacramental ointment.

"Think, too," the priest went on, "of the pyx, in which the transubstantiated elements are preserved, the consecrated oblations, and note that in the Middle Ages these little cases were formed in the figure of a dove and contained the Host in the very image of the Paraclete and the Virgin; this was well done, but here is something better. The jewellers of the time carved ivory and gave these little shrines the form of a tower. Is not the sentiment exquisite of our Lord dwelling in the heart of the Virgin, the Ivory Tower of the Canticles? Is not ivory indeed the most admirable material to serve as a sanctum for the most pure white flesh of the Sacrament?"

"It is certainly mystical, and far more appropriate than the vessels of every form, the ciboria of silver-gilt, of aluminum, of silver of these days."

"And need I remind you that the liturgy assigns a meaning to each vestment, each ornament of the Church, according to its use and form?

"

Thus, for instance, the surplice and alb signify innocence; the cord that serves as a girdle is an emblem of chastity and modesty; the amice, of purity of heart and body—the helmet of salvation mentioned by Saint Paul. The maniple, of good works, vigilance, and the tears and sweat poured out by the priest to win and save souls; the stole, of obedience, the clothing on of immortality given to us in baptism; the dalmatic, of justice, of which we must give proof in our ministrations; the chasuble, of the unity of the faith, and also of the yoke of Christ.

"But the rain has not ceased, and I must nevertheless be gone, for I have a penitent waiting for me," exclaimed the Abbé, looking at his watch. "Will you come the day after to-morrow at about two o'clock? We will hope it may be fine enough to examine the outside of the Cathedral."

"And if it still rains?"

"Come all the same. But I must fly."

He pressed Durtal's hand and was gone.

[!-- Page 92 --]CHAPTER VI.

"Yes, I know when I confessed in her presence that I did not yet know of which Saint I might write the history, Madame Bavoil—dear Madame Bavoil, as the Abbé Gévresin calls her—exclaimed: 'The life of Jeanne de Matel! Why not?'

"But it is a biography that is not easy to deal with or that can be lightly handled," said Durtal to himself, as he arranged the notes he had collected by degrees as bearing on this Venerable woman.

And he sat meditating.

"What is quite unintelligible," said he to himself, "is the disproportion between the promises made to her by Jesus and the results achieved. Never, I really believe, have so many tribulations and hindrances, or so much ill-fortune attended the founding of a new Order. Jeanne spent her days on the high roads, running from one monastery to another, and toil as she would to dig up the conventual soil, nothing would grow. She could not even assume the habit of her Institution, or at any rate only a few minutes before her death, for, in order to travel with greater ease all over France, she wore the livery of a world she abominated, and to which she appealed in vain in the name of the Lord to take an interest in the formation of her cloister. Unhappy woman! She went to Court—as her confessor Father de Gibalin bears witness, while he testifies that he had never known a humbler soul—as others go to the stake.

"And yet the Lord certainly commanded her to found this Order of the Incarnate Word. He sketched the scheme, laid down the rule, and prescribed the costume, explaining its symbolism, declaring that the white robe of its maidens would do honour to that with which He was

mockingly invested in Herod's palace; that their red cloak would keep in memory that which was cast over Him in the house of Pilate; that their crimson scapulary and girdle would preserve the remembrance of the stake and the cords dyed in His blood. And He seems to have mocked her.

"He solemnly assured her that after sorrowful trials the seed she had sown should bring forth an abundant harvest of nuns. He expressly told her that she would rank as the sister of Saint Theresa and Saint Clare; those holy women appeared to ratify these promises by their presence, and when nothing would come of it, nothing would work, when, quite worn out, she burst into tears, the Lord calmly bade her be still and take patience.

"Meanwhile, she was living amid a howling storm of recrimination and threats. The clergy persecute her, the Archbishop of Lyon, the Cardinal de Richelieu, aims only at hindering the completion of her abbeys on his lands; she cannot even manage her Sisterhood, since we find her wandering in search of a protector or an assistant; they are torn by divisions, and their insubordination is such that at length she is compelled to return in hot haste, and, with many tears, expel the contumacious sisters from the cloister.

"It really seems as though no sooner had she built up a monastic wall than it split and fell; nothing would hold. In short, the Order of the Incarnate Word was born rickety and died a dwarf. It lingered in the midst of universal apathy, and survived till 1790, when it was buried. In 1811 one Abbé Denis revived it at Azérables in la Creuse, and since then it has struggled on for better for worse, scattered through about fifteen houses, one of these at Texas in the New World.

"There is no doubt of it," Durtal concluded; "we are far enough from the strong sap which Saint Theresa and Saint Clare could infuse into the centennial growth of their mighty trees!

"To say nothing of the fact that Jeanne de Matel, who has never been canonized like her two sisters, and whose name remains unknown to most Catholics, intended to found an order of men as well as women; she did not succeed, and the attempts since made in our day by the Abbé Combalot to carry her plan into effect have been equally vain!

"

Now, what is the reason? Is it because there are too many and various communities in the Church? Why, new foundations are set on foot and flourish every day! Is it by reason of the poverty of the monasteries? Nay, for indigence is the great test of success, and experience shows that God only blesses the most destitute convents and abandons the others! Is it, then, the austerity of the rule? But this was very mild; it was that of Saint Augustine, which yields to every compromise, and at need accepts every shade of practice. The sisters rose at five in the morning; the diet was not restricted to Lenten fare excepting at the Paschal season, but one fast day was enjoined in the week, and even that was compulsory only to the Sisters who were strong enough to bear it. Thus there is nothing to account for such persistent failure.

"And Jeanne de Matel was a saint endowed with remarkable energy and really moulded by the Saviour! In her writings she is an eloquent and subtle theologian, an ardent and rapturous mystic, dealing in metaphors and hyperbole, in tangible parallels, passionate questionings, and apostrophes; she resembles both Saint Denys the Areopagite and Saint Maddalena dei Pazzi; Saint Denys in matter, Saint Maddalena in manner. As a writer, no doubt she is not supreme, and the poverty of her borrowed style is sometimes painful; still, considering that she lived in the seventeenth century, she was at any rate not a mere scribbler of vapid aspirations, like most of the prosy pietists of the time.

"And her works have met with the same fate as her foundations. They remain for the most part unpublished. Hello, who was familiar with them, only extracted a very mediocre cento; some others, as Prince Galitzin and the Abbé Penaud, have explored her writings with better results and printed some loftier and more impassioned passages.

"And this Abbess wrote some of genuine inspiration.

"Yes, but all this does not alter the fact that I do not see the book I could write about her," muttered Durtal. "In spite of my wish to be agreeable to dear Madame Bavoil, no—I have no inclination to undertake the task.

"All things considered, if I did not so heartily hate a move, if I had energy enough to go back to Holland, I would try to do honour in loving and respectful terms to the

worshipful Lidwina, who is of all the female saints one whose life I should best love to write; but merely to attempt to reconstruct the surroundings amid which she lived, I should have to settle in the town where she dwelt, Schiedam.

"If God grants me life, no doubt I shall one day do this; but the plan is not yet ripe. Put that aside, then, and since on the other hand Jeanne de Matel does not captivate me, perhaps I had better think of another abbess even less known, and whose career was one of more tranquil endurance, less wandering and more concentrated, and at any rate more attractive.

"Besides, her life can now only be found in an octavo volume by an anonymous writer, whose incoherent chapters, in language as clogging as a linseed poultice, will for ever hinder the world from knowing her. So it will be interesting to work it up and make it readable."

As he turned over his papers he was thinking of one Mother Van Valckenissen, in religion Mary Margaret of the Angels, foundress of the Priory of Carmelite Sisters at Oirschot in Dutch Brabant.

This pious lady was the daughter of a noble house, born on the 26th of May, 1605, at Antwerp, during the wars which devastated Flanders, and at the very time when Prince Maurice of Nassau was besieging the town. As soon as she could read, her parents sent her to school in a convent of Dominican nuns near Brussels. Her father dying, her mother removed her from that convent and placed her with the White Ursulines of Louvain; then she too died, and at fifteen the girl was an orphan.

Her guardian again removed her to the House of the Carmelite Sisters at Mechlin; but the struggle between the Spaniards and the Flemings came close to the district watered by the Dyle, and Marie Marguerite was once more taken from her convent to find refuge with the canonesses of Nivelles. Thus her whole childhood was spent in rushing from one convent to another.

She was happy in these retreats, especially with the Carmelites, adopting the hair shirt and submitting to the severest discipline; but now, on coming forth from the most rigid cloistered life, she found herself in the midst of a gay world. This Chapter of Canonesses, which ought to

have inculcated the mystic life, was one of those hybrid institutions not altogether white nor quite black, a cross between profane piety and pious laity. This Chapter, filled up exclusively from the ranks of rich and high-born women, while the Abbess, nominated by the Sovereign, assumed the title of Princess of Nivelles, led a devout and frivolous life, passing strange. Not only might these semi-nuns go out walking whenever they thought fit, they had a right to live at home for a certain part of their time, and might even marry after obtaining the consent of the Abbess.

In the morning those who chose to reside in the Abbey put on a monastic habit during the services; then their religious duties ended; they doffed the convent livery, dressed in splendid attire, the hoops and bows and farthingales and ruffs that were then the fashion, and sat in the parlour where visitors poured in.

The unhappy Marie loathed the dissipation of a life which hindered her from ever being alone with her God. Bewildered by the gossip and ashamed of wearing clothes that were offensive to her, compelled to steal away before daylight, disguised as a waiting-woman, to pray in a deserted church far from all this turmoil, she at last pined away with sorrow, and was dying of grief at Nivelles.

At this juncture a certain Father Bernard de Montgaillard, Abbot of Orval, of the Cistercian Order, came to the town. She flew to him, and besought him to rescue her; and this monk, enlightened by a truly divine spirit, understood that she was born to be a victim of expiation, to atone for the insults offered to the Holy Eucharist in churches. He gave her comfort, and announced to her her vocation as a Carmelite. She set out for Antwerp to visit the Mother Anne de Saint Barthélemy, a saintly woman, who, warned of her coming by a vision of Saint Theresa, consented to receive her into the Carmel of which she was the Superior.

Then obstacles arose, the work of the Devil. Having returned to her guardian, pending her reception at the convent, she suddenly fell paralyzed, losing all at once her hearing, speech, and sight. She nevertheless succeeded in making it understood that they were to carry her, as she was, to the convent, where she was left half dead. There she fell at the feet of Mother Anne, who blessed her, and raised her up cured.

Then her novitiate began.

In spite of her delicate frame, she endured the most terrible fasts, the most violent scourging; she bound her body in chains with points on the links, fed on the parings thrown out on plates, drank dirty water to quench her thirst, and was so cold one winter that her legs froze.

Her body was one wound, but her soul was glorious; she lived in God, who loaded her with mercies and communed with her sweetly; her probation was near its end, and again, just when she became a postulant, she fell dangerously sick. There were doubts as to her being admitted to the Order, and again Saint Theresa intervened and commanded the Abbess to receive her.

She took the habit, and then fell a prey to the temptation of despair, which has assailed some Saints; after this came a sense of dryness and desertion, which lasted for three years. She held out; she endured all the tortures of the Mystical Substitution, bearing the most painful and repulsive diseases to save souls. The Lord vouchsafed at last to intermit the penitential task of suffering. He allowed her to breathe, and the Devil took advantage of this lull to come upon the scene.

He appeared to her under the most hostile and monstrous form, breaking everything, and vanishing in a trail of pestilential vapours. Meanwhile a good man, one Sylvester Lindermans, had determined to found a Carmel on an estate he possessed at Oirschot, in Holland. As is ever the case when a convent is to be established, tribulations abounded. It seemed, in fact, that the time was ill-chosen for transferring the Sisters to a town in arms against the Catholics, across a country infested by bands of armed Protestants. When the Mother Superior selected Marie Marguerite to go forth and found this new House, she entreated to be left to pray in peace in her little nook; but Jesus interposed; commanding her to depart. She obeyed; exhausted, sick, and worn out, she dragged herself along the roads, and at last arrived, with the Sisters accompanying her, at Oirschot, where she organized the Convent as best she might in a house which had never been intended to serve as a nunnery.

She was made Vicar-Prioress, and at once revealed a marvellous power of influencing souls. Living the austere

life of a Carmelite, which she aggravated for herself by fearful mortifications, she was always tolerant to others, and although she was known to murmur, so great were her bodily sufferings, "Till the Day of Judgment, none can ever know what I endure!" she was always gay, and preached cheerfulness to her daughters in these words: "It is all very well for those who sin to be sad; but we ought to have twice as much joy as the angels, since we, like them, fulfil the will of God, and we, in addition, can suffer for His glory, which they can never do."

She was the most indulgent and considerate of Abbesses. For fear of giving offence to her flock by exerting her authority, she never gave an order in an imperative form; never said, "Do this or that," but only, "Let us do it." And if at any time she found herself obliged to punish a nun in the refectory, she would forthwith kiss the feet of the others, and entreat them to buffet her to humble her.

But it would have been too perfect if she and the angelic flock over which she ruled could have lived the inward life in peace, and sunk their soul in God. The Curé of Oirschot hated her, and, why no one knew, he defamed her throughout the town. The Devil too, on his part, returned to the charge; he appeared, in the midst of an uproar that shook the walls and made the roof tremble, in the form of an Ethiopian giant, blew out all the lights, and tried to strangle the nuns. Most of them almost died of fear; but in compensation for their sufferings Heaven granted them the comfort of incessant miracles.

The Mother enabled them to prove in her person the authenticity of the incredible tales they had read during meals, of the Lives of the Saints. She had the gift of bilocation, appearing in several places at the same time, shedding a trail of delicious fragrance wherever she passed, curing the sick by the Sign of the Cross, scenting out and discerning hidden sins as a hunting dog puts up game, and reading souls.

And her daughters adored her, wept to see her lead a life which now was one long torment. As a result of the intense cold, she became a victim to acute rheumatism; for the Rule of Saint Theresa, which prohibits the lighting of a fire anywhere but in the kitchens, if it is endurable in Spain, is simply murderous in the frozen climate of Flanders.

"

After all," said Durtal to himself, "this life so far is not very unlike that experienced by many another cloistered nun; but towards the approach of death the amazing beauty of this spirit was revealed in so special a manner, and in wishes so remarkable, that it remains unique in the records of the Monastic Houses."

Her health grew worse and worse. Added to the rheumatism, which crippled her, she had pains in the stomach, which nothing could relieve. Sciatica was presently engrafted on this flourishing stock of torments, and dropsy, a common disease in cloisters of austere rule, supervened.

Her legs swelled and refused to carry her; she lay helpless on her bed. The Sisters who nursed her now discovered a secret which she had always kept, out of humility; they perceived that her hands were pierced with red holes surrounded by a blue halo, and that her feet, also pierced, lay of their own accord, unless they were held down, one above the other, in the position of Christ's feet on the cross. At last she confessed that many years before Jesus had marked her with the stigmata of the Passion, and that the wounds burnt night and day like red hot iron.

Her sufferings constantly increased. Feeling that this time she was dying, she grieved over the pitiless macerations she had used, and with touching artlessness begged forgiveness of her poor body for having exhausted its strength, and so having perhaps hindered it from living to suffer longer.

And she then put up the most strangely fragrant, the most wildly extravagant prayer that ever a Saint can have addressed to God.

She had so loved the Holy Eucharist, she had so longed to kneel at His feet and atone for the outrages inflicted on Him by the sins of mankind, that she waxed faint at the thought that after her death what would remain of her could no longer worship Him.

The idea that her body would rot in uselessness, that the last handfuls of her miserable flesh would decay without having served to honour the Saviour, broke her heart; and then it was that she besought Him to suffer her to melt away, to liquefy into an oil which might be burnt before the tabernacle in the lamp of the sanctuary.

And Jesus vouchsafed to her this excessive privilege, such as the like is unknown in the history of the Saints; and at the moment when she died she enjoined her daughters to leave her body exposed in the chapel, and unburied for some weeks.

On this point there is abundant authentic evidence. More or less minute inquiries were made, and the reports of medical experts are so precise that we can follow from day to day the state of the corpse until it had turned to oil and could be preserved in phials, from which, by her desire, a spoonful was poured every morning to feed the wick of a lamp hanging near the altar.

When she died—then aged fifty-two, having lived as a nun for thirty-three years, and fourteen as Superior of Oirschot—her face was transfigured, and in spite of the cold of a winter when the Scheldt could be crossed in a carriage, her body remained soft and pliable; but it swelled. Surgeons examined it and opened it in the presence of witnesses. They expected to find the stomach filled with water, but scarcely half a pint was removed, and the body did not collapse.

This autopsy led to the incomprehensible discovery in the gall-bladder of three nails with black heads, angular and polished, of an unknown metal; two weighed as much as half a French gold crown, within seven grains; the third, which was as large as a nutmeg, weighed five grains more.

The operators then filled up the intestines with tow soaked in wormwood, and sewed the body up again with a needle and thread. And during and after these proceedings not only did the dead nun give out no smell of putrefaction, but, as in her lifetime, she diffused an ineffable and exquisite perfume.

Nearly three weeks elapsed; boils formed and broke, giving out blood and water for more than a month; then the skin showed patches of yellow; exudation ceased and oil came out, at first white, limpid, and fragrant, afterwards darker and of about the colour of amber. It filled more than a hundred phials, each containing two ounces, several of them being still preserved in the Carmels of Belgium; and her remains when buried were not decomposed, but had assumed the golden brown colour of a date.

"A book might really be written on the life of this

admirable woman," thought Durtal. "And then what a group of wonderful nuns were those about her! The convents of Antwerp, Mechlin, and Oirschot swarmed with saintly nuns. In the time of Charles V. the Order of Carmelites renewed in Flanders the mystical prodigies which, four centuries before, in the Middle Ages, the Dominicans had accomplished in the Monastery of Unterlinden at Colmar.

"How such women as these carry one away and throw one, as it were! What strength of soul we see in this Marie Marguerite! What grace must have sustained her, that she could thus shed all the natural frenzy of the senses, and endure so cheerfully and bravely the most overwhelming sufferings!

"Well, now, shall I harness myself to a history of this venerable Abbess? But then I must procure the volume by Joseph de Loignac, her first biographer, the notice by the Recluse of Marlaigne, the pamphlet by Monseigneur de Ram, the narrative by Papebröch; above all I must have at hand the translation, made by the Carmelites of Louvain, of the Flemish manuscript written while the Mother was still alive, by her daughters. Where can I unearth that? In any case the search must be a long one. No, I must set aside that scheme, which for the present is impracticable.

"What I ought to do I know very well; I ought to put the article into shape on Angelico's picture in the Louvre. I promised the paper at least four months ago to the magazine which clamours for it every morning by letter. It is disgraceful! Since I left Paris I have ceased to work; and I have no excuse, for the subject interests me, since it affords me an opportunity for studying the complete system of the symbolism of colour in the Middle Ages. 'The Early Painters, and Prayer in Colour as seen in their Works.' What a subject for thought! However, that is not the immediate matter. I must not sit dreaming, but go to join the Abbé Plomb; and the weather is clouding over again! I certainly have no luck."

As he crossed the square he was lost again in meditations, captivated once more by the haunting thought of the Cathedral, and saying to himself as he looked up at the spires,—

"

How many varieties there are in the immense family of the Gothic; and what dissimilarities. No two churches are alike."

The towers and belfries of those he knew rose before him as in those diagrams on which, irrespective of distance, the buildings are placed all close together at the same point of view to show their relative height.

"It is quite true," thought he, "the towers vary like the basilicas. Those of Notre Dame de Paris are thick-set and gloomy, almost elephantine; cleft almost from top to bottom by deep bays, they seem to mount slowly and with difficulty, and stop short, crushed as it were by the burden of sins, dragged down to earth by the wickedness of the city; we feel the effort with which they rise, and we are saddened as we contemplate those captive masses, all the more depressing by reason of the dismal hue of the louvre-boards. At Reims, on the contrary, they are open from top to bottom, pierced as with needles' eyes, long narrow windows of which the opening seems filled with a herring-bone of enormous size, or a gigantic comb with teeth on each side. They spring into the air, as light as filigree; and the sky gets into the mouldings, plays between the mullions, peeps through the tracery and the innumerable lancets, in strips of blue, is focussed and reflected in the little carved trefoils above. These towers are mighty, expansive, immense, and yet light. They are as speaking, as much alive, as those in Paris are stern and mute.

"At Laon they are more especially strange. With their light columns, here thrust forward and there standing back, they suggest a series of shelves piled up in a hurry, crowned merely by a platform, over which lowing oxen look down.

"The two towers at Amiens, built, like those of the Cathedrals at Rouen and at Bourges, at different periods, do not match. They are of different heights, lame against the sky; another that is really magnificent in its solitude, and putting to shame the mediocrity of the two belfries lately erected on each side of the west front, is the Norman tower of Saint Ouen, its summit encircled by a crown. This is the patrician tower among so many that preserve a peasant air, with bare heads, or coifs made narrow and square at the top, sloped somewhat like the mouthpiece of a whistle, such as that of Saint Romain

at Rouen, or rustic, pointed caps like that worn by the church of Saint Bénigne at Dijon, or the queer sort of awning which shades the Cathedral of Saint Jean at Lyon.

"And in any case a tower without a tapering spire never soars to heaven. It always rises heavily, pants on the way, and falls asleep exhausted. It is, as it were, an arm without a hand, a wrist without palm and fingers, a stump; or, again, a pencil uncut, having no point wherewith to write up beyond the clouds the prayers from below; in short, it is for ever inert.

"We must turn to the steeple, to the stone spire, to find the true symbol of prayers shot up to pierce the sky and reach the Heart of the Father, which is their target.

"And in this family of arrows what a variety we see; no two darts are alike!

"Some are set in a collar of turrets at their base, held in a circle of pinnacles, like the points of a Magian king's diadem; this we see in the bell-tower of Senlis.

"Others seem to have about them the children born in their image, little spires, all round them; some are covered with bosses, knobs, and blisters; others pierced like colanders and strainers, in patterns of trefoils and quaterfoils that seem to have been punched out; here we find some that are covered with ornament, with teeth like a rasp, ridges of notches, or bristling with spines; others are imbricated with scales like a fish, as we see in the older spire at Chartres; and others again, like that at Caudebec, display the emblem of the Roman Church, the triple crown of the Pope.

"Out of this general outline, which was almost forced upon them, and which they hardly ever tried to avoid, this pyramid or pepper-caster, jelly-bag or extinguisher, the architects of the Middle Ages evolved the most ingenious combinations and varied their designs to infinity.

"How mysterious for the most part is the origin of our cathedrals! Most of the artists who built them are unknown; nay, the age of the stones is rarely a matter of certainty, for the greater part of them have been wrought upon by the alluvium of ages.

"They almost all cover intervals of two, three, or four centuries each; they extend from the beginning, of the thirteenth century till the first years of the sixteenth.

"And on reflection that is very intelligible.

"

It has been accurately remarked that the thirteenth century was the great period of cathedral-building. It gave birth to almost every one of them; and then, being created, their growth was checked for nearly two hundred years.

"The fourteenth century was torn by frightful disasters. It began with the ignoble quarrels between Philippe le Bel and the Pope; it saw the stake lighted for the Templars, made bonfires in Languedoc of the Bégards and the Fraticelli, the lepers and the Jews; wallowed in blood under the defeats of Crécy and Poitiers, the furious excesses of the Jacquerie and of the Maillotins, and the ravages of the brigands known as the Tard-venus; and finally, having run so wild, its madness was reflected in the incurable insanity of the king.

"Thus it ended, as it had begun, writhing in the most horrible religious convulsions. The Tiaras of Rome and Avignon clashed, and the Church, standing unsupported on these ruins, tottered on its base, for the Great Western Schism now shook it.

"The fifteenth century seemed to be born mad. Charles VI.'s insanity seemed to be infectious; the English invasion was followed by the pillage of France, the frenzied contest of the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs, by plagues and famines, and the overthrow at Agincourt; then came Charles VII., Joan of Arc, the deliverance and the healing of the land by the energetic treatment of King Louis XI.

"All these events hindered the progress of the works in cathedrals.

"The fourteenth century on the whole restricted itself to carrying on the structures begun during the previous century. We must wait till the end of the fifteenth, when France drew breath, to see architecture start into life once more.

"It must be added that frequent conflagrations at various times destroyed a whole church, and that it had to be rebuilt from the foundations; others, like Beauvais, fell down, and had to be reconstructed, or, if money was lacking, simply strengthened and the gaps repaired.

"With the exception of a very few—Saint Ouen at Rouen for one, a rare example of a church almost entirely built during the fourteenth century (excepting the western towers and front, which are quite modern), and the

Cathedral at Reims for another, which appears to have been constructed without much interruption, on the original plans of Hugues Libergier or Robert de Coucy—not one of our cathedrals was erected throughout in accordance with the designs of the architect who began it, nor has one remained untouched.

"Most of them, consequently, represent the combined efforts of successive pious generations; still, this apparently improbable fact is true: until the dawn of the Renaissance the genius of successive builders was singularly well matched. If they made any alterations in their predecessors' plans, they were able to introduce some touch of individuality, inventions of exquisite beauty that did not clash with the whole. They engrafted their genius on that of their first masters; there was the perpetuated tradition of an admirable conception, a perennial breath of the Holy Spirit. It was the interloper, the period of false and farcical Pagan art, that extinguished that pure flame, and annihilated the luminous truthfulness of the Mediæval past, when God had dwelt intimately, at home, in souls; it substituted a merely earthly form of art for one that was divine.

"As soon as the sensuality of the Renaissance revealed itself, the Paraclete fled; the mortal sin of stone could display itself at will. It contaminated the buildings that were finished, defiled the churches, debasing their purity of form; this, with the gross license of sculpture and painting, was the great stupration of the cathedrals.

"And this time the Spirit of Prayer was quite dead; everything went to pieces. The Renaissance, so lauded afterwards by Michelet and the historians, was the death of the Mystical soul of monumental theology, of religious art—all the great art of France.

"Bless me! where am I?" Durtal suddenly asked himself, finding himself in the ill-paved alleys which lead from the Cathedral square to the lower town. He saw that, dreaming as he walked, he had passed the Abbé's lodgings.

He turned up the street again, stopped in front of an old house and rang. A brass wicket was opened and closed, and a housekeeper, shuffling up in old shoes, half opened the door. Durtal was met by the Abbé Plomb, who was watching for him, and who led him into a room full of statues; there were carved images in every spot—on

the chimney-shelf, on a chest of drawers, on a side table, and in the middle of the room.

"Do not look at them," said the Abbé, "do not heed them; I have no part in the selection of this horrible bazaar. I have to endure it in spite of myself; these are offerings from my penitents."

Durtal laughed, though somewhat scared by the extraordinary specimens of religious art that crowded the room.

There was every kind of work: black frames with brass flats, and in them engravings of Virgins by Bouguereau and Signol, Guido's Ecce Homo, Pietàs, Saint Philomenas—and then the assembly of polychrome statues: Mary painted with the crude green of angelica and the acrid pinks of English pear-drops; Madonnas gazing in rapture at their own feet, with extended hands whence proceeded fans of yellow rays; Joan of Arc squatting like a hen on her eggs, with eyes raised to heaven like white marbles, and pressing a standard to her bosom in its plaster cuirass; Saint Anthonys of Padua, clean and snug, as neat as two pins; Saint Josephs, not enough the carpenter and too little the Saint; Magdalens weeping silver pills; a whole mob of semi-divinities, best quality, of the class known as "The Munich Article" in the Rue Madame.

"Oh, Monsieur l'Abbé, the donors are certainly terrible people—but could you not, quite by accident, drop one of these objects every day—"

The priest gave a shrug of despair.

"They would only bring me more," cried he. "But if you are willing, we will be off at once, for I am afraid of being caught here if I linger."

And as they walked, talking of the Cathedral, Durtal exclaimed,—

"Is it not a monstrous thing that in the splendour of this Cathedral of Chartres it is impossible to hear any genuine plain-song? I am reduced to frequenting the sanctuary only at hours when there is no high service going on. Above all I avoid being present at High Mass on Sundays; the music that is tolerated infuriates me! Is there no way of having the organist dismissed, and a clean sweep made of the precentor and the teachers in the choir-school, of packing off the basses with their vinous voices to the taverns? Ugh! And the gassy effervescence that rises

from the thin pipes of the little boys! and the street tunes eructed in a hiccough, like the run of a lamp-chain when you pull it up, mingling with the noisy bellow of the basses! What a disgrace, what a shame! How is it that the Bishop, the priests, the Canons do not prohibit such treason?

"Monseigneur, I know, is old and ill; but those Canons!—They look so weary, to be sure! As I see them droning out the Psalms in their stalls, I wonder whether they know where they are and what they are doing; they always seem to me in a half unconscious state—"

"The high winds of la Beauce induce lethargy," said the Abbé, laughing. "But allow me to assure you that though the Cathedral scorns Gregorian chants, here, at Chartres, at the little Seminary, at the church of Notre Dame de la Brèche, and at the convent of the Sisters of Saint Paul, they are sung after the Use of Solesmes, so that you can alternately attend that church and those chapels and the Cathedral, since perfection is to be found in neither."

"Of course. Still, is it not horrible to think that the Hottentot taste of a few bawling old men can pursue the Virgin even in Her sanctuary with such musical insults? Ah, there is the rain again," said Durtal with vexation, after a short silence.

"Well, here we are. We can take shelter in the church, and study the interior at our leisure."

They knelt before the Black Virgin of the Pillar; then they sat down in the deserted nave, and the Abbé said in an undertone,—

"I explained to you the other day the symbolism of the outside of the building. Would you like me now to inform you in a few words as to the allegories set forth in the aisles?"

And on seeing Durtal agree by a nod, the priest went on,—

"You are, of course, aware that almost all our cathedrals are cruciform. In the primitive Church, it is true, you will find that some were constructed of a circular form and surmounted by a dome. But most of these were not built by our forefathers; they are ancient temples of the heathen adapted by the Catholics, with more or less alteration, to their own use, or imitated from such temples before the Romanesque style was recognized.

"

We need then seek in these no liturgical meaning, since that form was not a Christian invention. At the same time Durand of Mende, in his Rationale, asserts that a building of rounded form symbolizes the extension of the Church over the whole circle of the universe. Others explain the dome as being the crown of the Crucified King, and the smaller cupolas which occasionally support it as the huge heads of the Nails. But we may set aside these explanations, which are but based on existing facts, and study the cruciform plan shown here, as in other cathedrals, in the arrangement of the nave and transepts.

"It may be noted that in a few churches, as, for instance, the abbey church of Cluny, the interior, instead of showing a Latin Cross, was planned on the lines of the Cross of Lorraine, two crosslets being added to the arms.—Now, behold the whole scheme!" the priest said, with a gesture that comprehended the whole of the interior of the basilica of Chartres.

"Jesus is dead; His head is at the altar; His outstretched arms are the two transepts; His pierced hands are the doors; His legs are the nave where we are standing; His pierced feet are the door by which we have come in. Now consider the systematic deviation of the axis of the building; it imitates the attitude of a body bent over from the upright tree of sacrifice, and in some cathedrals—for instance, at Reims—the narrowness, the strangulation, so to speak, of the choir in proportion to the nave represents all the more closely the head and neck of a man, drooping over his shoulder when he has given up the ghost.

"This twist in the church is to be seen almost everywhere—in Saint Ouen and in the Cathedral at Rouen, in Saint Jean at Poitiers, at Tours and at Reims. Sometimes, indeed—but this statement needs verification—the architect had substituted for the body of the Saviour that of the Saint in whose name the church was dedicated, and the curved axis of Saint Savin, for instance, has been supposed to represent the bend of the wheel which was the instrument of that Saint's martyrdom.

"But all this is evidently familiar to you.

"This is less well known: So far we have studied the image of Christ motionless, and dead, in our churches. I will now tell you of a singular instance of a church which,

instead of reproducing the attitude of the Divine Corpse, represents that of His still living Body, a church which seems to have a suggestion of movement as if bending like Christ on the Cross.

"In fact it seems to be certain that some architects strove to represent in the plan of their building the motion of the human frame, to imitate the action of a drooping figure; in short, to give life to stones.

"Such an attempt was made in the abbey church of Preuilly-sur-Claise in Touraine. The plan and photographs of this basilica are to be found in an interesting volume that I can lend you; the author, the Abbé Picardat, is the Curé of the church. You will from them readily perceive that the curve of the plan is that of a body leaning on one side, drawn out and bending over.

"And the movement of the body is represented by the curve of the axis, beginning at the very first bay and continued along the nave, the choir, and the apse to the end, which bends aside to imitate the droop of the head.

"Thus, even better than at Chartres, at Reims, and at Rouen, this humble sanctuary, built by Benedictine monks whose names are unknown, represents in its serpentine line, in the perspective of its aisles and the obliquity of its vaulting, the allegorical presentment of our Lord on the Cross. In all other churches the architects have to some extent imitated the cadaverous rigidity of the head fallen in death; at Preuilly the monks have perpetuated the never-to-be-forgotten instant that elapsed between the 'Sitio' (I thirst) and the 'Consummatum est' (It is finished), as recorded in the Gospel of Saint John. Thus the old Touraine church is in the image of Christ Crucified, but still living.

"Now, to look at home once more, we will consider the inward parts of our sanctuaries. It may be noted incidentally that the length of the cathedral figures the long-suffering of the Church in adversity; its breadth symbolizes charity, which expands the souls of men; its height, the hope of future reward; and we can then proceed to details.

"The choir and sanctuary symbolize Heaven; the nave is the emblem of the earth; as the gulf that divides the two worlds can only be passed by the help of the Cross, it was formerly the custom, now, alas, fallen into desuetude, to

erect an enormous Crucifix over the grand arch between the nave and the choir. Hence the name of triumphal arch was given to the vast space in front of the High altar. It may also be remarked that a railing or screen marks the limits of these two parts of the cathedral. Saint Gregory Nazianzen regards this as the border line traced between the two parts—that of God, and that of man.

"There is, however, a different explanation given by Richard de Saint Victor, as to the sanctuary, the choir, and the nave. According to him, the first symbolizes the Virgins, the second the chaste souls, and the third the married hearts. As to the altar, or, as old liturgical writers call it, the Cancel (chancel), it is Christ Himself, the spot whereon His Head rests, the Table of the Last Supper, the Stake whereon He shed His blood, the Sepulchre that held His body; and again, it is the Spiritual Church, and its four angles the four corners of the earth over which it shall reign.

"Now behind this altar we find the apse, assuming in most cathedrals the form of a semicircle. There are exceptions; to mention three: at Poitiers, at Laon, and in Notre Dame du Fort at Étampes the wall is square, as in the ancient civic basilicas, and does not describe the sort of half-moon, of which the significance is one of the most beautiful inventions of symbolism.

"This semicircular end, this apsidal shell, with the chapels that surround the choir, simulates the Crown of Thorns on the Head of Christ. Excepting in Sanctuaries which are wholly dedicated to Our Lady—this one, Notre Dame de Paris, and some others—one of these chapels, that in the centre and the largest, is dedicated to the Virgin, to show by the place that it occupies at the end of the church that Mary is the last refuge of sinners.

"She, in person, is again symbolized by the Sacristy, whence the priest comes forth as Christ's representative after putting on his sacerdotal vestments, as Jesus came forth from His Mother's womb after clothing Himself in flesh.

"It must constantly be repeated; every part of a church and every material object used in divine worship is representative of some theological truth. In the script of architecture everything is a reminiscence, an echo, a reflection, and every part is connected to form a whole.

"

For instance, the altar, which is the Image of Our Lord, must be draped with white linen in memory of the winding-sheet in which Joseph of Arimathea wrapped His body—and that linen must be woven of pure thread, of hemp or flax. The chalice, which according to the texts adduced by the Spicilegium of Solesmes, is to be taken now as a symbol of glory, and now as a sign of opprobrium, may be regarded, by the most generally received theory, as the figure of the sacred Tomb; then the paten appears as the stone which served to close it, while the corporal is the shroud itself.

"When I tell you further," added the Abbé, "that according to Saint Nilus, the columns signify the divine dogmas, or, according to Durand of Mende, the Bishops and the Doctors of the Church, that the capitals are the words of Scripture, that the pavement of the church is the foundation of faith and humility, that the ambos and rood-loft, almost everywhere destroyed, figure the pulpit of the gospel, the mountain on which Christ preached; again, that the seven lamps burning before the altar are the seven gifts of the Spirit, that the steps to the altar are the steps to perfection; that the alternating choirs represent on the one side the angels, and on the other the righteous, combining to do homage with their voices to the glory of the Most High, I have pretty well explained to you the general meaning and detailed symbolism of the interior of the cathedral, and more particularly that of Chartres.

"Now you must observe a peculiarity which is also to be seen in the Cathedral at Le Mans; the side aisles of the nave in which we are sitting are single, but they are double round the choir—"

But Durtal was not listening; far away from this architectural exegesis, he was admiring the amazing structure without even trying to analyze it.

Wrapped in the mystery of its own shadow thick with the haze of rain, it soared up lighter and lighter as it rose in the skyey whiteness of its arcades, aspiring like a soul purifying itself with increasing light as it toils up the ways of the mystic life.

The clustered columns sprang in slender sheaves, their groups so light that they looked as if they might bend at a breath; yet it was not till they had reached a giddy height that these stems curved over, flying from one side of the

Cathedral to the other to meet above the void, mingling their sap and blossoming at last, like a basket of flowers, in the once gilt pendants from the roof.

This church appeared as a supreme effort of matter striving for lightness, rejecting, as though it were a burden, the diminished weight of its walls and substituting a less ponderous and more lucent matter, replacing the opacity of stone by the diaphanous texture of glass.

It grew more spiritual—wholly spiritual, purely prayer, as it sprang towards the Lord to meet Him; light and slender, as it were imponderable, it remained the most glorious expression of Beauty escaping from its earthly dross, Beauty become seraphic.

It was as slender and colourless as Roger Van der Weyden's Virgins, who are so fragile, so ethereal, that they might blow away were they not held down to earth by the weight of their brocades and trains. Here was the same mystical conception of a long-drawn body and an ardent soul, which, unable to free itself completely from that body, strove to purify it by reducing it, refining it, almost distilling it to a fluid.

The building bewildered him with the giddy flight of its vault, the dazzling splendour of its windows. The weather was gloomy, and yet a furnace of gems flamed in the lancets of the windows and the blazing wheels of the roses.

Up there, high in air, as they might be salamanders, human beings with faces ablaze and robes on fire dwelt in a firmament of glory; but these conflagrations were enclosed and limited by an incombustible frame of darker glass which set off the youthful and radiant joy of the flames by the contrast of melancholy, the suggestion of the more serious and aged aspect presented by gloomy colouring. The bugle cry of red, the limpid confidence of white, the repeated Hallelujahs of yellow, the virginal glory of blue, all the quivering crucible of glass was dimmed as it got nearer to this border dyed with rusty red, the tawny hues of sauces, the harsh purples of sandstone, bottle-green, tinder-brown, fuliginous blacks, and ashy greys.

As at Bourges, where the glass is of the same period, Oriental influence was visible in these windows at Chartres. Not only had the figures the hieratic appearance, the sumptuous and barbarous dignity of Asiatic personages, but

the borders, in their design and the arrangement of their colours, were an evident reminiscence of the Persian carpets which undoubtedly served as models to the painters; since it is known from the Livre des Métiers that in the thirteenth century hangings copied from those which the Crusaders brought from the Levant were manufactured in France, and in Paris itself.

But, apart from the question of subjects or borders, the various colours of these pictures were, so to speak, but an accessory crowd, handmaidens whose part it was to set off another colour, namely blue—a glorious, indescribable blue, a vivid sapphire hue of excessive transparency, pale but piercing and sparkling throughout, glittering like the broken glass of a kaleidoscope—in the top-lights, in the roses of the transepts, and in the great west window, where it burned like the blue flame of sulphur, among the lead-lines and black iron bars.

Taken for all in all, with the tones of its stone-work and its windows, Notre Dame de Chartres was fair with blue eyes. He personified Her as a sort of white fairy, a tall and slender virgin, with large blue eyes under lids of translucent rose. This was the Mother of a Christ of the North, the Christ of a Pre-Raphaelite Flemish painter. She sat enthroned in a Heaven of ultramarine, surrounded by these Oriental hangings of glass—a pathetic reminder of the Crusades.

And these transparent hangings were like flowers, redolent of sandal and pepper, fragrant with the subtle spices of the Magian kings; a perfumed flower-bed of hues culled at the cost of so much blood in the fields of Palestine; and here offered by the West, under the cold sky of Chartres, to the Virgin Mother in remembrance of the sunny lands where She dwelt and where Her Son chose to be born.

"Where could you find a grander shrine or a more sublime dwelling for Our Mother?" said the Abbé as he pointed to the nave.

This exclamation roused Durtal from his reflections, and he listened as the priest went on,—

"Though this cathedral is unique as regards its width, in spite of its enormous height it cannot compare with the extravagant elevation of Bourges, Amiens, and more especially of Beauvais, where the vault of the roof rises to

forty-eight metres from the ground. That cathedral, it is true, was bent on outstripping its sisters.

"Springing into the air at one flight, when it reached the upper spaces it tottered and fell. You know the portions which survived the wreck of that mad attempt?"

"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbé; and that sanctuary and that apse, so narrow and restricted, with columns so close together, and the iridescent light, like filmy soap bubbles, from walls which seem made of glass, disturb and bewilder you; on first entering it gives the impression of indescribable uneasiness, a sort of anxious and distressed anticipation. And in truth it is neither quite healthy nor sound; it seems only to live by dint of aids and expedients; it struggles to be free and is not; it is long drawn and not ethereal; it has—how shall I express it?—large bones. You remember the pillars? They are like the smooth muscular trunks of beech trees, which have also the angular edges of reeds. How different from the harp-strings which form the aerial skeleton of Chartres! No, in spite of all, Beauvais, like Reims, and like Paris, is a fleshy cathedral; it has not the elegant leanness, the perennial youthfulness of form, the Patrician stamp of Amiens, and more especially of Chartres!

"And have you not been struck, Monsieur l'Abbé, by the way in which the genius of man has constantly borrowed from Nature in the construction of his basilicas? It is almost certain that the arcades of the forest were the starting-point for the mystic avenues of our aisles. And again, look at the pillars. I was speaking of those at Beauvais as suggesting the beech and the reed; if you think of the columns at Laon, they have nodes all up their stems, resembling the regular swelling of bamboos, to the point of imitation. Note also the stone flora of the capitals and the pendants of the vault, terminating the long ribs of the arches. Here the animal kingdom seems to have inspired the architect. Might we not conceive of a fabulous spider, of which the key-stone is the body and the ribs stretching under the vaults are the legs? The image is so accurate as to be irresistible. And then what a marvel is the gigantic Arachne, wrought like a jewel and heightened with gold, which might have spun the web of those three flaming rose windows!"

"

By the way," said the Abbé, when they had left the church and were walking down the street, "I forgot to point out to you the Number which is everywhere stamped on Chartres; it is identical with Paray-le-Monial. Here, again, everything is in threes. Thus there are three aisles, and three entrances each with three doors; if you count the pillars of the nave, you will count twice three on each side. The transept aisles again have each three bays and three pillars, the windows are in threes under the three great roses. So, you see, Notre Dame is full of the Trinity."

"And it is also the great store-house of Mediæval painting and sculpture."

"Yes, and like other Gothic cathedrals, it is the completest and most trustworthy collection of symbolism; for the allegories we fancy we can interpret in Romanesque churches are on the whole but artificial and doubtful—and that is quite conceivable. The Romanesque is a convert, a pagan turned monk. It was not born Catholic as the pointed arch was; it only became so by baptism conferred by the Church. Christianity discovered it in the Roman basilica, and utilized while modifying it; thus its origin is pagan, and it was only as it grew up that it could learn the language and use the forms of our emblems."

"And yet, to me, as a whole, it seems to be a symbol, for it is the image in stone of the Old Testament, a figure of contrition and fear."

"And yet more of the soul's peace," replied the Abbé. "Believe me, really to understand that style we must go back to the fountain-head, to the earliest times of Monasticism, of which it is a perfect expression; back, in fact, to the Fathers of the Church, the monks of the Desert.

"Now, what is the very special character of the mysticism of the East? It is the calmness of faith, love feeding on itself, ecstasy without display, ardent but reserved, internal.

"In the books of the Egyptian Recluses you will never find the vehemence of a Maddalena de' Pazzi or a Catherine of Siena, the passionate ejaculations of a Saint Angela. Nothing of the kind, no amorous addresses, no trepidations, no laments. They look upon the Redeemer less as

the Victim to be wept over than as the Mediator, the Friend, the Elder Brother. To them He was, to quote Origen's words, 'The Bridge between us and the Father.'

"These tendencies, transplanted from Africa to Europe, were preserved by the first monks of the West, who followed the example of their predecessors, and modified and built their churches on the same pattern.

"That repentance, contrition, and awe dwell under these dark vaults, among these heavy pillars, in this fortress, as it were, where the elect shut themselves in to resist the assaults of the world, is quite certain—but this mystical Romanseque also suggests the notion of a sturdy faith, of manly patience, and stalwart piety—like its walls.

"It has not the flaming raptures of the mystical Gothic, which finds utterance in all these soaring shafts of stone; the Romanesque lives self-centred, in reserved fervour, brooding in the depths of the soul. It may be summed up in this saying of Saint Isaac's: In mansuetudine et in tranquillitate, simplifica animam tuam.'"

"You will confess, Monsieur l'Abbé, that you have a weakness for the style."

"Perhaps I have, in so far as that it is less petted, more humble, less feminine, and more claustral than the Gothic."

"On the whole," the priest concluded, as he shook hands with Durtal at his own door, "it is the symbol of the inner life, the image of the monastic life; in a word, the true architecture of the cloister."

"On condition, nevertheless," said Durtal to himself, "that it is not like that of Notre Dame de Poitiers, where the interior is gaudy with childish colouring and raw tones; for there, instead of expressing regret and tranquillity, it rouses a suggestion of the childish glee of an old savage in his second childhood, who laughs when his tattoo marks are renewed, and his skin rough-cast with crude ochres."

[!-- Page 117 --]CHAPTER VII.

"How many worshippers can the Cathedral contain? Well, nearly 18,000," said the Abbé Plomb. "But I need hardly tell you, I suppose, that it is never full; that even during the season for pilgrimages the vast crowds of Mediæval times never assemble here. Ah, no! Chartres is not exactly what you would call a pious town!"

"It strikes me as indifferent to religion, to say the least, if not actually hostile," said the Abbé Gévresin.

"The citizen of Chartres is money-getting, apathetic, and salacious," replied the Abbé Plomb. "Above all, greedy of money, for the passion for lucre is fierce here, under an inert surface. Really, from my own experience, I pity the young priest who is sent as a beginner to evangelize la Beauce.

"He arrives full of illusions, dreaming of Apostolic triumphs, burning to devote himself—and he drops into silence and the void. If he were but persecuted he would feel himself alive; but he is met, not with abuse, but with a smile, which is far worse; and at once he becomes aware of the futility of all he can do, of the aimlessness of his efforts, and he is discouraged.

"The clergy here are, it may be said, admirable, composed of good and saintly priests; but they vegetate, torpid with inaction; they neither read nor work; their joints become ankylose; they die of weariness in this provincial spot."

"You do not!" exclaimed Durtal, laughing; "for you make work. Did you not tell me that you especially devote yourself to ladies who can still condescend to take an interest in Our Lord in this town?"

"Your satire is scathing," replied the Abbé. "I can assure you that if I had serving-women and the peasant

girls to deal with, I should not complain; for in simple souls there are qualities and virtues and a responsive spring, but not in the commercial or the richer classes! You cannot imagine what those women are. If only they attend Mass on Sunday and perform their Easter duties they think they may do anything and everything; and thenceforth their one idea is not so much to avoid offending the Saviour as to disarm Him by mean subterfuges. They speak ill of their neighbour, injuring him cruelly, refusing him all help and pity, and they make excuses for themselves as though these were mere venial faults; but as to eating meat on a Friday! That is quite another thing; they are persuaded that this is the unpardonable sin. To them their stomach is the Holy Ghost; consequently, the great point is to tack and veer round that particular sin, never to commit it, while only just avoiding it, and not depriving themselves in the least. What eloquence they will pour out on me to convince me of the penitential quality of water-fowl.

"During Lent they are possessed with the idea of giving dinners, and rack their brains to provide a lenten meal in which there is no meat, though it would be supposed that there was; and then come interminable discussions as to teal, wild duck, and cold-blooded birds. They should consult a naturalist and not a priest on such cases of conscience.

"As to Holy Week, that is another affair; the mania for water-birds gives way to a hankering for the Charlotte Russe. May they, without offence to God, enjoy a Charlotte? There are eggs in it, to be sure, but so whipped and scourged that the dish is almost ascetic; culinary explanations are poured into my ear, the confessional becomes a kitchen, and the priest might be a master-cook.

"But as to the general sin of greediness, they hardly admit that they are guilty of it. Is it not so, my dear colleague?"

The Abbé Gévresin nodded assent. "They are indeed hollow souls," said he, "and what is more, impenetrable. They are sealed against every generous idea, regarding the intercourse they hold with the Redeemer as beseeming their rank and in good style; but they never seek to know Him more nearly, and restrict themselves, of deliberate purpose, to calls of politeness."

"

Such visits as we pay to an aged parent on New Year's Day," said Durtal.

"No, at Easter," corrected Madame Bavoil.

"And among these Fair Penitents," the Abbé Plomb went on, "we have that terrible variety, the wife of the Député who votes on the wrong side, and to his wife's objurgations retorts: 'Why, I am at heart a better Christian than you are!'

"Invariably and every time, she repeats the list of her husband's private virtues, and deplores his conduct as a public man; and this history, which is never ending, always leads up to the praises she awards herself, almost to requiring us to apologize for all the annoyance the Church occasions her."

The Abbé Gévresin smiled, and said,—

"When I was in Paris, attached to one of the parishes on the left bank of the Seine, in which there is a huge draper's and fancy shop, I had to deal with a very curious class of women. Especially on days when there was a great show of cotton and linen goods, or a sale of bankrupt stock, there was a perfect rush of well-dressed women to the confessional. These people lived on the other side of the water; they had come to that part of the town to buy bargains, and finding the departments of the shop too full, no doubt, they meant to wait till the crowd should be thinner, to make their selection in comfort; so then, not knowing what to be doing, they took refuge in the church, and, tortured by the need for speech, they asked for the priest whose turn it was to attend, and to justify themselves, chattered in the confessional as if it had been a drawing-room, merely to kill time."

"Not being able to go to a café like a man, they go to church," said Durtal.

"Unless it is," said Madame Bavoil, "that they would rather confide to an unknown priest the sins it would pain them to confess to their own director."

"At any rate, this is a new light on things: the influence of big shops on the tribunal of penance!" exclaimed Durtal.

"And of railway stations," added the Abbé Gévresin.

"How of railway stations?"

"Yes, I assure you that churches situated near railway

stations have a special following of women on their journeys. There it is that our dear Madame Bavoil's shrewd remark finds justification. Many a country-woman who has the Curé of her own parish to dinner dares not tell him the tale of her adultery, because he could too easily guess the name of her lover, and because the propinquity of a priest living on intimate terms in her house would be inconvenient; so she takes advantage of an excursion to Paris to open her heart to another confessor who does not know her. As a general rule, when a woman speaks ill of her Curé, and begins the tale of her confession by explaining that he is dull, uneducated, unsympathetic in understanding and guiding souls, you may be certain that a confession is coming of sin against the sixth (seventh) Commandment."

"Well, well; the people who flutter around the Lord are cool hands!" exclaimed Madame Bavoil.

"They are unhappy creatures, who try to strike a balance between their duties and their vices.

"But enough of this; let us turn to something more immediate. Have you brought us the article on the Angelico, as you promised? Read it to us."

Durtal brought out of his pocket the manuscript he had finished, which was to be posted that evening to Paris.

He seated himself in one of the straw-bottomed arm-chairs in the middle of the room where they were sitting with the Abbé Gévresin, and began:—

THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN.

By Fra Angelico. In the Louvre.

The general arrangement of this picture reminds the spectator of the tree of Jesse, of which the branches, supporting a human figure on every twig, spread fan-like as they rise on each side of a throne, while at the top, on a single stem, the radiant beauty of a Virgin is the crowning blossom.

In Fra Angelico's 'Coronation of the Virgin,' to the right and left of the isolated knoll on which Christ sits under a carved stone canopy, placing the crown He holds with both hands on His Mother's bowed head, we see a perfect espalier of Apostles, Saints, and Patriarchs, rising in close and

crowded ramification at the lower part of the panel, to burst into a luxuriant blossoming of angels relieved against the blue sky, their heads in a sunshine of glories.

The arrangement of the persons represented is as follows:—

At the foot of the throne, under the gothic canopy—to the left, Saint Nicholas of Myra kneels in prayer, wearing his mitre and clasping his crozier, from which the maniple hangs like a folded banner; Saint Louis the King with a crown of fleurs de lys; the monastic saints; St. Antony, St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Thomas, who holds an open book in which we read the first lines of the Te Deum, St. Dominic holding a lily, St. Augustine with a pen. Then, going upwards, St. Mark and St. John carrying their gospels, St. Bartholomew showing the knife with which he was flayed; and higher still the lawgiver Moses, ending in the serried ranks of angels against the azure firmament, each head circled with a golden nimbus.

On the right, below, by the side of a monk whose back only is seen—possibly St. Bernard—Mary Magdalene is on her knees with a vase of spices by her side, robed in vermilion; behind her come St. Cecilia, crowned with roses, St. Clara or St. Catherine of Sienna, in a blue hood, patterned with stars, St. Catherine of Alexandria, leaning on her wheel of martyrdom, St. Agnes, cherishing a lamb in her arms, St. Ursula flinging an arrow, and others whose names are unknown; all female saints, facing the Bishop, the King, the Recluses, and the founders of Orders. By the steps of the throne are St. Stephen, with the green palm of martyrdom, St. Lawrence, with his gridiron, St. George, wearing a breastplate, and on his head a helmet, St. Peter the Dominican recognizable by his split skull; and yet further up St. Matthew, St. Philip, St. James the Greater, St. Jude, St. Paul, St. Matthias, and King David. Finally, opposite the angels on the left a group of angels, whose faces, set in gold discs, are relieved against the pure ultramarine background.

In spite of injury from the restorations it has endured, this panel, with its stamped and diapered gold, is splendid in the freshness of its colours, laid on with white of egg.

As a whole, it represented, so to speak, a stairway for the eye, a circular stair of two flights, in steps of glorious blue hung with gold.

The lowest to the left is seen in the blue mantle of Saint Louis, and others lead up through a glimpse of blue drapery, the robe of St. John, and then, higher still before reaching the blue expanse of the sky, the robe of the first angel.

The first on the right is the mantle of St. Cecilia; others are the bodice of St. Agnes, St. Stephen's robe, a prophet's tunic; and above these, before reaching the lapis-lazuli border of sky, the robe of the first angel.

Thus blue, which is the predominating colour in the whole, is regularly piled up in steps and spaced almost identically on the opposite sides of the throne. This azure hue of the draperies, their folds faintly indicated with white, is extraordinarily serene, indescribably innocent. This it is which gives the work its soul of colour—this blue, helped out by the gold which gleams round the heads, runs or twines on the black robes of the monks; in Y's on those of St. Thomas; in suns, or rather in radiating chrysanthemums, on those of St. Antony and St. Benedict; in stars on St. Clara's hood; in filagree embroidery in the letters of their names, in brooches and medallions on the bodices of the other female saints.

At the very bottom of the picture a splash of gorgeous red—the Magdalen's robe—that finds an echo in the flame-colour of one of the steps of the throne, and reappears here and there, but softened in fragmentary glimpses of drapery, or smothered under a running pattern of gold (as in St. Augustine's cope) serves as a spring-board, as it were, to start the whole stupendous harmony.

The other colours seem to fill no part, but that of necessary stop-gaps, indispensable supports. They are too, for the most part, common and ugly to a degree that is most puzzling. Look at the greens: they range from boiled endive to olive, ending in the absolute hideousness of two steps of the throne which lie across the picture—two bars, two streaks of spinach dipped in tawny mud. The only tolerable green of them all is that of St. Agnes' mantle, a Parmigiano green, rich in yellow, and made still richer by the lining which affords the pleasing adjunct of orange.

On the other hand, consider this blue which Angelico uses so sumptuously in his celestial tones; when he makes it darker it loses its fulness, and looks almost dull; we see this in St. Clara's hood.

But what is yet more amazing is that this painter, so eloquent in blue, is but a stammerer when he makes use of the other angelic hue—rose-pink. In his hands it is neither subtle nor ingenuous; it is opaque, of the colour of blood thinned with water, or of pink sticking-plaister, excepting when it trends on the hue of wine-lees, like that of the Saviour's sleeves.

And it is heaviest of all in the saints' cheeks. It looks glazed, like the surface of pie-crust; it has the quality of raspberry syrup drowned in white of egg.

These are in the main the only colours used by Angelico. A magnificent blue for the sky and another vile blue, white, brilliant red, melancholy pinks, a light green, dark greens, and gold. No bright yellow like everlastings, no luminous straw-colour; at most a heavy opaque yellow for the hair of his female saints; no truly bold orange, no violet, either tender or strong, unless in the half-hidden lining of a cloak or in the scarcely visible robe of a saint, cut off by the frame; no brown that does not lurk in the background. His palette, as may be seen, is very limited.

And it is symbolical, if we consider it. He has undoubtedly done in his hues what he has done in the arrangement of the work. His picture is a hymn to Chastity, and round the central group of Christ and His Mother he has placed in ranks the Saints who best concentrated this virtue on earth. St. John the Baptist, beheaded for the bounding impurity of an Herodias; St. George, who saved a virgin from the emblematic Dragon; such saints as St. Agnes, St. Clara, and St. Ursula; the heads of the Orders—St. Benedict and St. Francis; a king like St. Louis, and a bishop like St. Nicholas of Myra, who hindered the prostitution of three young girls whom a starving father was fain to sell. Everything, down to the smallest details, from the attributes of the persons represented to the steps of the throne, of which the number is nine—that of the choirs of angels—everything in this picture is symbolical.

It is permissible therefore to assume that he selected his colours for their allegorical signification.

White: the symbol of the Supreme Being, and of absolute Truth, and employed by the Church in its adornments for the festival of our Lord and the Virgin because it signifies Goodness, Virginity, Charity, and is the splendour, the

emblem of Divine Wisdom when it is enhanced to the pure radiance of silver.

Blue: because it symbolizes Chastity, Innocence, and Guilelessness.

Red: which is the colour adopted for the offices of the Holy Ghost and of the Passion; the garb of Charity, Suffering and Love.

Rose-pink; the Love of Eternal Wisdom, and, as Saint Mechtildis teaches, the anguish and torments of Christ.

Green: used liturgically at Seasons of Pilgrimage, and which seems to be the colour preferred by the Benedictine Sisterhood, interpreting it as meaning freshness of soul and perennial sap; the green which, in the hermeneutics of colour, expresses the hopes of the regenerated creature, the yearning for final repose, and which is likewise the mark of humility, according to the Anonymous English writer of the thirteenth century, and of contemplation, according to Durand of Mende.

On the other hand, Angelico has intentionally refrained from introducing the hues which are emblematic of vices, excepting of course those adopted for the garb of the Monastic Orders, which altogether changes their meaning.

Black: the colour of error and the void, the seal of death, and, according to Sister Emmerich, the image of profaned and wasted gifts.

Brown: which, as the same Sister tells us, is synonymous with agitation, barrenness and dryness of the spirit, and neglect of duty; brown; which being composed of black and red—smoke darkening the sacred fire—is Satanic.

Grey: the ashes of penance, the symbol of tribulation, according to the Bishop of Mende, the sign of half-mourning formerly used in the Paris ritual instead of violet in Lent. The mingling of white and black, of virtue and vice, of joy and grief, the mirror of the soul that is neither good nor evil, the medium being, the lukewarm creature that God spueth out, grey can only rise by the infusion of a little purity, a little blue; but can, when thus converted to pearl grey, become a pious hue, and attempt a step towards Heaven, an advance in the lower paths of Mysticism.

Yellow: considered by Sister Emmerich as the colour of idleness, of a horror of suffering, and often given to Judas in mediæval times, is significant of treason and envy.

Orange: of which Frédéric Portal speaks as the revelation of Divine Love, the communion of God with man, mingling the blood of Love to the sinful hue of yellow, may be taken to bear a worse meaning with the idea of falsehood and torment; and, especially when it verges on red, expresses the defeat of a soul over-ridden by its sins, hatred of Love, contempt of Grace, the end of all things.

Dead leaf colour: speaking of moral degradation, spiritual death, the hopefulness of green for ever extinct.

Finally, violet: adopted by the Church for the Sundays in Advent and in Lent, and for penitential services. It was the colour of the mortuary-shroud of the kings of France; during the Middle Ages it was the attribute of mourning, and it is at all times the melancholy garb of the exorcist.

What is certainly far less easy to explain is the limited variety of countenance the painter has chosen to adopt. Here symbolism is of no use. Look, for instance, at the men. The Patriarchs with their bearded faces do not show us the almost translucent texture, as of the sacramental wafer, in which the bones show through the dry and diaphanous parchment-like skin, or like the seeds of the cruciferous flower called Monnaie du Pape (honesty); they have all regular and pleasant faces, are all healthy, full-blooded personages, attentive and devout. His monks too have round faces and rosy cheeks; not one of his Saints looks like a Recluse of the Desert overcome by fasting, or has the exhausted emaciation of an ascetic; they are all vaguely alike, with the same solidity and the same complexion. In fact, as we see them in this picture, they are a contented colony of excellent people.

At least, so they appear at a first glance.

The women, too, are all of one family; sisters more or less exactly alike; all fair and rosy, with light snuff-coloured eyes, heavy eyelids, and round faces; they form a train of rather an insipid type round the Virgin with her long nose and bird-like head kneeling at the feet of Christ.

Altogether, among all these figures we find scarcely four distinct types, if we take into consideration their more or less advanced years and the modifications resulting from the arrangement of their hair, their being bearded or shaven, and the pose of the head, front face or profile, which distinguishes them.

The only groups which are not of an almost uniform stamp are the angels, sexless youths for ever charming. They are of matchless purity, of a more than human innocence in their blue and rose-pink and green robes sprigged with gold, with their yellow or red hair, at once aerial and heavy, their chastely downcast eyes, and flesh as white as pith. Grave, but in ecstasy, they play on the harp or the theorbo, on the Viol d'Amore or the rebeck, singing the eternal glory of the most Holy Mother.

Thus, on the whole, the types used by Angelico are not less restricted than his colours.

But then, in spite of the exquisite array of angels, is this picture monotonous and dull? Is this much-talked-of work over-praised?

No, for this Coronation of the Virgin is a masterpiece, and superior to all that enthusiasm can say about it; indeed, it outstrips painting and soars through realms which the mystics of the brush had never penetrated.

Here we have not a mere manual effort, however admirable; this is not merely a spiritual and truly religious picture such as Roger van der Weyden and Quentin Matsys could create; it is quite another thing. With Angelico an unknown being appears on the scene, the soul of a mystic that has entered on the contemplative life, and breathes it on the canvas as on a perfect mirror. It is the soul of a marvellous monk that we see, of a saint, embodied on this coloured mirror, exhaled in a painted creation. And we can measure how far that soul had advanced on the path of perfection from the work that reflects it.

He carries his angels and his saints up to the Unifying Life, the supreme height of Mysticism. There the weariness of their dolorous ascent is no more; there is the plenitude of tranquil joy, the peace of man made one with God. Angelico is the painter of the soul immersed in God, the painter of his own spirit.

None but a monk could attempt such paintings. Matsys, Memling, Dierck Bouts, Roger van der Weyden were no doubt sincere and pious worthies. They gave their work a reflection of Heaven; they too reflected their own soul in the faces they depicted; but though they gave them a wonderful stamp of art, they could only infuse into them the semblance of the soul beginning the practice of Christian

asceticism; they could only represent men still detained, like themselves, in the outer chambers of those Castles of the Soul of which Saint Theresa speaks, and not in the Hall where, in the centre, Christ sits and sheds His glory.

They were, in my opinion, greater and keener observers, more learned and more skilful, even better painters than Angelico; but their heart was in their craft, they lived in the world, they often could not resist giving their Virgins fine-lady airs, they were hampered by earthly reminiscences, they could not rise in their work above the trammels of daily life; in short, they were and remained men. They were admirable; they gave utterance to the promptings of ardent faith; but they had not had the specific culture which is practised only in the silence and peace of the cloister. Hence they could not cross the threshold of the seraphic realm where roamed the guileless being who never opened his eyes, closed in prayer, excepting to paint—the monk who had never looked out on the world, who had seen only within himself.

And what we know of his life is worthy of this work. He was a humble and tender recluse, who always prayed or ever he took up his brush, and could not draw the Crucifixion without melting into tears.

Through the veil of his tears his angelic vision poured itself out in the light of ecstasy, and he created beings that had but the semblance of human creatures, the earthly husk of our existence, beings whose souls soared already far from their prison of flesh. Study his picture attentively, and see how the incomprehensible miracle works of such a sublimated state of mind.

The types chosen for the Apostles and Saints are, as we have said, quite ordinary. But gaze firmly at the countenances of these men, and you will see how little they really take in of the scene before them. Whatever attitude the painter may have given them, they are all absorbed into themselves; they behold the scene, not with the eyes of the body, but with the eyes of the soul. Each is looking into himself. Jesus dwells in them, and they can gaze on Him better in their inmost heart than on His throne.

It is the same with his female Saints. I have said that they are insignificant looking, and it is true; but how their features, too, are transfigured and effaced under the Divine

touch! They are drowned in adoration, and spring buoyant, though motionless, to meet the Heavenly Spouse. Only one remains but half escaped from her material shell: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who, with upturned eyes of a brackish green, is neither as simple nor as innocent as her sisters; she still sees the form of man in Christ; she still is a woman; she is, if one may so, the sin of the work.

Still, all these spiritual degrees clothed in human figures are but the accessories of this picture. They are placed there, in the august assumption of gold and the chaste ascending scale of blue, to lead by a stair of pure joy to the sublime platform whereon we see the group of the Saviour and the Virgin.

And here, in the presence of the Mother and Son, the ecstatic painter overflows. One could imagine that the Lord had merged into him, and transported him beyond the life of sense, love and chastity are so perfectly personified in the group above all the means of expression at the command of man.

No words could express the reverent tenderness, the anxious affection, the filial and paternal love of the Christ, who smiles as He crowns His Mother; and She is yet more incomparable. Here the words of adulation are too weak; the invisible is made visible by the sacramental use of colour and line. A feeling of infinite deference, of intense but reserved adoration, flows and spreads about this Virgin, who, with Her arms crossed over Her bosom, bends Her little dove-like head, with downcast eyes and a rather long nose, under a veil. She resembles the Apostle St. John who is just behind her, and might be his daughter; and she is enigmatic; for that soft, delicate face, which in the hands of any other painter would be merely charming and trivial, breathes out the purest innocence. She is not even flesh and blood; the material that clothes Her swells softly with the breath of the fluid that shapes it. Mary is a living but a volatilized and glorious body.

We can understand certain ideas of the Abbess of Agréda who declares that She was exempt from the defilements inflicted on women; we see what St. Thomas meant who asserted that Her beauty purified instead of agitating the senses.

Her age is indeterminate; She is not a woman, yet She is

no longer a child. It is hard to say even that She is grown up, just marriageable, a girl-child, so entirely is She refined above all humanity, beyond the world, so exquisitely pure and for ever chaste.

She remains incomparable, unapproached in painting. By Her, other Madonnas are vulgar; they are in every case women; She alone is the white stem of the divine Ear of corn, the Wheat of the Eucharist. She alone is indeed the Immaculate, the Regina Virginum of the hymns; and She is so youthful, so guileless, that the Son seems to be crowning His Mother before She can have conceived Him.

It is in this that we see the glory of the gentle Friar's superhuman genius. He painted as others have spoken, inspired by Grace; he painted what he saw within him just as St. Angela of Foligno related what she heard within her. Both one and the other were mystics absorbed into God; thus this picture by Angelico is at the same time a picture by the Holy Ghost, bolted through a purified sieve of art.

If we consider it, this soul is that of a female saint rather than of a monk. Turn to his other pictures; those, for instance, in which he strove to depict Christ's Passion; we are not looking at the stormy scene represented by Matsys or Grünewald; he has none of their harsh manliness, nor their gloomy energy, nor their tragic turbulence; he only weeps with the uncomforted grief of a woman. He is a Sister rather than a Friar-artist; and it is from this loving sensibility, which in the mystic vocation is more generally peculiar to women, that he has drawn the pathetic orisons and tender lamentation of his works.

And was it not also in this spiritual nature, so womanly in its complexion, that he found, under the impulse of the Spirit, the wholly angelical gladness, the really glorious apotheosis of Our Lord and His Mother, as he has painted them in this Coronation of the Virgin, which, after being revered for centuries in the Dominican Church at Fiesole, has now found shelter and admiration in the little gallery devoted to the Italian School at the Louvre.

"Your article is very good," said the Abbé Plomb. "But can the principles of a ritual of colour which you have dis

cerned in Angelico be verified with equal strictness in other painters?"

"No, if we look for colour as Angelico received it from his monastic forefathers, the illuminators of Missals, or as he applied it in its strictest and most usual acceptation. Yes, if we admit the law of antagonism, the rules of inversion, and if we know that symbolism authorizes the system of contraries, allowing the use of the hues which are appropriated to certain virtues to indicate the vices opposed to them."

"In a word, an innocent colour may be interpreted in an evil sense, and vice versâ," said the Abbé Gévresin.

"Precisely. In fact, artists who, though pious, were laymen, spoke a different language from the monks. On emerging from the cloister the liturgical meaning of colours was weakened; it lost its original rigidity and became pliant. Angelico followed the traditions of his Order to the letter, and he was not less scrupulous in his respect for the observances of religious art which prevailed in his day. Not for anything on earth would he have infringed them, for he regarded them as a liturgical duty, a fixed rule of service. But as soon as profane painters had emancipated the domain of painting, they gave us more puzzling versions, more complicated meanings; and the symbolism of colour, which is so simple in Angelico, became singularly abstruse—supposing that they even were constantly faithful to it in their works—and almost impossible to interpret.

"For instance, to select an example: the Antwerp gallery possesses a tryptich, by Roger van der Werden, known as 'The Sacraments.' In the centre panel, devoted to the Eucharist, the Sacrifice of the Redeemer is shown under two aspects, the bleeding form of the Crucifixion and the mystic form of the pure oblation on the altar; behind the Cross, at the foot of which we see the weeping Mary, Saint John and the Holy Women, a priest is celebrating Mass and elevating the Host in the midst of a cathedral which forms the background of the picture.

"On the left-hand shutter, the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Penance are shown, in small detached scenes; and on the right-hand shutter those of Ordination, Marriage and Extreme Unction.

"

This picture, a work of marvellous beauty, with the 'Descent from the Cross' by Quentin Matsys, are the inestimable glory of the Belgium gallery; but I will not linger over a full description of this work; I will omit any reflection suggested by the supreme art of the painter, and restrict myself to recording that part of the work which bears on the symbolism of colour."

"But are you sure that Roger van der Weyden intended to ascribe such meanings to the colours?"

"It is impossible to doubt it, for he has assigned a different hue to each Sacrament, by introducing above the scenes he depicts, an angel whose robe is in each instance different in accordance with the ceremony set forth. His meaning therefore is beyond question; and these are the colours he affects to the means of Grace consecrated by the Saviour:

"To the Eucharist, green; to Baptism, white; to Confirmation, yellow; to Penance, red; to Ordination, purple; to Marriage blue; to Extreme Unction, a violet so deep as to be almost black.

"Well, you will admit that the interpretation of this sacred scheme of colour is not altogether easy.

"The pictorial imagery of Baptism, Extreme Unction, and Ordination is quite clear; Marriage even as symbolized by blue may be intelligible to simple souls; that Communion should blazon its coat with vert, is even more appropriate, since green represents sap and humility, and is emblematical of the regenerative power. But ought not Confession to display violet rather than red; and how, in any case, are we to account for Confirmation being figured in yellow?"

"The colour of the Holy Ghost is certainly red," remarked the Abbé Plomb.

"Thus there are differences of interpretation between Angelico and Roger van der Weyden, though they lived at the same time. Still, the monk seems to me the more trustworthy authority."

"For my part," said the Abbé Gévresin, "I cannot but think of the right side of the lining of which you were speaking just now."

"This rule of contraries is not peculiar to the ritual of colour; it is to be seen in almost every part of the science

of symbolism. Look at the emblems derived from the animal world; the eagle alternately figuring Christ and the Devil; the snake which, while it is one of the most familiar symbols of the Demon, may nevertheless, as in the brazen serpent of Moses, prefigure the Saviour."

"The anticipatory symbol of Christian symbolism was the double-faced Janus of the heathen world," said the Abbé Plomb, laughing.

"Indeed, these allegories of the palette turn completely to the right-about," said Durtal. "Take red, for instance: we have seen that in the general acceptation it is to be interpreted as meaning charity, endurance, and love. This is the right side out; the wrong side, according to Sister Emmerich, is dulness, and clinging to this world's goods.

"Grey, the emblem of repentance and sorrow, and at the same time the image of a lukewarm soul, is also, according to another interpretation, symbolical of the Resurrection—white, piercing through blackness—light entering into the Tomb and coming out as a new hue—grey, a mixed colour still heavy with the gloom of death, but reviving as it gets light by degrees from the whiteness of day.

"Green, to which the mystics gave favourable meanings, also acquires a disastrous sense in some cases; it then represents moral degradation and despair; it borrows melancholy significance from dead leaves, is the colour given to the bodies of the devils in Stephan Lochner's Last Judgment, and in the infernal scenes depicted in the glass windows and pictures of the earliest artists.

"Black and brown, with their inimical suggestions of death and hell, change their meaning as soon as the founders of religious Orders adopt them for the garb of the cloister. Black then symbolizes renunciation, repentance, the mortification of the flesh, according to Durand de Mende; and brown and even grey suggest poverty and humility.

"Yellow again, so misprized in the formulas of symbolism, becomes significant of charity; and if we accept the teaching of the English monk who wrote in about 1220, yellow is enhanced when it changes to gold, rising to be the symbol of divine Love, the radiant allegory of eternal Wisdom.

"Violet, finally, when it appears as the distinctive colour

of prelates, divests itself of its usual meaning of self-accusation and mourning, to assume a certain dignity and simulate a certain pomp.

"On the whole, I find only white and blue which never change."

"In the Middle Ages, according to Yves de Chartres," said the Abbé Plomb, "blue took the place of violet in the vestments of bishops, to show them that they should give their minds rather to the things of Heaven than to the things of earth."

"And how is it," asked Madame Bavoil, "that this colour, which is all innocence, all purity, the colour of Our Mother Herself, has disappeared from among the liturgical hues?"

"Blue was used in the Middle Ages for all the services to the Virgin, and it has only fallen into desuetude since the eighteenth century," replied the Abbé Plomb; "and that only in the Latin Church, for the orthodox Churches of the East still wear it."

"And why this neglect?"

"I do not know, any more than I know why so many colours formerly used in our services have been forgotten. Where are the colours of the ancient Paris use: saffron yellow, reserved for the festival of All Angels; salmon pink, sometimes worn instead of red; ashen grey, which took the place of violet; and bistre instead of black on certain days.

"Then there was a charming hue which still holds its place in the scale of colour used in the Roman ritual, though most of the Churches overlook it—the shade called 'old rose,' a medium between violet and crimson, between grief and joy, a sort of compromise, a diminished tone, which the Church adopted for the third Sunday in Advent and the fourth Sunday in Lent. It thus gave promise, in the penitential season that was ending, of a beginning of gladness, for the festivals of Christmas and Easter were at hand.

"It was the idea of the spiritual dawn rising on the night of the soul, a special impression which violet, now used on those days, could not give."

"Yes, it is to be regretted that blue and rose-colour have disappeared from the Churches of the West," said the Abbé Gévresin. "But to return to the monastic dress which

delivered brown, grey, and black from their melancholy significance, does it not strike you that from the point of view of emblematic language, that of the Order of the Annunciation was the most eloquent? Those sisters were habited in grey, white, and red, the colours of the Passion, and they also wore a blue cape and a black veil in memory of Our Mother's mourning."

"The image of a perpetual Holy Week!" exclaimed Durtal.

"Here is another question," the Abbé Plomb went on. "In the earliest religious pictures the cloaks in which the Virgin, the Apostles, and the Saints are draped almost always show the hue of their lining in ingeniously contrived folds. It is of course different from that of the outer side, as you yourself observed just now with regard to the mantle of Saint Agnes in Angelico's work. Now, do you suppose that, apart from contrast of colour selected for technical purposes, the monk meant to express any particular idea by the juxtaposition of the two colours?"

"In accordance with the symbolism of the palette the outer colour would represent the material creature, and the lining colour the spiritual being."

"Well, but then what is the significance of Saint Agnes' mantle of green lined with orange?"

"Obviously," replied Durtal, "green denoting freshness of feeling, the essence of good, hope; and orange, in its better meaning, being regarded as representing the act by which God unites Himself to man, we might conclude from these data that Saint Agnes had attained the life of union, the possession of the Saviour, by virtue of her innocence and the fervour of her aspirations. She would thus be the image of virtue yearning and fulfilled, of hope rewarded, in short.

"But now I must confess that there are many gaps, many obscurities in this allegorical lore of colours. In the picture in the Louvre, for instance, the steps of the throne, which are intended to play the part of veined marble, remain unintelligible. Splashed with dull red, acrid green, and bilious yellow, what do these steps express, suggesting as they do by their number the nine choirs of angels?"

"It seems to me difficult to allow that the monk intended to figure the celestial hierarchies by smears with a dirty brush and these crude streaks."

"

But has the colour of a step ever represented an idea in the science of symbolism?" asked the Abbé Gévresin.

"Saint Mechtildis says so. When speaking of the three steps in front of the altar, she propounds that the first should be of gold, to show that it is impossible to go to God save by charity; the second blue, to signify meditation on things divine; the third green, to show eager hope and praise of Heavenly things."

"Bless me!" cried Madame Bavoil, who was getting somewhat scared by this discussion, "I never saw it in that light. I know that red means fire, as everybody knows; blue, the air; green, water; and black, the earth. And this I understand, because each element is shown in its true colour; but I should never have dreamed that it was so complicated, never have supposed that there was so much meaning in painters' pictures."

"In some painters'!" cried Durtal. "For since the Middle Ages the doctrine of emblematic colouring is extinct. At the present day those painters who attempt religious subjects are ignorant of the first elements of the symbolism of colours, just as modern architects are ignorant of the first principles of mystical theology as embodied in buildings."

"Precious gems are lavishly introduced in the works of the primitive painters," observed the Abbé Plomb. "They are set in the borders of dresses, in the necklets and rings of the female saints, and are piled in triangles of flame on the diadems with which painters of yore were wont to crown the Virgin. Logically, I believe we ought to seek a meaning in every gem as well as in the hues of the dresses."

"No doubt," said Durtal, "but the symbolism of gems is much confused. The reasons which led to the choice of certain stones to be the emblems, by their colour, water, and brilliancy, of special virtues, are so far-fetched and so little proven, that one gem might be substituted for another without greatly modifying the interpretation of the allegory they present. They form a series of synonyms, each replacing the other with scarcely a shade of difference.

"In the treasury of the Apocalypse, however, they seem to have been selected, if not with stricter meaning, with a more impressive breadth of application, for expositors regard

them as coincident with a virtue, and likewise with the person endowed with it. Nay, these jewellers of the Bible have gone further; they have given every gem a double symbolism, making each embody a figure from the Old Testament and one from the New. They carry out the parallel of the two Books by selecting in each case a Patriarch and an Apostle, symbolizing them by the character more especially marked in both.

"Thus, the amethyst, the mirror of humility and almost childlike simplicity, is applied in the Bible to Zebulon, a man obedient and devoid of pride, and in the Gospel to St. Matthias, who also was gentle and guileless; the chalcedony, as an emblem of charity, was ascribed to Joseph, who was so merciful and pitiful to his brethren, and to St. James the Great, the first of the Apostles to suffer martyrdom for the love of Christ; the jasper, emblematical of faith and eternity, was the attribute of Gad and of St. Peter; the sard, meaning faith and martyrdom, was given to Reuben and St. Bartholomew; the sapphire, for hope and contemplation, to Naphtali and St. Andrew, and sometimes, according to Aretas, to St. Paul; the beryl, meaning sound doctrine, learning, and long-suffering, to Benjamin and to St. Thomas, and so forth. There is, indeed, a table of the harmony of gems and their application to patriarchs, apostles, and virtues, drawn up by Madame Félicie d'Ayzac, who has written an elaborate paper on the figurative meaning of gems."

"The avatar of some other Scriptural personages might be equally well carried out by these emblematical minerals," observed the Abbé Gévresin.

"Obviously; and as I warned you, the analogies are very far-fetched. The hermeneutics of gems are uncertain, and founded on mere fanciful resemblances, on the harmonies of ideas hard to assimilate. In mediæval times this science was principally cultivated by poets."

"Against whom we must be on our guard," said the Abbé Plomb, "since their interpretations are for the most part heathenish. Marbode, for example, though he was a Bishop, has left us but a very pagan interpretation of the language of gems."

"These mystical lapidaries have on the whole chiefly applied, their ingenuity to explaining the stones of the

breastplate of Aaron, and those that shine in the foundations of the New Jerusalem, as described by St. John; indeed, the walls of Sion are set with the same jewels as the High Priest's pectoral, with the exception of the carbuncle, the ligure, agate, and onyx, which are named in Exodus, and replaced in the Book of Revelation by chalcedony, sardonyx, chrysoprase, and jacinth."

"Yes, and the symbolist goldsmiths wrought diadems, setting them with precious stones, to crown Our Lady's brow; but their poems showed little variety, for they were all borrowed from the Libellus Corona Virginis, an apocryphal work ascribed to St. Ildefonso, and formerly famous in convents."

The Abbé Gévresin rose and took an old book from the shelf.

"That brings to my mind," said he, "a hymn in honour of the Virgin composed in rhyme by Conrad of Haimburg, a German monk in the fourteenth century. Imagine," he continued, as he turned over the pages, "a litany of gems, each verse symbolizing one of Our Mother's virtues.

"This prayer in minerals opens with a human greeting. The good monk, kneeling down, begins:—

"'Hail, noble Virgin, meet to become the Bride of the Supreme King! Accept this ring in pledge of that betrothal, O Mary!'

"And he shows Her the ring, turning it slowly in his fingers, explaining to Our Lady the meaning of each stone that shines in the gold setting; beginning with green jasper, symbolical of the faith which led the Virgin to receive the message of the angelic visitant; then comes the chalcedony, signifying the fire of charity that fills Her heart; the emerald, whose transparency signifies Her purity; the sardonyx, with its pale flame, like the placidity of Her virginal life; the red sard-stone, one with the Heart that bled on Calvary; the chrysolite, sparkling with greenish gold, reminding us of Her numberless miracles and Her Wisdom; the beryl, figurative of Her humility; the topaz, of Her deep meditations; the chrysoprase of Her fervency; the jacinth of Her charity; the amethyst, mingling rose and purple, of the love bestowed on Her by God and men; the pearl, of which the meaning remains vague, not representing any special virtue; the agate, signifying Her modesty;

the onyx, showing the many perfections of Her grace; the diamond, for patience and fortitude in sorrow; while the carbuncle, like an eye that shines in the night, everywhere proclaims that Her glory is eternal.

"Finally the donor points out to the Virgin the interpretation of certain other matters set in the ring, which in the Middle Ages were regarded as precious: crystal, emblematic of chastity of body and soul; ligurite, resembling amber, more especially figurative of the quality of temperance; lodestone, which attracts iron, as She touches the chords of repentant hearts with the bow of her loving-kindness.

"And the monk ends his petition by saying: 'This little ring, set with gems, which we offer Thee as at this time, accept, glorious Bride, in Thy benevolence. Amen.'"

"It would no doubt be possible," said the Abbé Plomb, "to reproduce almost exactly the invocations of these Litanies by each stone thus interpreted." And he reopened the book his friend the priest had just closed.

"See," he went on, "how close is the concordance between the epithets in the sentences and the quality assigned to the gems.

"Does not the emerald, which in this sequence is emblematical of incorruptible purity, reflect in the sparkling mirror of its water the Mater Purissima of the Litanies to the Virgin? Is not the chrysolite, the symbol of wisdom, a very exact image of the Sedes Sapientiae? The jacinth, attribute of charity and succour vouchsafed to sinners, is appropriate to the Auxilium Christianorum and the refugium peccatorum of the prayers. Is not the diamond, which means strength and patience, the Virgo potens?—the carbuncle, meaning fame, the Virgo praedicanda?—the chrysoprase, for fervour, the Vas insigne devotionis?

"And it is probable," said the Abbé, in conclusion, as he laid the book down, "that if we took the trouble we could rediscover one by one, in this rosary of stones, the whole rosary of praise which we tell in honour of Our Mother."

"Above all," remarked Durtal, "if we did not restrict ourselves to the narrow limits of this poem, for Conrad's manual is brief, and his dictionary of analogies small; if we accepted the interpretations of other symbolists, we could produce a ring similar to his and yet quite different,

for the language of the gems would not be the same. Thus to St. Bruno of Asti, the venerable Abbot of Monte Cassino, the jasper symbolizes Our Lord, because it is immutably green, eternal without possibility of change; and for the same reason the emerald is the image of the life of the righteous; the chrysoprase means good works; the diamond, infrangible souls; the sardonyx, which resembles the blood-stained seed of a pomegranate, is charity; the jacinth, with its varying blue, is the prudence of the saints; the beryl, whose hue is that of water running in the sunshine, figures the Scriptures elucidated by Christ; the chrysolite, attention and patience, because it has the colour of the gold that mingles in it and lends it its meaning; the amethyst, the choir of children and virgins, because the blue mixed in it with rose pink suggests the idea of innocence and modesty.

"Or, again, if we borrow from Pope Innocent III. his ideas as to the mystical meanings of gems, we find that chalcedony, which is pale in the light and sparkles in the dark, is synonymous with humility; the topaz with chastity and the merit of good works, while the chrysoprase, the queen of minerals, implies wisdom and watchfulness.

"If we do not go quite so far back into past ages, but stop at the end of the sixteenth century, we find some new interpretations in a Commentary on the Book of Exodus by Corneille de la Pierre; for he ascribes truth to the onyx and carbuncle, heroism to the beryl, and to the ligure, with its delicate and sparkling violet hue, scorn of the things of earth, and love of heavenly things."

"And then St. Ambrose regards this stone as emblematical of Eucharist," the Abbé Gévresin put in.