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The Cathedral

by J.-K. Huysmans · English · Gutenberg #15067 · 753,885 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Cathedral

Author: J.-K. Huysmans

Translator: Clara Bell


        
Release date: February 15, 2005 [eBook #15067]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CATHEDRAL ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Cori Samuel and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.






J.K. Huysmans


THE CATHEDRAL


Translated by Clara Bell


_Publishing History_
First published in France in 1898
First English edition in 1898




THE CATHEDRAL.




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.




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."




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!"


  [1] The English use of the word Ogee is thus defined: "An arch
  or moulding which displays sectionally contrasted curves similar
  to that of the _cyma reversa_." FAIRHOLT, "Dict. of Terms used in
  Art;" and PARKER, "A Concise Glossary of Terms used in
  Architecture."--[_Translator_.]




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.




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 homoeopathic pharmacopoeia 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.




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 t

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