"This picture, a work of marvellous beauty, with the 'Descent from the Cross' by Quentin Matsys, are the inestimable glory of the Belgium gallery; but I will not linger over a full description of this work; I will omit any reflection suggested by the supreme art of the painter, and restrict myself to recording that part of the work which bears on the symbolism of colour."

"But are you sure that Roger van der Weyden intended to ascribe such meanings to the colours?"

"It is impossible to doubt it, for he has assigned a different hue to each Sacrament, by introducing above the scenes he depicts, an angel whose robe is in each instance different in accordance with the ceremony set forth. His meaning therefore is beyond question; and these are the colours he affects to the means of Grace consecrated by the Saviour:

"To the Eucharist, green; to Baptism, white; to Confirmation, yellow; to Penance, red; to Ordination, purple; to Marriage blue; to Extreme Unction, a violet so deep as to be almost black.

"Well, you will admit that the interpretation of this sacred scheme of colour is not altogether easy.

"The pictorial imagery of Baptism, Extreme Unction, and Ordination is quite clear; Marriage even as symbolized by blue may be intelligible to simple souls; that Communion should blazon its coat with vert, is even more appropriate, since green represents sap and humility, and is emblematical of the regenerative power. But ought not Confession to display violet rather than red; and how, in any case, are we to account for Confirmation being figured in yellow?"

"The colour of the Holy Ghost is certainly red," remarked the Abbe Plomb.

"Thus there are differences of interpretation between Angelico and Roger van der Weyden, though they lived at the same time. Still, the monk seems to me the more trustworthy authority."

"For my part," said the Abbe Gevresin, "I cannot but think of the right side of the lining of which you were speaking just now."

"This rule of contraries is not peculiar to the ritual of colour; it is to be seen in almost every part of the science of symbolism. Look at the emblems derived from the animal world; the eagle alternately figuring Christ and the Devil; the snake which, while it is one of the most familiar symbols of the Demon, may nevertheless, as in the brazen serpent of Moses, prefigure the Saviour."

"The anticipatory symbol of Christian symbolism was the double-faced Janus of the heathen world," said the Abbe Plomb, laughing.

"Indeed, these allegories of the palette turn completely to the right-about," said Durtal. "Take red, for instance: we have seen that in the general acceptation it is to be interpreted as meaning charity, endurance, and love. This is the right side out; the wrong side, according to Sister Emmerich, is dulness, and clinging to this world's goods.

"Grey, the emblem of repentance and sorrow, and at the same time the image of a lukewarm soul, is also, according to another interpretation, symbolical of the Resurrection—white, piercing through blackness—light entering into the Tomb and coming out as a new hue—grey, a mixed colour still heavy with the gloom of death, but reviving as it gets light by degrees from the whiteness of day.

"Green, to which the mystics gave favourable meanings, also acquires a disastrous sense in some cases; it then represents moral degradation and despair; it borrows melancholy significance from dead leaves, is the colour given to the bodies of the devils in Stephan Lochner's Last Judgment, and in the infernal scenes depicted in the glass windows and pictures of the earliest artists.

"Black and brown, with their inimical suggestions of death and hell, change their meaning as soon as the founders of religious Orders adopt them for the garb of the cloister. Black then symbolizes renunciation, repentance, the mortification of the flesh, according to Durand de Mende; and brown and even grey suggest poverty and humility.

"Yellow again, so misprized in the formulas of symbolism, becomes significant of charity; and if we accept the teaching of the English monk who wrote in about 1220, yellow is enhanced when it changes to gold, rising to be the symbol of divine Love, the radiant allegory of eternal Wisdom.

"Violet, finally, when it appears as the distinctive colour of prelates, divests itself of its usual meaning of self-accusation and mourning, to assume a certain dignity and simulate a certain pomp.

"On the whole, I find only white and blue which never change."

"In the Middle Ages, according to Yves de Chartres," said the Abbe Plomb, "blue took the place of violet in the vestments of bishops, to show them that they should give their minds rather to the things of Heaven than to the things of earth."

"And how is it," asked Madame Bavoil, "that this colour, which is all innocence, all purity, the colour of Our Mother Herself, has disappeared from among the liturgical hues?"

"Blue was used in the Middle Ages for all the services to the Virgin, and it has only fallen into desuetude since the eighteenth century," replied the Abbe Plomb; "and that only in the Latin Church, for the orthodox Churches of the East still wear it."

"And why this neglect?"

"I do not know, any more than I know why so many colours formerly used in our services have been forgotten. Where are the colours of the ancient Paris use: saffron yellow, reserved for the festival of All Angels; salmon pink, sometimes worn instead of red; ashen grey, which took the place of violet; and bistre instead of black on certain days.

"Then there was a charming hue which still holds its place in the scale of colour used in the Roman ritual, though most of the Churches overlook it—the shade called 'old rose,' a medium between violet and crimson, between grief and joy, a sort of compromise, a diminished tone, which the Church adopted for the third Sunday in Advent and the fourth Sunday in Lent. It thus gave promise, in the penitential season that was ending, of a beginning of gladness, for the festivals of Christmas and Easter were at hand.

"It was the idea of the spiritual dawn rising on the night of the soul, a special impression which violet, now used on those days, could not give."

"Yes, it is to be regretted that blue and rose-colour have disappeared from the Churches of the West," said the Abbe Gevresin. "But to return to the monastic dress which delivered brown, grey, and black from their melancholy significance, does it not strike you that from the point of view of emblematic language, that of the Order of the Annunciation was the most eloquent? Those sisters were habited in grey, white, and red, the colours of the Passion, and they also wore a blue cape and a black veil in memory of Our Mother's mourning."

"The image of a perpetual Holy Week!" exclaimed Durtal.

"Here is another question," the Abbe Plomb went on. "In the earliest religious pictures the cloaks in which the Virgin, the Apostles, and the Saints are draped almost always show the hue of their lining in ingeniously contrived folds. It is of course different from that of the outer side, as you yourself observed just now with regard to the mantle of Saint Agnes in Angelico's work. Now, do you suppose that, apart from contrast of colour selected for technical purposes, the monk meant to express any particular idea by the juxtaposition of the two colours?"

"In accordance with the symbolism of the palette the outer colour would represent the material creature, and the lining colour the spiritual being."

"Well, but then what is the significance of Saint Agnes' mantle of green lined with orange?"

"Obviously," replied Durtal, "green denoting freshness of feeling, the essence of good, hope; and orange, in its better meaning, being regarded as representing the act by which God unites Himself to man, we might conclude from these data that Saint Agnes had attained the life of union, the possession of the Saviour, by virtue of her innocence and the fervour of her aspirations. She would thus be the image of virtue yearning and fulfilled, of hope rewarded, in short.

"But now I must confess that there are many gaps, many obscurities in this allegorical lore of colours. In the picture in the Louvre, for instance, the steps of the throne, which are intended to play the part of veined marble, remain unintelligible. Splashed with dull red, acrid green, and bilious yellow, what do these steps express, suggesting as they do by their number the nine choirs of angels?"

"It seems to me difficult to allow that the monk intended to figure the celestial hierarchies by smears with a dirty brush and these crude streaks."

"But has the colour of a step ever represented an idea in the science of symbolism?" asked the Abbe Gevresin.

"Saint Mechtildis says so. When speaking of the three steps in front of the altar, she propounds that the first should be of gold, to show that it is impossible to go to God save by charity; the second blue, to signify meditation on things divine; the third green, to show eager hope and praise of Heavenly things."

"Bless me!" cried Madame Bavoil, who was getting somewhat scared by this discussion, "I never saw it in that light. I know that red means fire, as everybody knows; blue, the air; green, water; and black, the earth. And this I understand, because each element is shown in its true colour; but I should never have dreamed that it was so complicated, never have supposed that there was so much meaning in painters' pictures."

"In some painters'!" cried Durtal. "For since the Middle Ages the doctrine of emblematic colouring is extinct. At the present day those painters who attempt religious subjects are ignorant of the first elements of the symbolism of colours, just as modern architects are ignorant of the first principles of mystical theology as embodied in buildings."

"Precious gems are lavishly introduced in the works of the primitive painters," observed the Abbe Plomb. "They are set in the borders of dresses, in the necklets and rings of the female saints, and are piled in triangles of flame on the diadems with which painters of yore were wont to crown the Virgin. Logically, I believe we ought to seek a meaning in every gem as well as in the hues of the dresses."

"No doubt," said Durtal, "but the symbolism of gems is much confused. The reasons which led to the choice of certain stones to be the emblems, by their colour, water, and brilliancy, of special virtues, are so far-fetched and so little proven, that one gem might be substituted for another without greatly modifying the interpretation of the allegory they present. They form a series of synonyms, each replacing the other with scarcely a shade of difference.

"In the treasury of the Apocalypse, however, they seem to have been selected, if not with stricter meaning, with a more impressive breadth of application, for expositors regard them as coincident with a virtue, and likewise with the person endowed with it. Nay, these jewellers of the Bible have gone further; they have given every gem a double symbolism, making each embody a figure from the Old Testament and one from the New. They carry out the parallel of the two Books by selecting in each case a Patriarch and an Apostle, symbolizing them by the character more especially marked in both.

"Thus, the amethyst, the mirror of humility and almost childlike simplicity, is applied in the Bible to Zebulon, a man obedient and devoid of pride, and in the Gospel to St. Matthias, who also was gentle and guileless; the chalcedony, as an emblem of charity, was ascribed to Joseph, who was so merciful and pitiful to his brethren, and to St. James the Great, the first of the Apostles to suffer martyrdom for the love of Christ; the jasper, emblematical of faith and eternity, was the attribute of Gad and of St. Peter; the sard, meaning faith and martyrdom, was given to Reuben and St. Bartholomew; the sapphire, for hope and contemplation, to Naphtali and St. Andrew, and sometimes, according to Aretas, to St. Paul; the beryl, meaning sound doctrine, learning, and long-suffering, to Benjamin and to St. Thomas, and so forth. There is, indeed, a table of the harmony of gems and their application to patriarchs, apostles, and virtues, drawn up by Madame Felicie d'Ayzac, who has written an elaborate paper on the figurative meaning of gems."

"The avatar of some other Scriptural personages might be equally well carried out by these emblematical minerals," observed the Abbe Gevresin.

"Obviously; and as I warned you, the analogies are very far-fetched. The hermeneutics of gems are uncertain, and founded on mere fanciful resemblances, on the harmonies of ideas hard to assimilate. In mediaeval times this science was principally cultivated by poets."

"Against whom we must be on our guard," said the Abbe Plomb, "since their interpretations are for the most part heathenish. Marbode, for example, though he was a Bishop, has left us but a very pagan interpretation of the language of gems."

"These mystical lapidaries have on the whole chiefly applied, their ingenuity to explaining the stones of the breastplate of Aaron, and those that shine in the foundations of the New Jerusalem, as described by St. John; indeed, the walls of Sion are set with the same jewels as the High Priest's pectoral, with the exception of the carbuncle, the ligure, agate, and onyx, which are named in Exodus, and replaced in the Book of Revelation by chalcedony, sardonyx, chrysoprase, and jacinth."

"Yes, and the symbolist goldsmiths wrought diadems, setting them with precious stones, to crown Our Lady's brow; but their poems showed little variety, for they were all borrowed from the Libellus Corona Virginis, an apocryphal work ascribed to St. Ildefonso, and formerly famous in convents."

The Abbe Gevresin rose and took an old book from the shelf.

"That brings to my mind," said he, "a hymn in honour of the Virgin composed in rhyme by Conrad of Haimburg, a German monk in the fourteenth century. Imagine," he continued, as he turned over the pages, "a litany of gems, each verse symbolizing one of Our Mother's virtues.

"This prayer in minerals opens with a human greeting. The good monk, kneeling down, begins:—

"'Hail, noble Virgin, meet to become the Bride of the Supreme King! Accept this ring in pledge of that betrothal, O Mary!'

"And he shows Her the ring, turning it slowly in his fingers, explaining to Our Lady the meaning of each stone that shines in the gold setting; beginning with green jasper, symbolical of the faith which led the Virgin to receive the message of the angelic visitant; then comes the chalcedony, signifying the fire of charity that fills Her heart; the emerald, whose transparency signifies Her purity; the sardonyx, with its pale flame, like the placidity of Her virginal life; the red sard-stone, one with the Heart that bled on Calvary; the chrysolite, sparkling with greenish gold, reminding us of Her numberless miracles and Her Wisdom; the beryl, figurative of Her humility; the topaz, of Her deep meditations; the chrysoprase of Her fervency; the jacinth of Her charity; the amethyst, mingling rose and purple, of the love bestowed on Her by God and men; the pearl, of which the meaning remains vague, not representing any special virtue; the agate, signifying Her modesty; the onyx, showing the many perfections of Her grace; the diamond, for patience and fortitude in sorrow; while the carbuncle, like an eye that shines in the night, everywhere proclaims that Her glory is eternal.

"Finally the donor points out to the Virgin the interpretation of certain other matters set in the ring, which in the Middle Ages were regarded as precious: crystal, emblematic of chastity of body and soul; ligurite, resembling amber, more especially figurative of the quality of temperance; lodestone, which attracts iron, as She touches the chords of repentant hearts with the bow of her loving-kindness.

"And the monk ends his petition by saying: 'This little ring, set with gems, which we offer Thee as at this time, accept, glorious Bride, in Thy benevolence. Amen.'"

"It would no doubt be possible," said the Abbe Plomb, "to reproduce almost exactly the invocations of these Litanies by each stone thus interpreted." And he reopened the book his friend the priest had just closed.

"See," he went on, "how close is the concordance between the epithets in the sentences and the quality assigned to the gems.

"Does not the emerald, which in this sequence is emblematical of incorruptible purity, reflect in the sparkling mirror of its water the Mater Purissima of the Litanies to the Virgin? Is not the chrysolite, the symbol of wisdom, a very exact image of the Sedes Sapientiae? The jacinth, attribute of charity and succour vouchsafed to sinners, is appropriate to the Auxilium Christianorum and the refugium peccatorum of the prayers. Is not the diamond, which means strength and patience, the Virgo potens?—the carbuncle, meaning fame, the Virgo praedicanda?—the chrysoprase, for fervour, the Vas insigne devotionis?

"And it is probable," said the Abbe, in conclusion, as he laid the book down, "that if we took the trouble we could rediscover one by one, in this rosary of stones, the whole rosary of praise which we tell in honour of Our Mother."

"Above all," remarked Durtal, "if we did not restrict ourselves to the narrow limits of this poem, for Conrad's manual is brief, and his dictionary of analogies small; if we accepted the interpretations of other symbolists, we could produce a ring similar to his and yet quite different, for the language of the gems would not be the same. Thus to St. Bruno of Asti, the venerable Abbot of Monte Cassino, the jasper symbolizes Our Lord, because it is immutably green, eternal without possibility of change; and for the same reason the emerald is the image of the life of the righteous; the chrysoprase means good works; the diamond, infrangible souls; the sardonyx, which resembles the blood-stained seed of a pomegranate, is charity; the jacinth, with its varying blue, is the prudence of the saints; the beryl, whose hue is that of water running in the sunshine, figures the Scriptures elucidated by Christ; the chrysolite, attention and patience, because it has the colour of the gold that mingles in it and lends it its meaning; the amethyst, the choir of children and virgins, because the blue mixed in it with rose pink suggests the idea of innocence and modesty.

"Or, again, if we borrow from Pope Innocent III. his ideas as to the mystical meanings of gems, we find that chalcedony, which is pale in the light and sparkles in the dark, is synonymous with humility; the topaz with chastity and the merit of good works, while the chrysoprase, the queen of minerals, implies wisdom and watchfulness.

"If we do not go quite so far back into past ages, but stop at the end of the sixteenth century, we find some new interpretations in a Commentary on the Book of Exodus by Corneille de la Pierre; for he ascribes truth to the onyx and carbuncle, heroism to the beryl, and to the ligure, with its delicate and sparkling violet hue, scorn of the things of earth, and love of heavenly things."

"And then St. Ambrose regards this stone as emblematical of Eucharist," the Abbe Gevresin put in.

"Yes; but what is the ligure or ligurite?" asked Durtal. "Conrad of Haimburg speaks of it as resembling amber; Corneille de la Pierre believes it to be violet-tinted, and St. Jerome gives us to understand that it is not identifiable; in fact, that it is but another name for the jacinth, the image of prudence, with its water of blue like the sky and changing tints. How are we to make sure?"

"As to blue stones, we must not forget that St. Mechtildis regarded the sapphire as the very heart of the Virgin," observed the Abbe Plomb.

"We may also add," Durtal went on, "that a new set of variations on the subject of gems was executed in the seventeenth century by a celebrated Spanish Abbess, Maria d'Agreda, who applies to Our Mother the virtues of the precious stones spoken of by St. John in the twenty-first chapter of the Apocalypse. According to her, the sapphire figures the serenity of Mary; the chrysolite shows forth Her love for the Church Militant, and especially for the Law of Grace; the amethyst, Her power against the hordes of hell; the jasper, Her invincible fortitude; the pearl, Her inestimable dignity—"

"The pearl," interrupted the Abbe Plomb, "is regarded by St. Eucher as emblematic of perfection, chastity, and the evangelical doctrine."

"And all this time you are forgetting the meaning of other well-known gems," cried Madame Bavoil. "The ruby, the garnet, the aqua-marine; are they speechless?"

"No," replied Durtal. "The ruby speaks of tranquility and patience; the garnet, Innocent III. tells us, symbolizes charity. St. Bruno and St. Rupert say that the aqua-marine concentrates in its pale green fire all theological science. There yet remain two gems, the turquoise and the opal. The former, little esteemed by the mystics, is to promote joy. As to the second, of which the name does not occur in treatises on gems, it may be identified with chalcedony, which is described as a sort of agate of an opaque quality, dimmed with clouds and flashing fires in the shadows.

"To have done with this emblematical jewelry, we may add that the series of stones serves to symbolize the hierarchies of the angels. But here, again, the meanings commonly received are derived from more or less forced comparisons and a tissue of notions more or less flimsy and loose. However, it is so far established that the sard-stone suggests the Seraphim, the topaz the Cherubim, the jasper means the Thrones, the chrysolite figures the Dominions, the sapphire the Virtues, the onyx the Powers, the beryl the Principalities, the ruby the Archangels, and the emerald the Angels."

"And it is a curious fact," said the Abbe Plomb, "that while beasts, colours, and flowers are accepted by that symbolists sometimes with a good meaning and sometimes with an evil one, gems alone never change; they always express good qualities, and never vices."

"Why is that?"

"St. Hildegarde perhaps affords a clue to this stability when, in the fourth book, of her treatise on Physics, she says that the Devil hates them, abhors and scorns them, because he remembers that their splendour shone in him before his fall, and that some of them are the product of the fire that is his torment.

"And the saint added, 'God, who deprived him of them, would not that the stones should lose their virtues; He desired, on the contrary, that they should ever be held in honour, and used in medicine to the end that sickness should be cured and ills driven out.' And, in fact, in the Middle Ages they were highly esteemed and used to effect cures."

"To return to those early pictures," said the Abbe Gevresin, "in which the Virgin emerges like a flower from amid the gorgeous assemblage of gems, it may be said as a general thing, that the glow of jewels declares by visible signs the merits of Her who wears them; but it would be difficult to say what the painter's purpose may have been when, in the decoration of a crown or a dress, he placed any particular stone in one spot rather than another. It is, as a rule, a question of taste or harmony, and has nothing, or very little, to do with symbolism."

"Of that there can be no doubt," said Durtal, who rose and took leave, as Madame Bavoil, hearing the cathedral clock strike, handed to the two priests their hats and breviaries.



CHAPTER VIII.

The somewhat dolefully calm frame of mind in which Durtal had been living since settling at Chartres came to a sudden end. One day ennui made him its prey, the black possession which would allow him neither to work, nor to read, nor to pray; so overwhelming that he knew not whither to turn nor what to do.

After spending dark and futile days in lounging round his library, taking down a volume and shutting it up again, opening another of which he failed to master a single page, he tried to escape from the weariness of the hours by taking walks, and he determined finally to study the town of Chartres.

He found a number of blind alleys and break-neck steeps, such as the road down the knoll of St. Nicolas, which tumbles from the top of the town to the bottom in a precipitous flight of steps; and then the Boulevard des Filles-Dieu, so lonely with its walks planted with trees, was worthy of his notice. Starting from the Place Drouaise, he came to a little bridge where the waters meet of the two branches of the Eure; to the right, above the eddying current and the buildings on the shore, he could see the pile of the old town shouldering up the cathedral; to the left, all along the quay, and looking out on the tall poplars that fanned the water-mills, were saw-mills and timber-yards, the washing places where laundresses knelt on straw in troughs, and the water foamed before them in widening inky circles splashed into white bubbles by the dip of a bird's wing.

This arm of the river diverted into the moat of the old ramparts, encircled Chartres, bordered on one side by the trees of the alleys, and on the other by cottages with terraced gardens down to the level of the stream, the two banks joined by foot-bridges of planks or cast iron arches.

Near where the Porte Guillaume uplifted its crenelated towers like raised pies, there were houses that looked as if they had been gutted, displaying, as in the vanished cagnards or vaults of the Hotel Dieu at Paris, cellars open on the level of the water, paved basements in whose depths of prison twilight stone steps could be seen; and on going out through the Porte Guillaume across a little humpbacked bridge, under the archway still showing the groove in which the portcullis had worked which was let down of yore to defend this side of the town, he came upon yet another arm of the river washing the feet of more houses, playing at hide and seek in the courts, musing between walls; and at once he was haunted by the recollection of another river just like this, with its decoction of walnut hulls frothed with bubbles; and to contribute to the suggestion, the more clearly to evoke a vision of the dismal Bievre, the rank, acrid, pungent smell of tan, steeped, as it were, in vinegar, came up in fumes from this broth of medlar juice brought down by the Eure.

The Bievre, a prisoner now in the sewers of Paris, seemed to have escaped from its dungeon and to have taken refuge at Chartres that it might live in the light of day; winding by the Rues de la Foulerie, de la Tannerie, du Massacre, the quarters invaded by the leather-dressers, the skinners and tan-peat makers.

But the Parisian environment, so pathetic in its aspect of silent suffering, was absent from this town; these streets suggested merely a declining hamlet, a poverty-stricken village. He felt something lacking in this second Bievre, the fascination of exhaustion, the grace of the woman of Paris faded and smirched by misery; it lacked the charm compounded of pity and regret, of a fallen creature.

Such as they were, however, these streets, traced with a sort of descending twist round the hill on which the cathedral stood exalted, were the only curious by-ways of Chartres worth wandering through.

Here Durtal often succeeded in getting out of himself, in dreaming over the distressful weariness of these streams, and in ceasing to meditate on his own qualms, till he presently was tired of constant excursions in the same quarter of the town, and then he tramped through it in every direction, trying to find an interest in the sight of time-worn spots—the grace of Queen Berthe's tower, of Claude Huve's house and other buildings that have survived the shock of ages; but the enthusiasm he threw into the study of these relics, spoilt by the foregone eulogiums of the guides, could not last, and he then fell back on the churches.

Although the cathedral crushed everything near it, Saint-Pierre, the ancient Abbey church of a Benedictine monastery, now used as barracks, deserved a lingering visit for the sake of its splendid windows, the dwelling-place of Abbots and Bishops who look down with stern eyes, holding up their croziers. And these windows, damaged by time, were very singular. Upright, in each lancet-shaped setting of white glass, rose a sword-blade bereft of its point; and in these square-tipped blades Saint Benedict and Saint Maur stood lost in thought, with Apostles and Popes, Prelates and Saints, standing out in robes of flame against the luminous whiteness of the borders.

Certainly Chartres could show the finest glass windows in the world; and each century had left its noblest stamp on its sanctuaries: the twelfth, thirteenth, and even the fifteenth, on the cathedral; the fourteenth on Saint Pierre; and a few examples—unfortunately broken up and used in a medley mosaic—of painted glass of the sixteenth century in Saint Aignan, another church where the vaulted roof had been washed of the colour of gingerbread speckled with anise-seed, by painters of our own day.

Durtal got through a few afternoons in these churches; then the charm of this prolonged study was at an end, and gloom took possession of him, even worse than before.

The Abbe Plomb, to divert his mind, took him for walks in the country, but La Beauce was so flat, so monotonous, that any variety of landscape was impossible to find. Then the Abbe took him through other parts of the town. Some of the buildings claimed their attention, as, for instance, the House of Detention, in the Rue-Sainte-Therese near the Palais de Justice. The edifices themselves were not, indeed, very impressive, but the history of their origin made them available as the fulcrum for old dreams. There was something in the prison walls, in their height and austerity, in their look of order and precision, which made the cloister wall of a Carmel look small. They had, in fact, of old, sheltered a Sisterhood of that Order, and a few steps further on, in a blind alley, was the entrance to the ancient convent of the Jacobins, the Mother-House of the great Sisterhood of Chartres: the Nursing Sisters of Saint Paul.

The Abbe Plomb took him to visit this house, and he retained a cheerful impression of the walk in the fresh air on the old ramparts. The Sisters had kept up the sentry's walk, which followed a long and narrow avenue with a statue of the Virgin at each end, one representing the Immaculate Conception, the other the Virgin Mother. And this walk, strewn with river-pebbles and edged with flowers, shut in on one side by the Abbey and the novices' schools, on the left overlooked a precipice down to the Butte des Charbonniers, and below that again, the Rue de la Couronne; while beyond lay the grass lawns of the Clos Saint Jean, the line of the railroad, labourers' hovels, and convent buildings.

"There you see," said the Abbe, "behind the embankment of the Western Railway stands the Convent of the Sisters of Our Lady and of the Carmelites; here, nearer to the town on this side of the line, are the Little Sisters of the Poor."

And indeed the place swarmed with convents: Sisters of the Visitation, Sisters of Providence, Sisters of Good Comfort, Ladies of the Sacred Heart, all lived in hives close round Chartres. Prayer hummed up on every side, rising as the fragrant breath of souls above a city where, by way of divine service, nothing was chanted but the price-current of grain and the higher and lower cost of horses in the fairs which, on certain days, brought all the copers of La Perche together in the cafes on the Place.

Besides this walk on the old ramparts, the Convent of the Sisters of Saint Paul was attractive by reason of its quiet and cleanliness. Down silent passages the backs of the good women might be seen crossed by the triangular fold of linen, and the click could be heard of their heavy black rosaries on links of copper, as they rattled on their skirts against the hanging bunch of keys. Their chapel was redolent of Louis XIV., at once childish and pompous, too much bedizened with gold, and the floor too shiny with wax; but there was an interesting detail: at the entrance large panes of glass had been substituted for the walls, so that in winter the sick, sitting in a warm room, could look through the glass partition and follow the services and hear the plain song of Solesmes which the Sisters had the good taste to use.

This visit revived Durtal's spirit; but he inevitably compared the peaceful hours told out in that retreat with others, and his disgust was increased for this town, and its inhabitants, and its avenues, and its boasted Place des Epars, aping a little Versailles, with its surrounding blatant mansions, and its ridiculous statue of Marceau in the middle.

And then the limpness of the place, hardly awake by sunrise and asleep again by dusk!

Once only did Durtal see it really awake, and that was on the day when Monseigneur Le Tilloy des Mofflaines was enthroned as Bishop.

Then suddenly the city was galvanized; projects were made, the various bodies corporate sat in committee, and men came forth who had lived within doors for years.

Scaffold poles were brought out from the masons' yards; blue and yellow flags were hoisted on them, and these masts were linked together by garlands of ivy-leaves sewn one over the other with white cotton.

Then Chartres was exhausted, and paused for breath.

Durtal, startled by these unexpected preparations and such an assumption of life, had gone out to meet the Bishop, as far as to the Rue Saint Michel. There, on the open square, a gymnastic apparatus had been erected, the swing bars and rings having been removed, and the poles garnished with pine branches and gilt paper rosettes, and surmounted by a trophy of tricolour flags arranged in a fan behind a painted cardboard shield. This was an arch of triumph, and under this the Brethren of the Christian Schools were to escort the canopy.

The procession, which had gone forth to fetch the Bishop from the Hospice of Saint Brice, where, in obedience to time-honoured custom, he had slept the night before entering his See, had made its way thither under a fine rain of chanted canticles, broken by heavier showers of brass sounding a pious flourish of trumpets. Slowly, with measured steps, the train wound along between two hedges of people crowded on the sidewalks, and all the way the windows, hung with drapery, displayed bunches of faces and leaning bodies, cut across the middle by the balcony bar.

At the head of the procession, behind the gaudy uniforms of the ponderous beadles, came the girls of the Congregational Schools, dressed in crude blue with white veils, in two ranks, filling up the roadway; then followed delegates of nuns from every Order that has a House in the diocese; Sisters of the Visitation from Dreux, Ladies of the Sacred Heart from Chateaudun, Sisters of the Immaculate Conception from Nogent le Rotrou, the uncloistered Sisters of the Cloistered Orders of Chartres, Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul and Poor Clares, whose dresses of blueish grey and peat-brown contrasted with the black robes of the others.

What was most odd was the various shapes of their coifs. Some had soft flapping blinkers, others wore them goffered and stiffened with starch; these hid their face at the bottom of a deep white tunnel; others, on the contrary, showed their countenance set in an oval frame of pleated cambric, prolonged behind into conical wings of starched linen lustrous from heavy irons. As he looked over this expanse of caps, Durtal was reminded of the Paris landscape of roofs, in shapes resembling the funnels worn by these nuns and the cocked hats of the beadles.

Then, behind these long files of sober-coloured garments, the scarlet vestments of the choirs came like the blare of trumpets. The little ones marched with downcast eyes, their arms crossed under their red capes edged with ermine, and behind them, a little in advance of the next group, walked two white cowls, that of a Brother of Picpus, and that of a Trappist who represented the Trappist Sisterhood of La Cour Peytral, to which he was chaplain.

Finally the Seminarists came on in a black crowd; those of the Great Seminary of Chartres and of the Little Seminary of Saint Cheron preceding the priests, and behind them, under a purple velvet canopy embroidered in gold with wheat ears and grapes, and decorated at each corner with bunches of snow-white feathers, with his mitre on his head and holding his crozier, came Monseigneur Le Tilloy des Mofflaines.

As he passed, in the act of blessing the street, many an unknown Lazarus rose up, the forgotten dead come back to life; His Reverence seemed to multiply the Miracles of the Lord. Effete old men, huddled in their chairs in the doorways or at the windows, revived for a second, and found strength enough to cross themselves. Persons who had been supposed dead for years managed almost to smile. The vacant eyes of old, old children gazed at the violet cross outlined in the air by the Prelate's gloved hand. Chartres, that city of the dead, had changed to a vast nursery; in the extravagance of its joy the town was in its second childhood.

But as soon as the Bishop was past the scene changed. Durtal was startled, and he tittered.

A whole "Court of Miracles" seemed to follow in the Prelate's train, strutting but tottering; a procession of old wrecks, dressed out in such garments as are sold from the dead-house, staggered along holding each other's arms, propped one against another. Every reach-me-down that had been hanging these twenty years flapped about their limbs, hindering their progress. Trousers with baggy ankles or with gaiter tops, balloon-shaped or close-fitting, made of loose-woven stuff or so shrunk that they would not meet the boot, displaying feet where the elastic sides wriggled like living vermin, and ankles covered with vermicelli dipped in ink; then the most impossibly threadbare and discoloured coats, made, as it seemed, of old billiard cloths, of tarpaulin worn to the canvas, of cast-off awnings; overcoats of cast iron, the surface worn off the back-seam and sleeves—glaucous waistcoats, sprigged with flowers and furnished with buttons of dry brawn-parings; and all this was as nothing; what was prodigious, beyond the bounds of belief, fabulous, positively insane, was the collection of hats that crowned these costumes.

The specimens of extinct headgear, lost in the night of ages, that were collected here! The veterans wore muff-boxes and gas-pipes; some had tall white hats, for all the world like toilet-pails turned upside down, or huge spigots with a hole for the head; others had donned felt hats like sponges, shaggy, long-haired Bolivars, melons on flat brims just like a tart on a dish; others, again, had crush-hats, which swayed and played the accordion on their own account, their ribs showing through the stuff.

The craziness of the gibus hats beats description. Some were very tall, the shaft crowned with a platform larger than the head, like the shako of an Imperial Lancer; others very low, ending in an inverted cone—the mouth of a blunderbuss or a Polish schapska.

And under this Sanhedrim of drunken hats were the mopping, wrinkled faces of very old men, with whiskers like white rabbits' paws, and bristles like tooth-brushes in their nostrils.

Durtal shook with inextinguishable laughter at this carnival of antiquities; but his mirth was soon over; he saw two Little Sisters of the Poor who were in charge of this school of fossils, and he understood. These poor creatures were dressed in clothes that had been begged, the rummage of wardrobes, for which the owners had no further use. Then the queerness of their outfit was pathetic; the Little Sisters must have been at infinite trouble to utilize these leavings of charity; and the old children, recking little of fashion, plumed themselves with pride at being so fine.

Durtal followed to the cathedral. When he reached the little square, the procession, caught by a gale of wind, was struggling and clinging to the banners, which bellied like the sails of a ship, carrying on the men who clutched the poles. At last, more or less easily, all the people were swallowed up in the basilica. The Te Deum was pouring out in a torrent from the organ. At this moment it really seemed as though, under the impulsion of this glorious hymn, the church, springing heavenward in a rapturous flight, were rising higher and higher; the echo resounded down the ages, repeating the hymn of triumph which had so often been sung under that roof; and for once the music was in harmony with the building, and spoke the language which the cathedral had learnt in its infancy.

Durtal was exultant. It seemed to him that Our Lady smiled down from those glowing windows, that She was touched by these accents, created by the saints she had loved, to embody for ever, in a definite melody, and in unique words, the scattered praise of the faithful, the unformulated rejoicing of the multitude.

Suddenly his exalted mood was sobered. The Te Deum was ended; a roll of drums and a clarion flourish rang out from the transept. And while the brass band of Chartres cannonaded the old walls with the balista of mere noise, he fled to breathe away from the crowd, which, however, did not nearly fill the church; and then, after the ceremony, he went to see the parade of representatives of the various institutions in the town, who came to pay their respects to the new Bishop in his palace.

There he could laugh and not be ashamed. The forecourt was packed full of priests. All the superiors of the different Archdeaconries—Chartres, Chateaudun, Nogent le Rotrou, and Dreux—had left there, within the great gate, their following of parish priests and cures, who were pacing round and round the green circus of a grass plot.

The big-wigs of the town, not at all less ridiculous than the pensioners of the Little Sisters of the Poor, crowded in, driving the ecclesiastics into the garden walks. Teratology seemed to have emptied out its specimen bottles; it was a seething swarm of human larvae, of strange heads—bullet-shaped, egg-shaped, faces as seen through a bottle or in a distorting mirror, or escaped from one of Redon's grotesque albums; a perfect museum of monsters on the move. The stagnation of monotonous toil, handed down for generations from father to son in a city of the dead, was stamped on every face, and the Sunday-best festivity of the day added a touch of the absurd to hereditary ugliness.

Every black coat in Chartres had come out to take the air. Some dated from the days of the Directory, swallowed up the wearer's neck, climbed up high behind the nape, muffled the ears and padded the shoulders; others had shrunk by lying in the drawer, and their sleeves, much too short, cut the wearer round the armholes so that he dared not move.

A miasma of benzine and camphor exhaled from these groups. The clothes, only that morning taken out of pickle to be aired by the good wife, were pestilential. The stove-pipe hats were to match. Left to themselves on wardrobe shelves, they had surely grown taller; they towered immense, displaying on their mill-board column a thin covering of hairs.

This assembly of worthies admired and congratulated each other; clasped hands encased in white gloves—gloves scoured with paraffin, cleaned with indiarubber or breadcrumb. Presently a retiring wave cleared a space in the crowd of priests and laymen, who shrank back hat in hand to make way for an old hearse of a landau, drawn by a consumptive horse and driven by a sort of Moudjik, a coachman with a puffy face behind a thicket of hair sprouting on his cheeks and his mouth, in his ears and nose. This vehicle came to an anchor before the front steps, and out of it stepped a fat man, blown out like a bladder and buttoned up in an uniform with silver lace; after him came a thinner personage in a coat with facings of dark and light blue, and everybody bowed to the Prefet attended by one of his three Councillors.

They had lifted their plumed cocked hats, distributed a dole of hand-shaking, and vanished into the vestibule when the army made its appearance, represented by a Colonel of Cuirassiers, some officers of the Artillery and the Commissariat, a few subalterns of Infantry, and one gendarme.

This was all.

Within an hour of this reception the exhausted town was asleep again, not having energy enough even to remove the poles; Lazarus had gone back to his sepulchre, the resuscitated antiquities had relapsed into death; the streets were empty; reaction had ensued; Chartres would be exhausted for months by this outbreak.

"What a sty it is! What a hole!" cried Durtal to himself.

On certain days, tired of spending his afternoons shut up with his books or of attending service in the cathedral, hearing the canons languidly playing rackets from side to side of the choir with the Psalms, of which they tossed the verses to and fro in a mumbling tone, he would go down after dinner and smoke cigarettes in the little Place. At Chartres, eight o'clock in the evening was as three in the morning in any other town; every light was out, every house closed.

The priesthood, eager for bed, had shut up shop. No prayers to the Virgin, no Benediction, nothing in this cathedral! At such an hour, kneeling in the dark, you feel as if the Mother were more immediately present, nearer, more intimately your own; but these moments of confidence, when it is easier to tell Her all your trivial woes, were unknown at Notre Dame. No one was worn out by midnight prayer in that church!

But though he could not go in, Durtal could prowl round and about it. And then, scarcely seen by the light of the poverty-stricken lamps standing here and there on the square, the cathedral assumed strange aspects. The portals yawned as caverns full of blackness, and the outer shape of the body of the building, from the towers to the apse, with its abutments and buttresses merely guessed at in the dark, stood up like a cliff worn away by invisible waves. It might have been a mountain, its summit jagged by storms, eaten into deep caverns at the foot by a vanished ocean; and on going nearer he could in the gloom imagine ill-defined paths steeply running up the cliff, or winding on shelves at the edge of a rock; and, occasionally, midway on one of these dark paths, some white statue of a Bishop would start forth under a moonbeam, like a ghost haunting the ruins, and blessing all comers with uplifted fingers of stone.

These wanderings in the precincts of the cathedral, which by daylight was so light and slender, and in the dark seemed so ponderous and threatening, were ill-adapted to cure Durtal of his melancholy.

This illusion of rocks riven by the lightning, of caverns deserted by the waves, plunged him into fresh reveries, and at last threw him back on himself, ending, after many divagations of mind, in the contemplation of the ruin within him. Then once more he sounded his soul, and tried to reduce his thoughts to some sort of order.

"I am simply bored to death," said he to himself, "and why?" And by dint of analyzing his condition he came to this conclusion: "My state of boredom is not simple but two-fold; or, if it is indeed all of a piece, it may be divided into two very distinct phases: I am bored by myself, independently of place, of home, of books; and I am also bored by provincial life—the special form of boredom inherent in Chartres.

"Bored by myself—ah, yes, most heartily! How tired I am of watching myself, of trying to detect the secret of my disgust and contentiousness. When I contemplate my life I could sum it up thus: the past has been horrible; the present seems to me feeble and desolate; the future—is appalling."

He paused, and then went on,—

"During my first days here I was happy in the dream suggested by this cathedral. I believed it would re-act on my life, that it would people the solitude I felt within me, that it would, in a word, be a help to me in this provincial atmosphere. But I beguiled myself. In fact, it still weighs on me, it still holds me wrapped in the mild gloom of its crypt; but I can now reason about it, I can scrutinize its details, I try to talk to it of art, and in these inquiries I have lost the unreasoning sense of its environment, the silent fascination of the whole.

"I am less conscious now of its soul than of its body. I tried to study archaeology, that contemptible anatomy of building, and I have fallen humanly in love with its beauty; the spiritual aspect has vanished, to leave nothing behind but the earthly part. Alas! I was determined to see, and I have wrecked trust; it is the eternal allegory of Psyche over again!

"And besides—besides—is not the weariness that is crushing me to some extent the fault of the Abbe Gevresin? By compelling me to much repetition he has exhausted in me the soothing and, at the same time, subversive virtue of the Sacrament; and the most evident result of this treatment is that my soul has collapsed and has no spirit to reinvigorate it.

"No, no," he went on presently. "Here I am working back on my perennial presumption, my incessant round of cares; and once more I am unjust to the Abbe. But it is certainly no fault of his if frequent Communion makes me cold. I look for sensations; but the very first thing should be to convince myself that such cravings are contemptible, and next, to understand clearly that it is precisely because Communion is so frigid that it is the more meritorious and virtuous, yes, that is very easy to say; but where is the Catholic who prefers such coldness to a glow? The saints may, no doubt; but even they suffer under it! It is so natural to entreat God for a little joy, to look forward to an Union consummated by a loving word, a sign—a mere nothing that may show that He is present.

"Say what they may, we cannot help being pained by a dead absorption of that living bread! And it is very hard to admit that Our Lord is wise when He keeps us in ignorance of the ills from which it preserves us and the progress it enables us to make, since, but for that, we might be defenceless against the attacks of self-conceit and the assaults of vanity—helpless against ourselves.

"In short, whatever the reason, I am no better off at Chartres than in Paris," was his conclusion. And when these reflections beset him, especially on Sundays, he regretted having accompanied the Abbe Gevresin into the country.

In Paris, in old days, he at any rate got through the hours at the services. He could attend Mass in the morning at the Benedictine chapel or at Saint Severin, and go to Saint Sulpice for vespers or compline.

Here there was nothing; and yet where were there more promising conditions for the performance of Gregorian music than at Chartres?

Setting aside a few antiquated basses who could only bark, and whom it would be necessary to dismiss, there was a whole sheaf of rich young voices, a school of nearly a hundred boys who could have rolled out in clear, sweet tones the broad melodies of the old plain-song.

But in this ill-starred cathedral an inept precentor gave out, by way of liturgical canticles, a perfect menagerie of outlandish tunes, which, let loose on Sunday, seemed to scamper like marmosets up the pillars and under the roof. And the artless voices of the choir-boys were drilled to these musical monkey-tricks. At Chartres it was impossible to attend High Mass in the cathedral with any decent devotion.

The other services were not much better; indeed, Durtal was reduced to attending vespers at Notre Dame de la Breche, in the lower town, a chapel where the priest, a friend of the Abbe Plomb, had introduced the use of Solesmes, and patiently trained a little choir composed of faithful working-men and pious boys.

The voices, especially the trebles, were not first-rate; but the priest, being a skilled musician, had contrived to train and soften them, and had, in fact, succeeded in getting the Benedictine art accepted in his church.

Unfortunately it was so ugly, so painfully adorned with images, that only by shutting his eyes could Durtal endure to remain in Notre Dame de la Breche.

In the midst of this surge of reflections on his soul, on Paris, on the Eucharist, on music, on Chartres, Durtal was at last quite bewildered, not knowing where he was. Now and then, however, he recovered some tranquillity, and then he was astonished at himself, he could not understand himself.

"Why regret Paris—why, indeed?" he would ask himself. "Was the life I led there unlike that I lead here? Were not the churches there—Notre Dame de Paris, to name but one—just as much to be execrated for sacrilegious bravuras as Notre Dame de Chartres? On the other hand, I never went out there to lounge in the tiresome streets; I saw nobody but the Abbe Gevresin and Madame Bavoil, and I see them still, and oftener, in this town. I have even gained a friend by the move, a learned and agreeable companion, in the Abbe Plomb. So why?"

And then one morning, unexpectedly, every thing was plain to him. He saw quite clearly that he was on the wrong track, and without even seeking for it he found the right one.

To discover the unknown source of his flaccid longing for he knew not what, and his inexplicable dissatisfaction, he had only to look back a little way and pause at La Trappe. He saw now everything had begun there. Having reached that culminating point of his retrospect, he could, as it were, stand on a height and command a view of the declining years since he had left the monastery; and now, gazing at that descending panorama of his life, he discerned this:—

That from the time of his return to Paris a craving for the cloister had been incessantly permeating his being; he had unremittingly cherished the dream of retiring from the world, of living peacefully as a recluse near to God.

He had, to be sure, only thought of it definitely in the form of impossible longings and regrets, for he knew full well that neither was his body strong enough nor his soul staunch enough for him to bury himself as a Trappist. Still, once started from that spring-board, his imagination flew off at a tangent, overleaped every obstacle, floated in discursive reveries where he saw himself as a Friar in some easy-going convent under the rule of a merciful Order, devoted to liturgies and adoring art.

He could but shrug his shoulders, indeed, when he came back to himself, and smile at these dreams of the future which he indulged in hours of vacuous idleness; but this self-contempt of a man who catches himself in the very act of flagrant nonsense was nevertheless succeeded by the hope of not losing all the advantages of an honest delusion; and he could remount on a chimera which he thought less wild, as leading to a via media, a compromise, fancying that by moderating his ideal he should find it more attainable.

He assured himself that, in default of a really conventual life, he might perhaps achieve an illusory imitation of it by avoiding the turmoil of Paris and burying himself in a hole. And he now saw that he had completely cheated himself when, on discussing the question as to whether he should leave Paris and go to settle at Chartres, he had believed that he was yielding to the Abbe Gevresin's arguments and Madame Bavoil's urgency.

Certainly, without admitting it, without accounting for it, he had really acted on the prompting of this cherished dream. Would not Chartres be a sort of monastic haven, of open cloister, where he could enjoy his liberty and not have to give up his comforts? Would it not, at any rate, for lack of an unattainable hermitage, be a sop thrown to his desires; and supposing he could succeed in reducing his too exorbitant demands, give him the final repose and peace for which he had yearned ever since his return from La Trappe?

And nothing of all this had been realized. The unsettled feeling he had experienced in Paris had pursued him to Chartres. He was, as it were, on the march, or perched on a bough; he could not feel at home, but as a man lingering on in furnished rooms, whence he must presently depart.

In short, he had deluded himself when he had fancied that a man might make a cell of a solitary room in silent surroundings; the religious jog-trot in a provincial atmosphere had no resemblance to the life of a monastery. There was no illusion or suggestion of the convent.

This check, when he recognized it, added to the ardour or his regrets; and the distress which in Paris had lurked latent and ill-defined, developed at Chartres clear and unmistakable.

Then began an unremitting struggle with himself.

The Abbe Gevresin, whom he consulted, would only smile and treat him as in a novices' school or a seminary a youthful postulant is treated who confesses to deep melancholy and persistent weariness. His malady is not taken seriously; he is told that all his companions suffer the same temptations, the same qualms; he is sent away comforted, while his superiors seem to be laughing at him.

But at the end of a little time this method no longer succeeded. Then the Abbe was firm with Durtal, and one day, when his penitent was bemoaning himself, he replied,—

"It is an attack you must get over," and then he added lightly after a silence, "And it will not be the last or the worst."

At this Durtal turned restive; the Abbe, however, drove him to bay, wanting to make him confess how senseless his struggles were.

"The idea of the cloister haunts you," said he. "Well, then, what is there to hinder you? Why do you not retire to a Trappist convent?"

"You know very well that I am not strong enough to endure the rule."

"Then become an oblate; go to join Monsieur Bruno at Notre Dame de l'Atre."

"No, indeed, not that, at any rate. To be an oblate at La Trappe is the same thing as remaining at Chartres! It is a mere half-measure. Monsieur Bruno will always remain a boarder; he will never be a monk. He gets all the disadvantages of the cloister, and none of the benefits."

"But there are other monasteries besides those of La Trappe," replied the Abbe. "Be a Benedictine Father or oblate, a black Friar. Their rule seems to be mild; you will live in a world of learned men and writers; what more would you have?"

"I do not say—but—"

"But what?"

"I know nothing of them—"

"Nothing can be easier than to get to know them. The Abbe Plomb is a welcome friend at Solesmes. He can give all the introductions you can wish to that convent."

"Good; that is worth thinking about. I will consult the Abbe," said Durtal, rising to take leave of the old priest.

"The Black Dog is troubling you, our friend," observed Madame Bavoil, who had overheard the two men's conversation from the next room, the door between being open; and she came in, her breviary in her hand.

"Ah, ha!" she went on, looking at him over her spectacles, "do you suppose that by moving your soul from place to place you can change it? Your trouble is neither in the air nor outside you, but within you. On my word, to hear you talk, one might fancy that by travelling from one spot to another every discord could be avoided, that a man could escape from himself! Nothing can be more false. Ask the Father—"

And when Durtal, smiling awkwardly, was gone, Madame Bavoil questioned her master.

"What is really the matter with him?"

"He is being broken by the ordeal of dryness," replied the priest. "He is enduring a painful but not dangerous operation. So long as he preserves a love of prayer, and neglects none of his religious exercises, all will be well. That is the touchstone which enables us to discern whether such an attack is sent from Heaven."

"But, Father, he must at any rate be comforted."

"I can do nothing but pray for him."

"Another question: our friend is possessed by the notion of a monastic life; perhaps you ought to send him to a convent."

The Abbe gave an evasive shrug.

"Dryness of spirit and the dreams to which it gives rise are not the sign of a vocation," said he. "I might even say that they have a greater chance of thriving than of diminishing in the cloister. From that point of view conventual life might be bad for him. Still, that is not the only question to be considered—there is something else—and besides, who knows?" He was silent, and presently added: "Much may be possible. Give me my hat, Madame Bavoil. I will go and talk over Durtal with the Abbe Plomb."



CHAPTER IX.

This discussion had been of use to Durtal; it took him out of the generalities over which he had persistently mused since his arrival at Chartres. The Abbe had, in fact, shown him his bearings, and pointed out a navigable channel leading to a definite end, a haven familiar to all. The monastery which had lingered in Durtal's fancy as a mere confused picture, apart from time, without place or date, deriving nothing from his memories of La Trappe but the sense of discipline, and on to which he had at once engrafted the fancy of an abbey of a more literary and artistic stamp, governed by a conciliatory rule, in a milder atmosphere—that ideal retreat, half borrowed from reality and half the fabric of a dream—was taking shape. By speaking of an Order that existed, mentioning it by name and actually specifying a House under its rule, the Abbe had given Durtal substantial food instead of the argumentative wordiness of a mania; he had afforded him something better to chew than the empty air on which he had fed so long.

The state of uncertainty and indecision he had been living in was at end; his choice now lay between remaining at Chartres or retiring to Solesmes; and at once, without delay, he set to work to read and reconsider the works of Saint Benedict.

This rule, summed up more particularly in a series of paternal injunctions and affectionate advice, was a marvel of gentleness and tactfulness. Every craving of the soul was described, every misery of the body foreseen. It knew so precisely how to ask much and yet not to exact too much, that it had yielded without breaking, satisfied the movements of different ages, and remained, in the nineteenth century what it had been in mediaeval times.

Then how merciful, how wise it was when addressing itself to the feeble and infirm. "The sick shall be served as though they were Christ in person," says Saint Benedict; and his anxiety for his sons, his urgent recommendations to the Superiors to love and visit the younger brethren, to neglect nothing that may assuage their ills, reveals a maternal care that is truly touching on the patriarch's part.

"Yes, yes," muttered Durtal, "but there are in this rule other articles which seem less acceptable to miscreants of my stamp. This, for instance: 'No man shall dare to give or to receive anything without the Abbot's permission, or to have or hold anything as his own—absolutely nothing, neither book, nor tablets, nor pointer—in a word, nothing whatever, inasmuch as they are not allowed to call even their body or their will their own.'

"This is a terrible sentence of abnegation and obedience," he sighed, "only, is this law, which is binding on the Fathers and the Serving Brothers, equally strict for the Oblates, the aegrotant members of the Benedictine army, who are not mentioned in the text? This remains to be seen. It will be well too to ascertain how far it is applied, for the rule is on the whole so skilful, so elastic, so broad that it can be made at option very austere or very mild.

"With the Trappists the ordinances are so closely drawn that they are stifling; with the Benedictines, on the contrary, they would be light and airy enough to allow the soul to breathe easily. One Fraternity clings scrupulously to the letter; the other, on the contrary, draws inspiration from the Spirit of the Saint.

"Before goading myself along this road I must consult the Abbe Plomb," was Durtal's conclusion. He went to call on the priest; but he was absent for some days.

As a precaution against indolence, a measure of spiritual discipline, he threw himself on the cathedral once more, and tried, now that he was less overpowered by speculation, to read its meaning.

The stone text which he was bent on understanding was puzzling, if not difficult to decipher, in consequence of the interpolated passages, repetitions, and parts eliminated or abridged; in fact, to say the truth, as the result of a certain incoherence, accounted for no doubt by the circumstance that the work had been carried on, altered or extended by successive artists during a lapse of two hundred years.

The image-makers of the thirteenth century had not always taken into account the ideas expressed by their precursors; they had repeated them, expressing them from their own point of view in their personal tongue; thus, for instance, they had introduced a second version of the signs of the seasons and of the zodiac. The sculptors of the twelfth century had made a calendar in stone on the western front; those of the thirteenth did the same in the right-hand doorway of the north porch, justifying this reduplication of the subject on the same church by the fact that the zodiac and the seasons may in symbolism have several interpretations.

According to Tertullian the death and new birth of the circling years afforded an image of the Resurrection at the end of the world. According to others the Sun, surrounded by the twelve Signs, was emblematic of the Sun of Justice surrounded by his twelve Apostles. The Abbe Bulteau sees in these stony calendars a rendering of the passage in which St. Paul declares to the Hebrews that "Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever," while the Abbe Clerval gives this simple interpretation: that all times belong to Christ, and are bound to glorify Him.

"But this is a mere detail," said Durtal to himself. "In the whole structure of the cathedral itself we can trace two-fold purposes.

"The architectural mass of Notre Dame de Chartres as a whole may be divided, externally, into three great parts, as indicated by the three grand porches. The western or royal portal, which is the ceremonial entrance to the sanctuary, between the two towers; the north porch on the side next the bishop's palace, beyond the new spire; the south porch, flanked by the old spire.

"Now, the subjects represented on the royal front and in the south porch are identical. Each glorifies the Triumph of the Incarnate Word, with this difference: that on the south porch Our Lord is not exalted alone as He is on the west front, but in the person also of the Elect and of His Saints. If to these two subjects, which may be considered as one—the Saviour glorified in Himself and in His Saints—we add the praises of the Virgin set forth in the north front we find this result: a poem in praise of the Mother and the Son as declaring the final cause of the Church itself.

"By studying the variations between the south and west fronts we perceive that, though in both Jesus is shown in the same act of blessing the earth, and though both are almost exclusively restricted to illustrating the Gospel, leaving the scenes of the Old Testament to the arches on the north, they differ greatly from each other, and are no less unlike the portals of all other cathedrals.

"In total disagreement with the mystic rituals observed almost everywhere else—at Notre Dame de Paris, at Bourges, at Amiens, to name but three churches—the Last Judgment, which is seen on the main entrance of those basilicas, is at Chartres relegated to the south porch.

"And in the same way the Tree of Jesse, which at Amiens and Reims and the cathedral at Rouen, is displayed on the royal porch, is at Chartres on the north side of the building; and many more similar changes might be noted," said Durtal to himself. "But, which is yet more strange, the parallel so commonly to be observed between the subjects treated on the inner and outer surface of the same wall, in sculptured stone without and painted glass within, does not constantly exist at Chartres. This, for instance, is the case with regard to the genealogical Tree of Christ, which is seen inside in glass on the upper wall of the west front, and is carved outside on the north porch. At the same time, when the subjects do not entirely coincide on the front and back of the page, they are often complementary, or carry out the same idea. Thus the Last Judgment, which is not to be found on the outside of the north front, blazes out, within, from the great rose window above on the same side. This, then, is not cumulative but appropriate development—history begun in one dialect and finished in another.

"In short, it is the ruling idea of the poem which governs all these differences and harmonies; which comes out like a refrain after each of these three strophes in stone; the idea that this church belongs to Our Mother. The cathedral is faithful to its name, loyal to its dedication. The Virgin is Lady over all. She fills the whole interior, and appears outside even on the western and southern portals, which are not especially Hers, above a door, on a capital, high in air on a pediment. The angelic salutation of art has been repeated without intermission by the painters and sculptors of every age. The cathedral of Chartres is truly the Virgin's fief.

"And on the whole," thought Durtal, "in spite of the discrepancies in some of its texts, the cathedral is legible.

"It contains a rendering of the Old and New Testaments; it also engrafts on the sacred Scriptures the Apocryphal traditions relating to the Virgin and St. Joseph, the lives of the saints preserved in the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Voragine and the special biographies of the aspiring recluses of the diocese of Chartres. It is a vast encyclopaedia of mediaeval learning as concerning God, the Virgin, and the Elect.

"Didron is almost justified in saying that it is a compendium of those great encyclopaedias composed in the thirteenth century; only the theory that he bases on this truthful observation wanders off and becomes faulty as soon as he tries to work it out.

"He concludes, in fact, by conceiving of this cathedral as no more than a rendering of the Speculum Universale, the Mirror of the World of Vincent of Beauvais; above all, like that work, as an epitome of practical life and a record of the human race throughout the ages. In point of fact," said Durtal to himself, as he took the Christian Iconography of that writer down from the shelf, "in point of fact, according to him, our stone pages ought to follow in such succession that, beginning with the opening chapter on the north, they would end with the paragraphs on the south. Then we should find the narrative in the following order: First of all the genesis, the Biblical cosmogony, the creation of man and woman and Eden; and then, after the expulsion of the first pair, the tale of man's redemption by suffering.

"'Whereby,' says he, 'the sculptor took occasion to teach the hinds of La Beauce how to work with their hands and their head. Here, to the right of Adam's Fall, he carves under the eyes and for the perpetual edification of all men, a calendar of stone with all the labours of the field, and then a catechism of industry, showing the works done in the town; finally, for the labours of the mind, a manual of the liberal arts."

"Then, thus instructed, man lives on from generation to generation, until the end of the world, set forth in the images on the south side.

"This treasury of sculpture would thus include a compendium of the history of nature and of science, a glossary of morality and art, a biography of humanity, a panorama of the whole world. Thus it would very really represent the Mirror of the World, and be an edition in stone of Vincent of Beauvais' book.

"There is only one difficulty. The Dominican's Speculum Universale dates from many years later than the erection of this cathedral; also, in developing his theory, Didron does not take into account the perspective and relations of the statuary. He assigns equal importance to a small figure half hidden in the moulding of an arch and to the large statues in the foreground supporting the picture in relief of Our Lord and His Mother. Indeed, it might be said that these are the very figures he overlooks; and, in the same way, he takes no account of the western doors, which he could not force into his scheme.

"This archaeologist's ideas, in fact, cannot be maintained. He subordinates leading features to accessory details, and ends in a kind of rationalism entirely opposed to the mysticism of the period. He investigates the Middle Ages by levelling down the divine idea to the lowest earthly meaning, and referring to man what is intended to apply to God. The prayer of sculpture, chanted by the ages of faith, becomes, in the introduction to his work, nothing more than an encyclopaedia of industrial and moral teaching.

"Let us look closer at all this," Durtal went on, and he went out to smoke a cigarette on the Place. "That royal doorway," thought he, as he walked on, "is the entrance to the great front by which kings were admitted. It is likewise the first chapter of the book, and it sums up the whole of the building.

"But certainly these conclusions forestalling the premisses are very strange; this recapitulation, placed at the very beginning of the work, when it ought, in fact, to be placed at the end, in the apse!

"And yet," he reflected, "putting this aside, the facade thus worked out fills the position in this basilica which the second of the Sapiential Books holds in the Bible. It answers to the Book of Psalms, which is in a certain sense an epitome of all the Books of the Old Testament, and consequently, at the same time, a prophetic memento of the whole of revealed religion.

"The western side of the cathedral is similar; only, it is a compendium not of the older but of the newer Scriptures; an epitome of the Gospels, an abridgment of the books of St. John and the synoptical Gospels.

"In building this, the twelfth century did more. It added more details to this glorification of Christ, following Him from before His birth, through the Bible story, till after His Death and to His Apotheosis as described in the Apocalypse; it completed the Scriptures by the Apocryphal writings, telling the tale of Saint Joachim and Saint Anna, recording many episodes of the marriage of the Virgin and Joseph derived from the Gospel of the Nativity of the Virgin and pseudo-Gospel of St. James the Less.

"But, indeed, in every early sanctuary such use was made of these legends, and no church is really intelligible when they are ignored.

"Nor is there anything to surprise us in this mixture of the authentic Gospels and mere fables. When the Church refused to recognize by canonical authority the divine origin of the Gospels of the Childhood, of the Nativity, the writings of St. Thomas the Israelite, of Nicodemus, of St. James the Less, and the History of Joseph, it had no intention of rejecting them altogether, and consigning them to the limbo of inventions and lies. In spite of certain anecdotes which are, to say the least of it, ridiculous, there may be found in these texts some accurate details and authentic narratives which the Evangelists, cautiously reticent, did not think proper to record. The Middle Ages by no means lent themselves to heresy when they ascribed to these purely human Scriptures the value of probable legend and the interest of pious reminiscence.

"As a whole," thought Durtal, who was now standing in front of the doors between the two towers, the royal western front, "as a whole, this vast palimpsest, with its 719 figures, is easy to decipher if we avail ourselves of the key applied by the Abbe Bulteau in his monograph on this cathedral.

"Starting from the new belfry and working across the western front to the old belfry, we follow the history of Christ embodied in nearly two hundred statues lost in the capitals. It starts with Christ's ancestors, beginning with the story of Anna and Joachim, and giving the legend in minute images. Out of deference perhaps to the Inspired Books, this history creeps along the wall, making itself small so as to be inconspicuous, and narrates, as if in secret, by artless mimicry, poor Joachim's despair when a scribe of the Temple named Reuben reproves him for being childless, and rejects his offerings in the name of the Lord who has not blessed him; then Joachim, in sorrow, separates from his wife and goes away to bewail the curse that has lighted on him, till an angel appears to him and comforts him, and bids him return to his wife, who shall bear a daughter of his begetting.

"Then we see Anna, weeping alone over her barrenness and her widowhood; and the angel comes to her and bids her go forth to meet her husband, and she finds him at the golden gate. And they fall on each other's neck and go home together. And Anna brings forth Mary, whom they dedicate to the Lord.

"Years then pass, till the time comes when the Virgin is to be betrothed. The High Priest bids all of the children of the House of David who are of age, and not yet married, to come to the altar with a rod in their hand; and to discern which of these shall be chosen to marry the Virgin, Abiathar, the High Priest, inquires of the Most High, who repeats the prophecy of Isaiah which declares that a flower shall come out of Jesse on which the Holy Spirit shall rest.

"And immediately the rod blossoms of one of those present, Joseph the Carpenter, and a dove descends from heaven to settle on it.

"So Mary is given to Joseph, and the marriage takes place; Messiah is born, and Herod massacres the Innocents; and there the gospel of the Nativity ends, and the story is taken up by the Holy Scriptures, which follow the Life of Jesus to the hour of His last appearance on earth after His death.

"These scenes, set forth in small simple imagery, serve as a border at the bottom of the vast presentment which extends from tower to tower over all three doors.

"Here the scenes are placed which are intended to attract the crowd by plainer and more visible images; here we see the general theme of this portal in all its splendour, recapitulating the Gospels and achieving the purpose of the Church itself.

"On the left we see the Ascension of Our Lord, soaring triumphant on clouds rendered by a waving scroll held on each side, in the Byzantine manner, by two angels; while below, the Apostles with uplifted faces, gaze at this ascension pointed out to them by other angels who have descended and hover over them, their fingers extended towards the sky.

"The hollow moulding of the arch is filled up with a calendar and zodiac of stone.

"The right-hand side shows the Assumption of Our Lady, seated on a throne, sceptre in hand, and holding the Infant, who blesses the world. Beneath are the episodes of Her life: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the homage of the shepherds, and the presentation of Jesus to the High Priest; and the bend of the arch, rising to a point like a mitre above the Mother, has the mouldings enriched with two lines of figures, one of archangels bearing censers, with wings closely imbricated as if with tiles, the other of personifications of the seven liberal arts, each represented by two figures—one allegorical, and the other the presentment of the inventor, or of the paragon of that art in antiquity. This is the same scheme of expression as we see in the cathedral at Laon; the paraphrase in sculpture of scholastic theology, and a rendering in images of the text of Albertus Magnus, who, after rehearsing the perfections of the Virgin, declares that She possessed a perfect knowledge of the seven arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—all the lore of the Middle Ages.

"Finally, in the middle, the great doorway illustrates the subject round which the storied carving of the other doors all centres: the Glorification of Our Lord, as Saint John beheld it at Patmos; the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible, spread open on the forefront of the basilica, above the grand entrance to the church.

"Jesus is seated, on His head the cruciform nimbus, robed in the linen talaris and draped in a mantle which hangs in a fall of close pleats; His bare feet rest on a stool, emblematical of the earth, according to Isaiah. With one hand He blesses the world; in the other He holds the Book with the seven Seals. About him, in the oval glory or Vesica, we see the Tetramorph—the four evangelical emblems with closely fretted wings: the winged cherub, the lion, the eagle, and the ox, figuring St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. John, and St. Luke. Above are the twelve Apostles holding scrolls and books.

"And to complete the Apocalyptic vision, in the hollow mouldings of the arch are the twelve Angels and four and twenty Elders described by St. John, in white raiment and crowned with gold, playing on musical instruments, and singing in the perpetual adoration which some few souls, dwelling isolated in the midst of the indifference of this age, still carry on. They magnify the glory of the Most High, throwing themselves on their faces when the Evangelical Beasts, responding to the fervent and solemn prayers that go up from the earth, utter, in a voice that resounds above the roar of thunder, the word which in its four letters, its two syllables, sums up every duty of man to God—the humble, loving, obedient Amen.

"The text has been very closely followed by the image-maker, excepting with regard to the Beasts, for one detail is omitted; they are not represented with the eyes of which the prophet tells us they were 'full within.'

"Thus, regarding this whole front as a triptych, we find that in the left doorway we have the Ascension framed in the signs of the zodiac; in the middle, the triumph of Jesus as described by the Seer; on the right, the triumph of Mary, surrounded by certain of Her attributes. The whole constitutes the scheme to be carried out by the architect: the Glorification of the Incarnate Word.

"In fact, as the Abbe Clerval says in his important work on the cathedral of Chartres, 'we have the scenes of His life which prepared the way for His glory; we have this actual entrance into glory; and then His eternal glorification by the Angels, the Saints, and the Blessed Virgin.'

"From the point of view of artistic execution the work in the grand subject is crisp and splendid; the smaller figures are obscure and mutilated. The panel representing the Virgin Mary has suffered severely, and both it and that representing the Ascension are strangely rough and barbarous, quite inferior to the central tympanum, which contains the most living, the most haunting, of many figures of Christ.

"Nowhere, indeed, in mediaeval sculpture does the Redeemer appear as more saddened or more pitiful, or under a more solemn aspect. Seen in profile, His hair flowing over His shoulders, smooth in front and divided down the middle, with a nose slightly turned up and a heavy mouth under a thick moustache, with a short, curling beard and a long neck, He suggests not so much a Byzantine Christ, such as the artists of that time were wont to paint and carve, but a pre-Raphaelite Christ designed by a Fleming, or even derived from the Dutch, showing indeed that slightly earthy taint which reappeared at a later time with a less pure type of head, at the end of the fifteenth century, in the picture by Cornelis Van Oostzaanen, in the gallery at Cassel.

"He rises enthroned, almost sorrowful in His triumph, unamazed as He blesses, with pathetic resignation, the generations of sinners who for seven centuries have gazed up at Him with inquisitive, unloving eyes as they cross the square; and all turn their back on Him, caring little enough for this Saviour unlike the head familiar to them, recognizing Him only with sheep-like features and a pleasing expression; such, in short, as the foppish image at the cathedral at Amiens before which the lovers of a softer type go into ecstasies.

"Above this Christ are the three windows invisible from outside, and over them again the huge dead rose window, looking like a blind eye, and lighting up, like the windows, only when seen from within, when they glow with clear flame and pale sapphires set in stone; then, higher yet, above the rose, is the gallery of French kings, under the great triangular gable between the towers.

"And the two belfries fling up their spires; the old one carved in soft limestone, imbricated with scales, rising in one bold flight to end in a point, and send up a vapour of prayer among the clouds; the new one, pierced like lace, chiselled like a jewel, wreathed with foliage and crockets of vine, rises with coquettish dalliance, trying to make up for lack of the inspired flight and humble entreaty of its senior by babbling prayer and ingratiating smiles; to persuade the Father by childlike lisping.

"But to return to the west portal," Durtal went on, "in spite of the importance of its grand decoration, displaying the Eternal Triumph of the Word, the interest of artists is irresistibly attracted to the ground storey of the building, where nineteen colossal stone statues stand in the space that extends from tower to tower; part against the wall, and part in the recesses of the door-bays.

"The finest sculpture in the world is certainly that we find here. There are seven kings, seven saints or prophets, and five queens. There were originally twenty-four of these statues, but five have disappeared and left no trace.

"They all wear glories excepting the three first, nearest to the new belfry, and all stand under canopies of pierced work, representing roofs or tabernacles, palaces, bridges—a whole town in little, Sion for children, a dwarfed New Jerusalem.

"They all are standing, each on a column with a guilloche pattern; on plinths carved over with lozenges, diamond points, fir-cone scales, with chain patterns, fretwork, billets, chequers like a chess-board of which the alternate squares are hollowed out; and paved with a sort of mosaic, inlaid patterns which, like the borders of the church windows, suggest a reminiscence of Mussulman goldsmith's work, and show the origin of the style brought from the East by the Crusaders.

"The three first statues in the recess to the left, nearest the new spire, do not stand on any pattern borrowed from the heathen; they are trampling on indescribable monsters. One, a king whose head having been lost, has been fitted with the head of a queen, treads on a man entangled by serpents; another king stands on a woman who holds a reptile by the tail with one hand, and with the other strokes the plait of her own hair; the third, a queen, her head crowned with a plain gold fillet and her shape that of a woman with child, while her face is smiling but commonplace, has at her feet two dragons, a monkey, a toad, a dog, and a snake with an ape's head. What is the meaning of these enigmas? No one knows—no more, indeed, than we know the names of the sixteen other statues placed along the porch.

"Some believe that they represent the ancestry of the Messiah, but this assertion has no evidence to support it; others find here a mixed assemblage of the heroes of the Old Testament and the benefactors to the Church, but this hypothesis is no less illusory. The truth is that, though all these personages have had sceptres in their hands, scrolls, ribands, and breviaries, not one of them displays the attributes which would serve to identify them in accordance with the religious symbolism of the Middle Ages. At most might we venture to give the name of Daniel to a headless figure because a formless dragon writhes under his feet, emblematical of the Devil conquered by the prophet at Babylon.

"The most striking and the strangest of these figures are the queens.

"The first, the royal virago with the prominent stomach, is ordinary enough; the last, opposite to this princess at the furthest end of the front near the old tower, has lost half her face, and the remaining portion is not attractive; but the three others, standing in the principal doorway, are matchless.

"The first, tall, slender, and very straight, wears a crown on her brow, a veil, hair banded on each side of a middle parting, and falling in plaits on her shoulders; her nose turns up a little, is somewhat common; her lips firm and judicious; her chin square. The face is not very young. The body is swathed, and rigid, in a large cloak with wide sleeves, and the richly-jewelled sheath of a gown that betrays no feminine outline of figure. She is upright, sexless, shapeless; her waist slight and bound with a girdle of cord, like a Franciscan Sister. She stands looking, with her head slightly bent, attentive to one knows not what, seeing nothing. Has she attained to the perfect negation of all things? Is she living the life of Union with God beyond the worlds, where time is no more? It might be thought so, since it is noteworthy that, in spite of her royal insignia and the magnificence of her costume, she has the self-centred look, the austere demeanour of a nun. She seems more of the cloister than of the Court. Then we wonder who can have placed her on guard by this door, and why, faithful to a charge known to none but herself, she watches, day and night, with her far-away gaze across the square, waiting motionless for some one who for seven hundred years has failed to come.

"She might be an embodiment of Advent, stooping a little to listen to the woeful supplications of man as they rise from earth; in that case, she must be an Old Testament queen, dead long before the birth of the Messiah she perhaps may have prophesied.

"As she holds a book, the Abbe Bulteau thinks it may be a full-length statue of Saint Radegonde. But other princesses have been canonized, and, like her, hold books. At the same time, the monastic aspect of this queen, her emaciated figure, her eye vaguely fixed on the region of internal dreams, would well befit Clotaire's wife, who retired to a cloister.

"But for what can she be watching? The dreaded arrival of the king bent on tearing her from her Abbey at Poitiers to replace her on the throne? For lack of any information every conjecture must be futile.

"The second statue again represents a king's wife holding a book. She is younger; she wears neither cloak nor veil; her bosom is full and closely fitted in a clinging dress, tightly drawn over the bust like wet linen; a bodice resembling the Carlovingian rokette, fastened on one side. Her hair lies flat in two bands on her forehead, covering her ears and falling in long tresses plaited with ribbon, and ending in loose tufts.