FIRST PART.


CHAPTER I.

DURING the first week in November, the week within the Octave of All Souls, Durtal entered St. Sulpice, at eight o’clock in the evening. He often chose to turn into that church, because there was a trained choir, and because he could there examine himself at peace, apart from the crowd. The ugliness of the nave, with its heavy vaulting, vanished at night, the aisles were often empty, it was ill-lighted by a few lamps — it was possible for a man to chide his soul in secret, as if at home.

Durtal sat down behind the high altar, on the left, in the aisle along the Rue de St. Sulpice; the lamps of the choir organ were lighted. Far off; in the almost empty nave, an ecclesiastic was preaching. He recognized, by the unctuousness of his delivery, and his oily accent, a well-fed priest who poured on his audience, according to his wont, his best known commonplaces.

"Why are they so devoid of eloquence?" thought Durtal. "I have had the curiosity to listen to many of them, and they are much the same. They only vary in the tones of their voice. According to their temperament, some are bruised down in vinegar, others steeped in oil. There is no such thing as a clever combination." And he called to mind orators petted like tenors, Monsabré, Didon, those Coquelins of the Church, and lower yet than those products of the Catholic training school, that bellicose booby the Abbé d’Hulst.

"Afterwards," he continued, "come the mediocrities, each puffed by the handful of devotees who listen to thin. If those cooks of the soul had any skill, if they served their clients with delicate meats, theological essences, gravies of prayer, concentrated sauces of ideas, they would vegetate misunderstood by their flocks. So, on the whole, it is all for the best. The low-water mark of the clergy must conform to the level of the faithful, and indeed Providence has provided carefully for this."

A stamping of shoes, then the movement of chairs grinding on the flags interrupted him. The sermon was over.

Then a great stillness was broken by a prelude from the organ, which dropped to a low tone, a mere accompaniment to the voices.

A slow and mournful chant arose, the "De Profundis." The blended voices sounded under the arches, intermingling with the somewhat raw sounds of the harmonicas, like the sharp tones of breaking glass.

Resting on the low accompaniment of the organ, aided by basses so hollow that they seemed to have descended into themselves, as it were underground, they sprang out, chanting the verse "De profundis ad te clamavi, Do-" and then stopped in fatigue, letting the last syllables "mine" fall like a heavy tear; then these voices of children, near breaking, took up the second verse of the psalm, "Domine exaudi vocem meam," and the second half of the last word again remained in suspense, but instead of separating, and falling to the ground, there to be crushed out like a drop, it seemed to gather itself together with a supreme effort, and fling to heaven the anguished cry of the disincarnate soul, cast naked, and in tears before God.

And after a pause, the organ, aided by two double-basses, bellowed out, carrying all the voices in its torrent — baritones, tenors, basses, not now serving only as sheaths to the sharp blades of the urchin voices, but openly with full throated sound — yet the dash of the little soprani pierced them through all at once like a crystal arrow.

Then a fresh pause, and in the silence of the church, the verses mourned out anew, thrown up by the organ, as by a spring board. As he listened with attention endeavouring to resolve the sounds, closing his eyes, Durtal saw them at first almost horizontal, then rising little by little, then raising themselves upright, then quivering in tears, before their final breaking. Suddenly at the end of the psalm, when the response of the antiphon came — "Et lux perpetua luceat eis" — the children’s voices broke into a sad, silken cry, a sharp sob, trembling on the word "eis," which remained suspended in the void.

These children’s voices stretched to breaking, these clear sharp voices threw into the darkness of the chant some whiteness of the dawn, joining their pure, oft sounds to the resonant tones of the basses, piercing as with a jet of living silver the sombre cataract of the deeper singers they sharpened the wailing, strengthened and embittered the burning salt of tears, but they insinuated also a sort of protecting caress, balsamic freshness, lustral help; they lighted in the darkness those brief gleams which tinkle in the Angelus at dawn of day; they called up, anticipating the prophecies of the text, the compassionate image of the Virgin, passing, in the pale light of their tones, into the darkness of that sequence.

The "De Profundis" so chanted was incomparably beautiful. That sublime prayer ending in sobs, at the moment when the soul of the voices was about to overpass human limits, gave a wrench to Durtal’s nerves, and made his heart beat. Then he wished to abstract himself, and cling especially to the meaning of that sorrowful plaint, in which the fallen being calls upon its God with groans and lamentations. Those cries of the third verse came back to him, wherein calling on his Saviour in despair from the bottom of the abyss, man, now that he knows he is heard, hesitates ashamed, knowing not what to say. The excuses he has prepared appear to him vain, the arguments he has arranged seem to him of no effect, and he stammers forth; "If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe iniquities, Lord, who shall endure it?"

"It is a pity," said Durtal to himself, "that this psalm, which in its first verses chants so magnificently the despair of humanity, becomes in those which follow more personal to King David. I know well," he went on, "that we must accept the symbolic sense of this pleading, admit that the despot confounds his own cause with that of God, that his adversaries are the unbelievers and the wicked, that he himself, according to the doctors of the Church, prefigures the person of Christ; but yet the memory of his fleshly desires, and the presumptuous praise he gives to his incorrigible people, contracts the scope of the poem. Happily the melody has a life apart from the text, a life of its own, not arising out of mere tribal dissensions, but extending to all the earth, chanting the anguish of the time to be born, as well as of the present day, and of the ages which are no more."

The "De Profundis" had ceased; after a silence, the choir intoned a motet of the eighteenth century, but Durtal was only moderately interested in human music in churches. What seemed to him superior to the most vaunted works of theatrical or worldly music, was the old plain chant, that even and naked melody, at once ethereal and of the tomb, the solemn cry of sadness and lofty shout of joy, those grandiose hymns of human faith, which seem to well up in the cathedrals, like irresistible geysers, at the very foot of the Romanesque columns. What music, however ample, sorrowful or tender, is worth the "De Profundis" chanted in unison, the solemnity of the "Magnificat," the splendid warmth of the "Lauda Sion," the enthusiasm of the "Salve Regina," the sorrow of the "Miserere," and the "Stabat Mater," the majestic omnipotence of the Te Deum"? Artists of genius have set themselves to translate the sacred texts: Vittoria, Josquin de Près, Palestrina, Orlando Lasso, Handel, Bach, Haydn, have written wonderful pages; often indeed they have been uplifted by the mystic effluence, the very emanation of the Middle Ages, for ever lost; and yet their works have retained a certain pomp, and in spite of all are pretentious, as opposed to the humble magnificence, the sober splendour of the Gregorian chant-with them the whole thing came to an end, for composers no longer believed.

Yet in modern times some religious pieces may be cited of Lesueur, Wagner, Berlioz, and Caesar Franck, and in these again we are conscious of the artist underlying his work, the artist determined to show his skill, thinking to exalt his own glory, and therefore leaving God out. We feel ourselves in the presence of superior men, but men with their weaknesses, their inseparable vanity, and even the vice or their senses. In the liturgical chant, created almost always anonymously in the depth of the cloisters, was an extraterrestrial well, without taint of sin or trace of art. It was an uprising of souls already freed from the slavery of the flesh, an explosion of elevated tenderness and pure joy, it was also the idiom of the Church, a musical gospel appealing like the Gospel itself at once to the most refined and the most humble.

Ah the true proof of Catholicism was that art which it had founded, an art which has never been surpassed; in painting and sculpture the Early Masters, mystics in poetry and in prose, in music plain chant, in architecture the Romanesque and Gothic styles. And all this held together and blazed in one sheaf, on one and the same altar; all was reconciled in one unique cluster of thoughts: to revere, adore and serve the Dispenser, showing to Him reflected in the soul of His creature, as in a faithful mirror, the still immaculate treasure of His gifts.

Then in those marvellous Middle Ages, wherein Art, foster-child of the Church, encroached on death and advanced to the threshold of Eternity, and to God, the divine concept mild the heavenly form were guessed and half-perceived, for the first and perhaps for the last time by man. They answered and echoed each other — art calling to art.

The Virgins had faces almond-shaped, elongated like those ogives which the Gothic style contrived in order to distribute an ascetic light, a virginal dawn in the mysterious shrine of its naves. In the pictures of the Early Masters the complexion of holy women becomes transparent as Paschal wax, and their hair is pale as golden grains of frankincense, their childlike bosoms scarcely swell, their brows are rounded like the glass of the pyx, their fingers taper, their bodies shoot upwards like delicate columns. Their beauty becomes, as it were, liturgical. They seem to live in the fire of stained glass, borrowing from the flaming whirlwind of the rose-windows the circles of their aureoles. The ardent blue of their eyes, the dying embers of their lips, keeping for their garments the colours they disdain for their flesh, stripping them of their light, changing them, when they transfer them to stuffs, into opaque tones which aid still more by their contrast to declare the seraphic clearness of their look, the grievous paleness of the mouth, to which, according to the Proper of the season, the scent of the lily of the Canticles or the penitential fragrance of myrrh in the Psalms lend their perfume.

Then among artists was a coalition of brains, a welding together of souls. Painters associated themselves in the same ideal of beauty with architects, they united in an indestructible relation cathedrals and saints, only reversing the usual process — they framed the jewel according to the shrine, and modelled the relics for the reliquary.

On their side the sequences chanted by the Church had subtle affinities with the canvases of the Early Painters.

Vittoria’s responses for Tenebrae are of a like inspiration and an equal loftiness with those of Quentin Matsys’ great work, the Entombment of Christ. The "Regina Coeli" of the Flemish musician Lasso has the same good faith, the same simple arid strange attraction, as certain statues of a reredos, or religious pictures of the elder Breughel. Lastly, the Miserere of Josquin de Près, choir-master of Louis XII, has, like the panels of the Early Masters of Burgundy and Flanders, a patient intention, a stiff, threadlike simplicity, but also it exhales like them a truly mystical savour, and its awkwardness of outline is very touching.

The ideal of all these works is the same and attained by different means.

As for plain chant, the agreement of its melody with architecture is also certain it also bends from time to time like the sombre Romanesque arcades, and rises, shadowy and pensive, like complete vaulting. The "De Profundis," for instance, curves in on itself like those great groins which form the smoky skeleton of the bays; it is like them slow and dark, extends itself only in obscurity and moves only in the shadow of the crypts.

Sometimes, on the other hand, the Gregorian chant seems to borrow from Gothic its flowery tendrils, its scattered pinnacles, its gauzy rolls, its tremulous lace, its trimmings light and thin as the voices of children. Then it passes from one extreme to another, from the amplitude of sorrow to an infinite joy; at other times again, the plain music, and the Christian music to which it gave birth, lend themselves, like sculpture, to the gaiety of the people, associate themselves with simple gladness, and the sculptured merriment of the ancient porches; they take the popular rhythm of the crowd, as in the Christmas carol "Adeste Fideles" and in the Paschal hymn "O Filii et Filiae;" they become trivial and familiar like the Gospels, submitting themselves to the humble wishes of the poor, lending them a holiday tune easy to catch, a running melody which carries them into pure regions where these simple souls can cast themselves at the indulgent feet of Christ.

Born of the Church, and bred up by her in the choir-schools of the Middle Ages, plain chant is the aerial and mobile paraphrase of the immovable structure of the cathedrals; it is the immaterial and fluid interpretation of the canvases of the Early Painters; it is a winged translation, but also the strict and unbending stole of those Latin sequences, which the monks built up or hewed out in the cloisters in the far-off olden time.

Now it is changed and disconnected, foolishly overwhelmed by the crash of organs, and is chanted, God knows how!

Most choirs when they intone it, like to imitate the rumbling and gurgling of water-pipes, others the grating of rattles, the creaking of pullies, the grinding of a crane, but, in spite of all, its beauty remains, unextinguished, dulled though it be, by the wild bellowing of the singers.

The sudden silence in the church roused Durtal. He rose and looked about him; in his corner was no one save two poor women, asleep, their feet on the bars of chairs, their heads on their knees. Leaning forward a little, he saw, hanging above him in a dark chapel, the light of a lamp, like a ruby in its red glass; no sound save the military tread of the Suisse, making his round in the distance.

Durtal sat down again; the sweetness of his solitude was enhanced by the aromatic perfume of wax, and the memories, now faint, of incense, but it was suddenly broken. As the first chords crashed on the organ Durtal recognized the "Dies irae," that despairing hymn of the Middle Ages; instinctively he bowed his head and listened. This was no more as in the "De Profundis" an humble supplication, a suffering which believes it has been heard, and discerns a path of light to guide it in the darkness, no longer the prayer which has hope enough not to tremble; it was the cry of absolute desolation and of terror.

And, indeed, the wrath divine breathed tempestuously through these stanzas. They seemed addressed less to the God of mercy, to the Son who listens to prayer, than to the inflexible Father, to Him whom the Old Testament shows us, overcome with anger, scarcely appeased by the smoke of the pyres, the inconceivable attractions of burnt -offerings. In this chant it asserted itself still more savagely, for it threatened to strike the waters, and break in pieces the mountains, and to rend asunder the depths of heaven by thunder-bolts. And the earth, alarmed, cried out in fear.

A crystalline voice, a clear child’s voice, proclaimed in the nave the tidings of these cataclysms, and after this the choir chanted new strophes wherein the implacable judge came with shattering blare of trumpet, to purify by fire the rottenness of the world.

Then, in its turn, a bass, deep as a vault, as though issuing from the crypt, accentuated the horror of these prophecies, made these threats more overwhelming, and after a short strain by the choir, an alto repeated them in yet more detail. Then, so soon as the awful poem had exhausted the enumeration of chastisement and suffering, in shrill tones — the falsetto of a little boy — the name of Jesus went by, and a light broke in on the thunder-cloud, the panting universe cried for pardon, recalling, by all the voices of the choir, the infinite mercies of the Saviour, and His pardon, pleading with Him for absolution, as formerly He had spared the penitent thief and the Magdalen.

But in the same despairing and headstrong melody the tempest raged again, drowned with its waves the half-seen shores of heaven, and the solos continued, discouraged, interrupted by the recurrent weeping of the choir, giving, with the diversity of voices, a body to the special conditions of shame, the particular states of fear, the different ages of tears.

At last, when still mixed and blended, these voices had borne away on the great waters of the organ all the wreckage of human sorrows, all the buoys of prayers and tears, they fell exhausted, paralyzed by terror, wailing and sighing like a child who hides its face, stammering "Dona eis requiem," they ended, worn out, in an Amen so plaintive, that it died away in a breath above the sobbing of the organ.

What man could have imagined such despair, dreamed of such disasters? And Durtal made answer to himself: "No man."

In fact the attempt has been vain to discover the author both of the music and of the sequence. They have been attributed to Frangipani, Thomas of Celano, St. Bernard and a crowd of others, and they have remained anonymous, simply formed by the sad alluvial deposits of the age. The "Dies irae" seemed to have, at first, fallen, like a seed of desolation, among the distracted souls of the eleventh century; it germinated there and grew slowly, nurtured by the sap of anguish, watered by the rain of tears. It was at last pruned when it seemed ripe, and had, perhaps, thrown out too many branches, for in one of the earliest known texts, a stanza, which has since disappeared, called up the magnificent and barbarous image of an earth revolving as it belched forth flames, while the constellations burst into shards, and heaven shrivelled like a parched scroll.

"All this," concluded Durtal, "does not prevent these triple stanzas woven of shadow and cold, full of reverberating rhymes, and hard echoes, this music of rude stuff which wraps the phrases like a shroud, and masks the rigid outlines of the work, from being admirable! Yet that chant which constrains, and renders with such energy the breadth of the sequence, that melodic period, which without variation, remaining always the same, succeeds in expressing by turns prayer and terror, moves me less than the ’De Profundis,’ which yet has not its grandiose spaciousness nor that artistic cry of despair."

But chanted to the organ the psalm is earthy and suffocating. It comes from out the very depths of the sepulchre, while the ’Dies irae’ has its source only on the sill of the tomb. The first is the very voice of the dead, the second that of the living who inter him, and the dead man weeps, but takes courage a little, when those that bury him despair.

"To sum up," Durtal concluded, "I prefer the text of the ’Dies irae’ to that of the ’De Profundis,’ and the melody of the ’De Profundis’ to that of the ’Dies irae.’ It is true also that this last sequence is modernized, and chanted theatrically here, without the imposing and needful march of unison.

"This time, for instance, it is devoid of interest," he continued, ceasing his thoughts for a moment, to listen to the piece of modern music which the choir was just then rendering. "Ah, who will take on himself to proscribe that pert mysticism, those fonts of toilet-water which Gounod invented! . . . There ought indeed to be astonishing penalties for those choir masters who allow such musical effeminacy in church. This is, as it was this morning at the Madeleine, when I happened to be present at the interminable funeral of an old banker; they played a military march with violin and violoncello accompaniments, with trumpets and timbrels, a heroic and worldly march to celebrate the departure and the decomposition of a financier!...It is too absurd." And listening no more to the music in St. Sulpice, Durtal transferred himself in thought to the Madeleine, and went off at full speed in his dreams.

"Indeed," he said to himself, "the clergy make Jesus like a tourist, when they invite Him daily to come down into that church whose exterior is surmounted by no cross, and whose interior is like the grand reception-room at an hotel. But how can you make those priests understand that ugliness is sacrilege, and that nothing is equal to the frightful sin of this confusion of Romanesque and Greek, these pictures of aged men, that flat ceiling studded with skylights, from which filter in all weathers the spoiled gleams of a rainy day, to that futile altar surmounted by a circle of angels who, in discreet abandonment, dance in honour of our Lady, a motionless marble rigadoon?"

Yet in the Madeleine, at a funeral, when the door opens, and the corpse advances in a gap of daylight, all is changed. Like a superterrestrial antiseptic, an extrahuman disinfectant, the liturgy purifies and cleanses the impious ugliness of the place.

And thinking over his memories of the morning, Durtal saw again, as he closed his eyes, at the end of the semicircular apse, the procession of red and black robes, white surplices, joining in front of the altar, descending the steps together, making their way together to the catafalque, dividing again on each side, joining to mix afresh in the great gangway between the chairs.

This slow and silent procession, led by incomparable Suisses, in mourning, their swords horizontal, and a general’s epaulets in jet, advanced, preceded by a cross, in front of the corpse laid on tressels, and far-off in all that confusion of lights falling from the roof, and lighted flambeaux round the catafalque and on the altar, the white of the tapers disappeared, and the priests who bore them seemed to march with empty hands uplifted as though to point out the stars which accompanied them, twinkling above their heads.

Then when the bier was surrounded by the clergy, the "De Profundis" burst forth from the depths of the sanctuary, intoned by invisible singers.

"That was good," said Durtal to himself. At the Madeleine the voices of the children are sharp and feeble, and the basses are badly trained and failing; we are evidently far from the choir of St. Sulpice, but all the same it was superb; then what a moment was that of the priests’ communion, when suddenly arising from the murmuring of the choir, the voice of the tenor threw above the corpse the magnificent plain chant antiphon-

"Requiem aeternam dona cis Domine Et lux perpetua luceat eis."

It seems that after all the lamentations of the "De Profundis" and the "Dies irae," the presence of God, who comes then upon the altar, brings consolation, and sanctions the confident and solemn pride of that melodious phrase, which then invokes Christ, without dread and without tears.

The mass ended, the celebrant disappeared, and, as at the moment when the corpse entered, the clergy, preceded by the Suisses, advanced towards the body, and in the blazing circle of the tapers, a priest, in his cope, said the mighty prayers of the general absolution.

Then the liturgy took a higher tone, and became still more admirable. Mediative between the sinner and the judge, the Church, by the mouth of her priest, implores the Lord to pardon the poor soul: "Non intres injudicium cum servo tuo Domine" — then after the amen given by the organ and all the choir, a voice arose in the silence, and spoke in the name of the dead:— "Libera me!" and the choir continued the old chant of the tenth century. Just as in the "Dies irae," which appropriates to itself fragments of these plaints, the Last Judgment flamed out, and pitiless responses declare to the dead the reality of his alarms, declare to him that at the end of Time the Judge will come with the crash of thunder to chastise the world.

The priest marched round the catafalque, sprinkling it with beads of holy water, incensed it, gave shelter to the poor weeping soul, consoled it, took it to himself, covered it, as it were, with his cope, and again, intervened to pray that, after so much weariness and sorrow, the Lord will permit the unhappy one to sleep the sleep that knows no waking, far from earth’s noises.

Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more august mission been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who has no doubt forgotten her since that day, and may even have persecuted her up to the hour of his death.

Nor does the Church shrink from the task. Before that fleshly dust heaped in a chest, she thinks of that sewage of the soul, and cries "From the gates of hell deliver him, O Lord!" but at the end of the general absolution, at the moment when the procession, turning its back, is on the way to the sacristy, she too seems disquieted. Perhaps recalling in an instant, the ill deeds done by that body while it was alive, she seemed to doubt if her supplications were heard, and the doubt her words would not frame, passed into the intonation of the last amen, murmured at the Madeleine, by children’s voices.

Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this amen said: "We have done what we could, but... but..." And in the funereal silence which followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be made into soap at the factories.

"If," continued Durtal, "in opposition to these sad prayers, these eloquent absolutions, we call up before us a marriage mass, all is changed. There the Church is disarmed and her musical liturgy is as nought. Then she may well play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and borrow from profane authors the gaiety of their songs to celebrate the brief and empty joy of the body. Imagine, and indeed it happens, the canticle of the Virgin used to magnify the glad impatience of a bride. Fancy the Te Deum, to hymn the blessedness of a bridegroom!"

Far away from this infamous barter of the flesh, plain chant remains shut up in the antiphonaries, like a monk in the cloister, and when it goes forth, it is to cast up before Christ his garnered pains and sorrows. It gathers and sums them up in admirable supplications, and if, fatigued with pleading it adores, its impulse is to glorify eternal events, Palm Sunday and Easter, Pentecost and the Ascension, Epiphany and Christmas, then its joy bursts forth so magnificently, that it springs beyond the world to show its ecstatic joy at the feet of God.

As to the very ceremonies of the funeral, they are now only the regular way of getting money, an official routine, a prayer-wheel which is turned mechanically without thought of it.

The organist while he plays thinks of his family, and considers how wearied he is; the bellows-blower thinks, as lie fills the pipes, of the half-pint which will dry his sweat; the tenors and basses are careful of their effects, and admire themselves in the more or less rippled water of their voices; the choir boys dream of their scampers after mass; and, moreover, not one of them at all understands a word of the Latin they sing and abridge, as for instance the "Dies irae," of which they suppress a part of the stanzas.

In its turn beadledom calculates the sum the dead man brings in, and even the priest, wearied with the prayers of which he has read so many, and needing his breakfast, prays mechanically from the lips outward, while the assistants are in a hurry that the mass to which they havt. not listened should come to an end, that they may shake hands with the relations, and leave the dead.

There is absolute inattention, profound weariness. Yet how terrible is that thing on the tressels that is waiting there in the church, that empty dwelling-place, that body which is already breaking up. Liquid manure that stinks gases which evaporate, flesh that rots is all that remains!

And the soul, now that life is over, and all begins? No one thinks of it, not even the family worn out by the length of the service, absorbed in their own sorrow; who in fact regret only the visible presence of the being they have lost; no one except myself, thought Durtal, and a few curious people, who associate themselves in their alarm with the "Dies irae" and the "Libera," of which they understand both the language and the meaning.

Then by the external sound of the words, without the aid of contemplation, without even the help of thought, the Church acts.

There it is, the miracle of her liturgy, the power of her word, the constantly renewed prodigy of phrases created by revolving time, of prayers arranged by ages which are dead. AII has passed, nothing exists that was raised up in those bygone times. Yet those sequences remain intact, cried aloud by indifferent voices and cast out from empty hearts, plead, groan, and implore even with efficacy, by their virtual power, their talismanic might, their inalienable beauty by the almighty confidence of their faith. The Middle Ages have left us these to help us to save, if it may be, the soul of the modern and dead fine gentleman.

At the present time, concluded Durtal, there is nothing left peculiar to Paris, but the ceremonies, very like each other, of taking the veil and of funerals. It is unfortunate that when we have to do with a sumptuous corpse, undertakers have their way.

They then bring out their terrible upholstery, plated statues of our Lady in atrocious taste, zinc basins in which blaze bowls of green punch, tin candelabra at the end of a branch, like a cannon on end with its mouth upwards, supporting spiders on their backs, with burning candles set about their legs, all the funeral ironmongery of the First Empire, with curtain rods in relief, acanthus leaves, winged hour-glasses, lozenges and Greek frets. It is unfortunate, too, that to touch up the miserable furniture of these ceremonies they play Massenet and Dubois, Benjamin Godard and Widor, or, worse still, the sacristy orchestra, mystical bellowing, such as the women sing, who are affiliated to the confraternities of the month of May.

And alas, we hear no longer the tempests of the great organs and the majestic dolours of plain chant, save at the funerals of the monied classes; for the poor, nothing — no choir, no organ, just a handful of prayers, then a few dips of the brush in the holy water stoup, and there is a dead man the more on whom the rain falls, who is carried away. But the Church knows that the carrion of the rich rots as much as that of the poor, while his soul stinks more, but she jobs indulgences and haggles about masses; she, even she, is consumed by the lust of gold.

"Yet I must not think too ill of these wealthy fools," said Durtal, after silent thought, "for after all it is thanks to them that I can hear the admirable liturgy of the burial service, these people who perhaps have done no good action in their life, do at least this kindness to a few, without knowing it, after their death."

A noise recalled him to St. Sulpice; the choir was going, the church was about to close. "I might as well have tried to pray," he said to himself, "it would have been better than to dream in the empty church on a chair. Pray indeed? I have no desire for it. I am haunted by Catholicism, intoxicated by its atmosphere of incense and wax, I prowl about it, moved even to tears by its prayers, touched even to the marrow by its psalms and chants. I am thoroughly disgusted with my life, very tired of myself, but it is a far cry from that to leading a different existence! And yet — and yet . . . If I am perturbed in these chapels, I become unmoved and dry again, as soon as I leave them. After all," he said to himself, getting up, and following the few persons who were moving towards a door, driven out by the Suisse, "after all, my heart is hardened and smoke-dried by dissipation, I am good for nothing."

CHAPTER II.

How had he become a Catholic, and got to this point?

Durtal answered himself: "I cannot tell, all that I know is that, having been for years an unbeliever, I suddenly believe.

"Let us see," he said to himself, "let us try at least to consider if, however great the obscurity of such a subject, there be not common sense in it.

"After all, my surprise depends on preconceived idea; of conversions. I have heard of sudden and violent crises of the soul, of a thunderbolt, or even of faith exploding at last in ground slowly and cleverly mined. It is quite evident that conversions may happen in one or other of these two ways, for God acts as may seem good to Him, but there must be also a third means, and this no doubt the most usual, which the Saviour has used in my case. And I know not in what this consists; it is something analogous to digestion in a stomach, which works though we do not feel it. There has been no road to Damascus, no events to bring about a crisis; nothing has happened, we awake some fine morning, and, without knowing how or why, the thing is done.

"Yes, but in fact this manceuvre is very like that of he mine which only explodes after it has been deeply dug. Yet not so, for in that case the operations are material, the objections in the way are resolved; I might have reasoned, followed the course of the spark along the thread, but in this case, no! I sprang unexpectedly, without warning, without even having suspected that I was so carefully sapped. Nor was it a clap of thunder, unless I admit that a clap of thunder can be occult and silent, strange and gentle. And this again would be untrue, for sudden disorder of the soul almost always follows a misfortune or a crime, an act of which we are aware.

"No, the one thing which seems certain, in my case, is that there has been divine impulse, grace.

"But," said he, "in that case the psychology of conversion is worthless," and he made answer to himself,-

"That seems to be so, for I seek in vain to retrace the stages through which I have passed; no doubt I can distinguish here and there some landmarks on the road I have travelled: love of art, heredity, weariness of life; I can even recall some of the forgotten sensations of childhood, the subterranean workings of ideas excited by my visits to the churches; but I am unable to gather these threads together, and group them in a skein, I cannot understand the sudden and silent explosion of light which took place in mc. When I seek to explain to myself how one evening an unbeliever, I became without knowing it, on one night a believer, I can discover nothing, for the divine action has vanishcd, and left no trace.

"It is certain," he continued, after silent thought, "that in these cases the Virgin acts upon us, it is she who moulds and places us in the hands of her Son, but her fingers are so light, so supple, so caressing, that the soul they have handled has felt nothing.

On the other hand, if I ignore the course and stages of my conversion, I can at least guess the motives which, after a life of indifference, have brought me into the harbours of the Church, made me wander round about her borders, and finally gave me a shove from behind to bring me in."

And he said to himself, without more ado, there are three causes:-

"First, the atavism of an old and pious family, scattered among the monasteries;" and the memories of childhood returned to him, of cousins, of aunts, seen in convent parlours; gentle women and grave, white as wafers, who alarmed him by their low voices, who troubled him by their looks, and asked if he were a good boy.

He felt a sort of terror, and hid himself in his mother’s skirts, trembling when he went away, and was obliged to bend his brow to those colourless lips, and undergo the touch of a chilly kiss.

Now that he thought of them at a distance, the interviews which had wearied him so much in his childhood, seemed to him charming. He put into them all the poetry of the cloister, clothed those bare parlours with a faded scent of wainscotting and of wax, and he saw again the convent gardens through which he had passed, impregnated with the bitter salt scent of box, planted with clipped hedges, intermingled with trellises, whose green grapes never ripened, divided by benches whose mouldering stone kept the traces worn by water and a thousand details came back to him of those silent lime alleys, of the paths where he ran in the interlaced shade which branches threw upon the ground. These gardens had seemed to him to become larger as he grew older, and he retained a somewhat confused memory of them, amid which was the vague recollection of an old stately park, and of a presbytery orchard in the north, always somewhat damp, even when the sun shone.

It was not surprising that these sensations, transformed by time, had left in him some traces of pious thought, which grew deeper as his mind embellished them; all this might have fermented indistinctly for thirty years, and now began to work.

But the two other causes which he knew, must have been still more active.

These were his disgust for his life, and his passion for art and the disgust was certainly aggravated by his solitude and his idleness.

After having, in old days, made friends by chance, and having taken the impression of souls which had nothing in common with his own, he had at last chosen after much useless vagabondage he had become the intimate friend of a certain Doctor des Hermies, a physician, who devoted much attention to demoniac possession and to mysticism, and of a Breton, named Carhaix, the bell-ringer at St. Sulpice.

These friendships were not like those he had formerly made, entirely superficial and external, they were wide and deep, based on similarity of thought, and the indissoluble ties of soul, and these had been roughly broken; within two months of each other Des Hermies and Carhaix died, the former of typhoid fever, the latter of a chill that prostrated him in his tower, after he had rung the evening Angelus.

These were frightful blows for Durtal. His life, now without an anchor, drifted; he wandered all astray, declaring to himself that this desolation was final, since he had reached an age at which new friends are not made.

So he lived alone, apart among his books, but the solitude which he bore bravely, when he was occupied, when he was writing a book, became intolerable to him now that he was idle. He lounged in an armchair in the afternoons, and abandoned himself to his dreams: then, especially, fixed ideas took hold on him, and these ended by playing pantomimes of which the scenes never varied behind the lowered curtain of his eyes. Nude figures danced in his brain to the tune of psalms, and he woke from these dreams weak and panting, ready, if a priest had been there, to throw himself at his feet with tears, just as he would have abandoned himseIf to the basest pleasures, had the temptation suddenly come to him.

"Let me chase away these phantoms by work," he cried. But at what should he work? He had just published the "Life of Gilles de Rais," which might interest a few artists, il he now remained without a subject, on the hunt for a book. As, in art, he was a man of extremes, he always went from one excess to the other, and after having dived into the Satanism of the Middle Ages, in his account of "Marshal de Rais," he saw nothing so interesting to investigate as the life of a saint. Some lines which he had discovered in Görres’ and Ribet’s "Studies in Mysticism" had put him on the trace of a certain Blessed Lidwine in search of new documents.

But admitting that he could unearth anything about her, could he write the life of a saint? He did not believe it, and the arguments on which he based his opinion seemed plausible.

Hagiography was now a lost branch of art, as completely lost as wood carving, and the miniatures of the old missals. Nowadays it is only treated by church officers and priests, by those stylistic agents who seem when they write to put the embryos of their ideas on ballast trucks, and in their hands it has become a commonplace of goody-goody, a transIation into a book of the statuettes of Froc Robert, and the coloured images of Bouasse.

The way then was free, and it seemed at first easy enough to plan it out, but to extract the charm of the legends needed the simple language of bygone centuries, the ingenuous phrases of the days that are dead. Who in our time can express the melancholy essence, the pale perfume of the ancient translations of the Golden Legend of Voragine, how bind in one bright posy the plaintive flowers, which the monks cultivated in their cloistered enclosures, when hagiography was the sister of the barbaric and delightful art of the illuminators and glass stainers, of the ardent and chaste paintings of the Early Masters?

Yet we may not think of giving ourselves over to studious imitations, nor coldly attempt to ape such works as these. The question remains, whether we can with the present artistic resources, succeed in setting up the humble yet lofty figure of a saint; and this is at least doubtful, for the lack of real simplicity, the over-ingenious art of style, the tricks of careful design and the false craft of colour would probably transform the elect lady into a strolling player. She would be no longer a saint, but an actress who rendered the part more or less adroitly; and then the charm would be destroyed, the miracles would seem mechanical, the episodes would be absurd, then... then... one must have a lively faith, and believe in the sanctity of one’s heroine, if one would try to exhume her, and put her alive again in a book.

This is so true that we may examine Gustave Flaubert’s admirable pages on the legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller. Their development is like a dazzling yet regulated tumult, evolved in superb language whose apparent simplicity is only due to the complicated ingenuity of consummate skill. All is there, all except the accent which would have made this work a true masterpiece. Given the subject, the fire which should course through these magnificent phrases is absent, there lacks the cry of the love that faints, the gift of the superhuman exile, the mystical soul.

On the other hand, Hello’s "Physionomies de Saints" are worth reading. Faith flashes out in each of his portraits, enthusiasm runs over in each chapter, unexpected allusions form deep reservoirs of thought between the lines; but after all Hello was so little of an artist that the fairest legends fade when, his fingers touch them; the meanness of his style impoverishes the miracles and renders them ineffectual. The art is lacking which would rescue the book from the category of pale and dead publications.

The example of these two men, in complete opposition as ever writers were, neither of whom attained perfection, one in the legend of St. Julian because faith was wanting, the other because his art was poor and narrow, thoroughly discouraged Durtal. He ought to be both at once, and yet remain himself, if not, there was no good in buckling to for such a task, it were better to be silent; and he threw himseIf back in his chair sullen and hopeless. Then the contempt of his desolate life grew upon him, and once more he wondered what interest Providence could have in thus tormenting the descendants of the first convicts. If there were no answer, he was obliged to admit that the Church in these disasters gathered up the waifs, sheltered the shipwrecked, brought them home again, and assured them a resting-place.

No more than Schopenhauer, whom he had once admired, but whose plan of labelling every one before death and whose herbarium of dry sorrows had wearied him, has the Church deceived man, nor sought to decoy him, by boasting the mercy of a life which she knew to be ignoble.

In all her inspired books she proclaims the horror of fate, and mourns over the enforced task of living. Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, the book of Job, the Lamentations of Jeremias manifest this sorrow in their every line, and the Middle Ages too in the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" cursed existence, and cried out loudly for death.

More plainly than Schopenhauer the Church declared that there is nothing to wish for here below, nothing to expect, but where the mere catalogues of the philosopher stop, the Church went on, overpassing the limits of the senses, declared the end of man, and defined his limitations.

"Then," he said to himself, "if it be well considered, the vaunted argument of Schopenhauer against the Creator, drawn from the misery and injustice of the world, is not irrefutable, for the world is not as God made it, but as man has refashioned it.’’

Before accusing heaven for our ills, it is, no doubt, fitting to examine through what phases of consent, through what voluntary falls the creature has passed, before ending in the gloomy disaster it deplores. We may well curse the vices of our ancestors and our own passions which beget the greater part of the woes from which we suffer; we may well loathe the civilization which has rendered life intolerable to cleanly souls, and not the Lord, who, perhaps, did not create us to be shot down by cannon in time of war, to be cheated, robbed, and stripped in time of peace, by the slave drivers of commerce and the brigands of the money market.

But that which remains for ever incomprehensible is the initial horror, the horror imposed on each of us, of having to live, and that is a mystery no philosophy can explain.

"Ah," he went on, "when I think of that horror, that disgust of existence which has for years and years increased in me, I understand how I am forced to make for the Church, the only port where I can find shelter.

"Once I despised her, because I had a staff on which to lean when the great winds of weariness blew I believed in my novels, I worked at my history, I had my art. I have come to recognize its absolute inadequacy, its complete incapacity to afford happiness. Then I understood that Pessimism was, at most, good to console those who had no real need of comfort I understood that its theories, alluring when we are young, and rich, and well, become singularly weak and lamentably false, when age advances, when infirmities declare themselves, when all around is crumbling.

"I went to the church, that hospital for souls. There, at least, they take you in, put you to bed and nurse you, they do not merely turn their backs on you as in the wards of Pessimism and tell you the name of your disease."

Finally Durtal had been brought back to religion by art. More even than his disgust for life, art had been the irresistible magnet which drew him to God. The day, when out of curiosity and to kill time, he had entered a church, and after so many years of forgetfulness, had heard the Vespers for the dead fall heavily, psalm after psalm, in antiphonal chant, as the singers threw up, like ditchers, their shovelsful of verses, his soul had been shaken to its depths. The evenings when he had listened at St. Sulpice to the admirable chanting during the Octave of All Souls; he had felt himself caught once for all; but that which had put most pressure on him, and brought him yet more completely into bondage were the ceremonies and music of Holy Week.

He had visited the churches during that week; and they had opened to him like palaces ruined, like cemeteries laid waste by God. They were forbidding with their veiled images, their crucifixes wrapped lozenge-wise in purple, their organs dumb, their bells silent. The crowd flowed in, busy, but noiseless, along the floor over the immense cross formed by the nave and the two transepts, and entering by the wounds of which the doors were figures, they went up to the altar, where the blood-stained head of Christ would lie, and there on their knees eagerly kissed the crucifix which marked the place of the chin below the steps.

And the crowd itself, as it ran in the cruciform mould of the church, became itself an enormous cross, living and crawling, silent and sombre.

At St. Sulpice, where the whole assembled seminary lamented the ignominy of human justice and the fore-ordained death of a God, Durtal had followed the incomparable offices of those mournful days, through all their black minutes, had listened to the infinite sadness of the Passion, so nobly and profoundly expressed at Tenebrae by the slow chanting of the Lamentations and the Psalms, but when he thought it over, that which above all made him shudder was the thought of the Virgin coming on the scene on the Thursday at night-fall.

The Church, till then absorbed in her sorrow, and prostrate before the Cross, raised herself and fell a-weeping on beholding the Mother.

By all the voices of the choir, it pressed round Mary, endeavouring to console her, mixing the tears of the "Stabat Mater" with her own, sighing out that music of plaintive weeping, pressing the wound of that sequence, which gave forth water and blood like the wound of Christ Himself.

Durtal left the church, worn out with these long services, but his temptations to unbelief were gone; he had no further doubt; it seemed to him that at St. Sulpice, grace mixed with the eloquent splendours of the liturgies, and that in the dim sorrow of the voices there had been appeals to him; and he therefore felt filial gratitude to that church where he had lived through hours so sweet and sad,

Yet, in ordinary weeks he did not go there; it seemed to him too great and too cold, and it was so ugly. He preferred warmer and smaller sanctuaries, in which there were still traces of the Middle Ages.

Thus on idle days when he came out of the Louvre, where he had strayed for a long time before the canvases of the Early Painters, he was wont to take refuge in the old church of St. Severin, hidden away in a corner of the poorer part of Paris.

He carried with him the visions of the canvases he had admired at the Louvre, and contemplated them again, in this surrounding where they were thoroughly at home.

Then he spent delightful moments, in which he was carried away in the clouds of harmony, divided by the white splendour of a child’s voice flashing out from the rolling thunder of the organ.

There, without even praying, he felt a plaintive languor, a vague uneasiness steal over him; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth of his senses, to weave together the regret and the terror of his soul.

He often went there, especially on Sunday mornings to High Mass at ten o’clock.

He was wont to place himself behind the high altar, in that melancholy and delicate apse, planted like a winter garden with rare and somewhat fantastic trees. It might have been called a petrified arbour of very old trunks in flower, but stripped of leaf, forests of pillars, squared or cut in broad panels, carved with regular notches near the base, hollowed through their whole length like rhubarb stalks, channelled like celery.

No vegetation expanded at the summit of those trunks which bent their naked boughs along the vaulting, joined and met and gathered at their junction, and thin, engrafted knots, extravagant bunches of heraldic roses, armorial flowers with open tracery; and for more than four hundred years no sap had run, no bud had formed in these trees. The shafts bent for ever remained untouched, the white bark of these pillars was scarcely worn, but the greater part of the flowers were withered, the heraldic petals were wanting, some keystones of the arches had only stratified calices, open like nests, with holes like sponges, in rags like handfuls of russet lace.

And among this mystic flora, amid these petrified trees, there was one, strange and charming, which suggested the fanciful idea, that the blue smoke of the rolling incense had condensed, and, as it coagulated, had grown pale with age, to form, in twisting, the spiral of a column which was inverted on itself, and ended broadening out into a sheaf, whereof the broken stems fell from above the arches.

The corner where Durtal took refuge was faintly lighted by pointed stained windows, with black diamond-shaped divisions set with minute panes darkened by the accumulated dust of years, rendered still more obscure by the woodwork of the chapels, which cut off half their surface.

This apse might have been called a frozen grove of skeIeton trees, a conservatory of dead specimens belonging to the palm family, calling up the memory of an impossible phoenix and unlikely palms; but it also recalled by its half-moon shape and doubtful light, the image of a ship’s prow below water. In fact it allowed to filter through its bars, to its windows trellised with all black network, the murmur, suggested by the rolling of the carriages which shook the street, of a river which sifted the golden light of day through the briny course of its waters.

On Sundays, at the time of High Mass, the apse was empty. The public filled the nave before the high altar, or spread themselves somewhat further into a chapel dedicated to Our Lady. Durtal was therefore almost alone, and even the people who crossed his refuge were neither stupid nor hostile, like the faithful in other churches. In this district were beggars, the very poor, hucksters, Sisters of Charity, rag pickers, street arabs; above all, there were women in tatters walking on tiptoe, who knelt without looking round, poor creatures overwhelmed by the piteous splendour of the altars, looking out of the corner of their eyes, and bending low when the Suisse passed them.

Touched by the timidity of this silent misery, Durtal listened to the mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of St. Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plain chant, better than it was done at St. Sulpice, where, however, the offices were as a rule solemn and correct, It bore it, as it were, to the top of the choir, and let it spread with its great wings open and almost without motion, above the prostrate flock, when the verse "Et horno factus est" took its slow and reverent flight in the low voice of the singer. It was at once monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in their last meeting, to the united apostiss of Christ.

At St. Severin a powerful voice declaimed a verse as a solo, then all the children, sustained by the rest of the singers, delivered the others, and the unchangeable truths declared themselves in their order, raore attentive, more grave, more accentuated, even a little plaintive in the solo voice of a man, more timid perhaps, but also more familiar and more joyous, in the dash, however restrained, of the boys.

At such a moment Durtal was roused, and exclaimed within himself: "It is impossible that the alluvial deposits of Faith which have created this musical certainty are false. The accent of these declarations is such as to be superhuman, and far from profane musIc, which has never attained to the solid grandeur of this naked chant."

The whole mass, moreover, at St. Severin was perfect. The "Kyrie eleison," solemn and sumptuous, the "Gloria in excelsis," shared by the grand and the choir organs, the one taking the solos, the other guiding and sustaining the singers, was full of exultant joy; the "Sanctus," concentrated, almost haggard, resounded through the arches when the choir shouted the "Hosanna in excelsis," and the "Agnus Dei" was sung low to a clear, suppliant melody, so humble that it dared not become loud.

Indeed, except for a contraband "O Salutaris," introduced there as in other churches, St. Severin maintained, on ordinary Sundays, the musical liturgy, sang it almost reverentially with the fragile but well-toned voices of the boys, the solidly built basses bringing vigorous sounds from the deep.

It was a joy to Durtal to linger in the delightful surroundings of the Middle Ages, in that shadowy loneliness, amid the chants which rose behind him, without being annoyed by tricks of the mouths which he could not see.

He ended by being moved to the very marrow, choked by nervous tears, and all the bitterness of his life came up before him; full of vague fears, of confused prayers which stifled him, and found no words, he cursed the ignominy of his life and swore to master his carnal affections.

When the mass was over, he wandered in the church itself, and was delighted with the spring of the nave, which four centuries built and sealed with their arms, placing on it those strange impressions, those wonderful seals which expand in relief under the reversed groining of the arches. These centuries combined to bring to the feet of Christ the superhuman effort of their art, and the gifts of each are still visible. The thirteenth century shaped those low and stunted pillars, whose capitals are crowned with water-lilies, water-parsley, foliage with large leaves, voluted with crochets and turned in the form of a crosier. The fourteenth century raised the columns of the neighbouring bays on the sides of which prophets, monks and saints uphold the spring of the arches. The fifteenth and sixteenth created the apse, the sanctuary, some windows pierced above the choir, and though they have been restored by incompetent builders, they have still retained a barbaric grace, and a really touching simplicity.

They seem to have been designed by ancestors of the Epinal foundries, and stained by them with crude colours. The donors and the saints who pass through these bright, stone-framed pictures are all awkward and pensive, dressed n robes of gamboge, bottle-green, prussian-blue, gooseberry-red, pumpkin-purple and wine lees, and these are made still deeper by contact with the flesh tints, either omitted or destroyed, which have at any rate remained uncoloured like a thin skin of glass. In one of these windows Christ on His cross seems limpid, all in light, between blue splashes of sky, and the red and green patches, formed by the wings of the two angeIs whose faces also seem cut in crystal and full of light.

These windows differ from those of other churches, in that they absorb the rays of the sun, without refracting them. No doubt they have been deliberately divested of reflection that they may not by the insolent joyousness of stones on fire insult the melancholy sorrow of this church which rises in the squalid haunts of a quarter inhabited by beggars and thieves.

Then these thoughts assailed Durtal. In Paris the modern churches are useless, they remain deaf to the prayers which break against the icy indifference of their walls. No man recollects himself in those naves where souls have left nothing of themselves, or where they have perhaps given themselves away, have had to turn and fall back on themselves, rebuffed by the insolence of a photographic glare, darkened by the neglect of those altars at which no saint has ever said mass. It seemed that God had always gone out, and would only come home to keep His promise to appear at the moment of consecration, and that He would retire immediately afterwards, despising these edifices which have not been built expressly for Him, since by the baseness of their form they might be put to any profane use, since above all they do not bring Him, in default of sanctity, the only gift which might please Him, the gift of art which He has lent to man, and which allows Him to see Himself in the abridged restitution of His work, and to rejoice in the development of that flower of which He has sowed the seed in souls which He has carefully chosen, in souls which are truly the elect, second only to those of His Saints.

All, those charitable churches of the Middle Ages, those chapels damp and smoky, full of ancient song, of exquisite paintings, of the odour of extinguished tapers, of the perfume of burning incense!

In Paris there remain now only a few specimens of this art of other years, a few sanctuaries whose stones really exude the Faith; among these St. Severin seemed to Durtal the most exquisite and the most certain. He only felt at home there, he believed that if he could ever pray in earnest he could do it in that church; and he said to himself that there lived the spirit of the fabric. It is impossible but that the burning prayers, the hopeless sobs of the Middle Ages, have not for ever impregnated the pillars and stained the walls; it is impossible but that the vine of sorrows whence of old the Saints gathered warm clusters of tears, has not preserved from those wonderful times emanations which sustain, a breath which still awakes a shame for sin, and the gift of tears.

As Saint Agnes remained immaculate in the brothels, this church remained intact amid infamous surroundings, when all near it in the streets from the Château Rouge to the Cremerie Alexandre, only two paces off, the modern rabble of rascality combine their misdeeds, mingling with prostitutes their brewage of crime, their adulterated absinthe and spirits.

In this especial territory of Satanism, the church rises, delicate and little, closely enveloped in the rags of taverns and hovels, and seen far off, raises above the roofs its light spire, like a netting needle, its point below, and lifting its eye into the light and air, through which can be seen a minute bell surmounting a sort of anvil. Such it appears, at least, from the Place Saint André des Arts. Symbolically it might be called a piteous appeal, always rejected by souls hardened and hammered by vice, of that anvil which was only an optical illusion, and that very real bell.

"They say," thought Durtal, "they say that ignorant architects and unskilled archaeologists wish to free St. Severin from its rags, and surround it with trees in an enclosed square. But it has always lived in its network of black streets, and is voluntarily humble, in accordance with the miserable district it aids. In the Middle Ages the church was a monument seen only within, and not one of those impetuous basilicas which are put up as a show in open spaces.

"Then it was an oratory for the poor, a church on its knees, and not standing; it would, therefore, be the most absolute nonsense to free it from its surroundings, to take it out of the day of an eternal twilight, out of those hours of shadow which brighten the melancholy beauty of a servant in prayer behind the impious hedge of hovels.

"Ah, were it possible to steep the church in the glowing atmosphere of Notre Dame des Victoires, and join to its meagre psalmody the powerful choir of St. Sulpice, that would be complete," said Durtal, "but alas, here below, nothing whole, nothing perfect exists!"

Indeed from an artistic point of view, it was the only church which satisfied him, for Notre Dame de Paris was too grand, and too much overrun by tourists; there were few ceremonies there, just the necessary amount of prayers were weighed out, and the greater part of the chapels remained closed; and lastly the voices of the choir boys always wanted mending; they broke, while the advanced age of the basses made them hoarse. At St. Etienne du Mont it was worse still; the shell of the church was charming, but the choir was an offshoot of the school of Sanfourche, you might think yourself in a kennel, where a medley pack of sick beasts were growling as for the other sanctuaries on the right bank of the river, they were worthless, plain chant was as far as possible suppressed, and the poverty of the voices was everywhere ornamented with promiscuous tunes.

Yet on the right bank were the more self-respecting churches, for religious Paris stops on that side of the Seine, and comes to an end as you pass the bridges.

In fact, to sum up all, he might believe that St. Severin by its scent, and the delightful art of its old nave, St. Sulpice by its ceremonies and its chanting, had brought him back towards Christian art, which in its turn had directed him to God.

Then when once urged on this way, he had pursued it, had left architecture and music, to wander in the mystic territories of the other arts, and his long visits to the Louvre, his researches into the breviaries, into the books of Ruysbrock, Angela da Foligno, Saint Teresa, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Magdalen of Pazzi, had confirmed him in his belief.

But the upheaval of all his ideas which he had undergone was too recent for his soul at once to regain its equilibrium. From time to time it seemed to wish to go back, and he discussed with himself in order to set it at rest. He spent himself in disputation, came to doubt :he reality of his con version, and said "After all I am united to the church only on the side of art, I only go there to see or hear and not to pray I do not seek the Lord, but my own pleasure. This is not business. Just as in a warm bath I do not feel the cold if. I am motionless, but if I move I freeze, so in the church my impulses are upset when I move, I am almost on fire in the nave, less warm in the porch, and I become perfectly icy outside. These are literary postulates, vibrations of the nerves, skirmishes of thought, spiritual brawls, whatever you please, except Faith."

But what disquieted him still more than the need of helps to feeling, was that his shameless senses rebelled at the contact of religious ideas. He floated like wreckage between Licentiousness and the Church, they each threw him back in turn, obliging him as he approached one to return at once to that which he had left, and he was inclined to ask if he were not a victim to some mystification of his lower instincts, seeking to revive themselves, without his consciousness, by the cordial of a false piety.

In fact he had often seen realized in himself that unclean miracle, when he had left St. Severin, almost in tears. Insensibly, without connection of ideas, without any welding together of sensations, without the explosion of a spark, his senses took fire, and he was powerless to let them burn themselves out, to resist them.

He loathed himself afterwards, and it was high time. Then came the reverse movement; he longed to run to some chapel, there to wash and be clean, and he was so disgusted with himself that now and then he went as far as the door and dared not enter.

At other times, on the contrary, he rebelled against himself; and cried in fury: "It is monstrous, I have in fact spoiled for myself the only pleasure that remained to me — the flesh. Once I amused myself without blame, now I pay for my poor debauches with torments. I have added one more weariness to existence — would that I could undo it."

He lied to himself in vain, trying to justify himself by suggesting doubts.

"Suppose all this were not true if there were nothing in it; if I were deceiving myself, what if the freethinkers were right?"

But he was obliged to be sorry for himself; for he felt distinctly to the bottom of his soul, that he held unshaken the certitude of true Faith.

"These discussions are miserable, and the excuses I make for my filthinesses are odious," he said to himself, and a flame of enthusiasm sprang up within him.

How doubt the truth of dogmas, how deny the divine power of the Church, for she commands assent?

First she has her superhuman art and her mysticism, then she is most wonderful in the persistent folly of conquered heresies. All since the world began have had the flesh as their springboard. Logically and humanly speaking they should have triumphed, for they allowed man and woman to satisfy their passions, saying to themselves there was no sin in these, even sanctifying them as the Gnostics, rendering homage to God by the foulest uncleanness.

All have suffered shipwreck. The Church, unbending in this matter, has remained upright and entire. She orders the body to be silent, and the soul to suffer, and contrary to all probability, humanity listens to her, and sweeps away like a dung-heap the seductive joys proposed to her.

Again, the vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves her in spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the awkwardness and lack of ability in her defenders, a very strong point.

"No, the more I think of her," he cried, "the more I think her prodigious, unique, the more I am convinced that she alone holds the truth, that outside her are only weaknesses of mind, impostures, scandals. The Church is the divine breeding ground, the heavenly dispensary of souls; she gives them suck, nourishes them, and heals them; she bids them understand, when the hour of sorrow comes, that true life begins, not at birth, but at death. The Church is indefectible, before all things admirable, she is great -

"Yes, but then we must follow her directions and practise the sacraments she orders!"

And Durtal, shaking his head, gave himself no further answer.

CHAPTER III.

BEFORE his conversion he had said like all unbelievers: "If I believed that Jesus Christ is God, and that eternal life is not a decoy, I would not hesitate to chinge all my habits, to follow as far as possible the rules of religion, and, in any case, to live chaste." And he was surprised that people lie knew, who were in these conditions, did not maintain an ittitude higher than his own. He who had so long indulgently forgiven himself became singularly intolerant, o soon as he had to do with a Catholic.

He now understood the injustice of his judgments, and confessed that between faith and practice was a gulf difficult to overpass.

He did not like to discuss this question with himself, but it returned and took possession of him all the same, and he was obliged to admit the meanness of his arguments, the despicable reasons for his resistance.

He was still honest enough to say: "I am no longer a child; if I have Faith, if I admit Catholicism, I cannot conceive it as lukewarm and unfixed, warmed up again and again in the saucepan of a false zeal. I will have no compromise or truce, no alternations of debauch and communions, no stages of licentiousness and piety, no, all or nothing; to change from top to bottom, or not change it all."

Then he drew hack in alarm, endeavoured to escape the part he was about to take, endeavoured to exculpate himself, cavilling for hours, invoking the most wretched motives for remaining as he was, and not budging a jot.

"What am I to do? If I do not obey orders, which I feel with increasing force, I am preparing for myself a life of uneasiness and remorse, for I know well I ought not to remain for ever on the threshold, but to penetrate into the sanctuary and stay there. And if I make up my mind — no indeed — for then I must bind myself to a heap of observances, bend to a series of rules, assist at mass on Sunday, abstain on Friday, live like a bigot, and look like a fool."

And then to help his revolt, he thought of the air, the look of people who frequented the churches; for two men who looked intelligent and clean, how many were without doubt rascals and impostors

Almost all had a side-long look, an oily voice, downcast eyes, immovable spectacles, clothes like sacristans as if of black wood, almost all told thin beads ostentatiously, and with more strategy and more knavery than the wicked took toll from their neighbours on leaving God.

The devout women were still less reassuring, they invaded the church, walking about as if quite at home disturbing everybody, upsetting chairs, knocking against you without begging pardon; then they knelt down with much ado, in the attitude of contrite angels, murmured interminable paternosters, and left the church more arrogant and sour than before.

"It is not encouraging to have to mix with this flock of pious geese," he exclaimed.

But soon, against his will, he made answer to himself: "You have nothing to do with others, were you more humble, these people would certainly seem less offensive; at any rate they have the courage you lack, they are no ashamed of their faith, and are not afraid to kneel to God in public."

And Durtal remained dumfounded, for he had to admit that the riposte struck home. It was clear his humility was at fault, but what was worse, he could not free himself from human respect.

He was afraid of being taken for a fool; the prospect of being seen on his knees, in church, made his hair stand on end; the idea, that, if he ever had to communicate, he would have to rise and go to the altar in the sight of all, was intolerable to him.

"If that moment ever come it will be hard to bear," said he; "and yet I am an idiot, for what have I to do with the opinion of people I do not know?" but much as he might repeat that his alarms were absurd, he could not get over them, or free himself from the fear of ridicule.

"After all," he said, "even if I decide to jump the ditch, to confess and communicate, that terrible question of the senses would always have to be resolved. I must determine to fly the lusts of the flesh, and accept perpetual abstinence. I could never attain to that.

"Without counting that in any case, the time would be ill-chosen were I now to make such an effort, for never have I been so tormented as since my conversion; Catholicism unfortunately excites unclean suggestions when I prowl about it, without entering."

And to this exclamation another answered at once: "Yes, but you must enter."

He was irritated at this change of front without change of place, and he tried to turn the conversation, as though it had been held with another, whose questions perplexed him; but he came back to it all the same, and, in his annoyance, summoned all his reasoning powers to his aid.

"Come, let us try to take stock at any rate! It is plain that as I have drawn near the Church, my unclean desires have become more frequent and more persistent; and yet another fact is certain that I have been so used up by twenty years of debauchery that I ought not to have any further carnal appetites. In fact, if I chose it, I could perectly well remain chaste. but then I must bid my miserable brain be silent, and I have no power to do so! It is frightful all the same that I am more excited than in youth, for now my desires go a-travelling, and since they have not their ordinary shelter they go off in search of evil haunts. How may this be explained? It is a sort of dyspepsia of the soul, which cannot digest ordinary meats, and tries to feed on spiced dreams, highly seasoned thoughts; it is then want of appetite for wholesome meals which has begotten this greediness for strange dishes, this trouble of the mind, this wish to escape from myself, and jump were it but for a moment over the permitted limits of the senses.

"In that case Catholicism would play a part at once repellent and depressing. It would stimulate these sick desires, and weaken me at the same time, would give me over to nervous emotions without strength to resist them."

Wandering thus in self-examination, he came to a dead stand where was no issue, arriving at this conclusion "I do not practise my religion, because I yield to my baser instincts, and I yield to these instincts because I do not practise my religion."

Brought up thus by a dead wall, he resisted, asking if this last observation were indeed true; for, after all, nothing proved that if he approached the Sacraments he would not be attacked with even greater violence. It was even probable he would be, for the devil makes a dead set at pious people.

Then he rebelled against the cowardice of these remarks, and cried: "I lie, for I know well, that if I made the least sign of resistance, I should be powerfully aided from on high."

Clever at self-torture, he continued to harass his soul, always on the same line. "Suppose," he said, "for the sake of argument, that I have tamed my pride, and subdued my body, suppose that at present there were nothing to do, but to go forward, I am still brought up, for the final obstacle terrifies me.

"Up to now I have been able to walk alone, without earthly assistance, without advice I have been converted without the help of anyone, but now I cannot make a step without a guide, I cannot approach the altar without the aid of an interpreter, and the bulwark of a priest."

And once more, he drew back, for in former times he had been intimate with a certain number of ecclesiastics, and had found them so mediocre, so lukewarm, above all so hostile to Mysticism, that he was revolted at the very notion of laying before them the schedule of his requirements and his regrets.

"They will not understand me," he thought; they will answer that Mysticism was interesting in the Middle Ages, but has now become disused and is in any case quite out of touch with the modern spirit. They will think me mad, will assure me, moreover, that God does not want so much, will advise me with a smile, not to make myself singular, to do as others, and to think like them.

"I have indeed no intention of entering on the way of Mysticism, but they may at least allow me to envy it and not, inflict on me their middle-class ideal of a God.

"For, not to deceive oneself, Catholicism is not only that moderate religion that they offer us; it is not composed only of petty cases and formulas; it is not wholly confined to rigid observances, and the toys of old maids, to all that goody-goody business, which spreads itself abroad in the Rue Saint Sulpice; it is far more exalted, far purer, but then we must penetrate its burning zone, and seek in Mysticism, the art, the essence, and the very soul of the Church.

"Using the powerful means at her disposal, we then have to empty ourselves, and strip the soul, so that Christ if He will may enter it; we have to purify the house, to cleanse it with the disinfectant of prayer and the sublimate of Sacraments; in a word, to be ready when the Guest shall come and bid us to empty ourselves wholly into Him, as He will pour Himself into us.

"I know thoroughly well, that this divine alchemy, this transmutation of the human creature into God, is generally impossible, for the Saviour, as a rule, keeps His singular favours for His elect; but after all, every one, however unworthy, is presumably able to attain that majestic end, since God only decides, and not man, whose humble acquiescence :ilone is requisite.

"I see myself saying that to the priests They will tell me I have no business with mystical ideas, and will give me in exchange the petty religion of rich women; they will wish to mix themselves up with my life, to inquire about the state of my soul, to insinuate their own tastes; they will try to convince me that art is dangerous, will sermonize me with imbecile talk, and pour over me their flowing bowls of pious veal broth.

"I know what I am; at the end of a couple of interviews I shall rebel, and become wicked."

Durtal shook his head, remained in thought, and began again:-

"Yet one must be just; perhaps the secular clergy are onIy the leavings, for the contemplative orders and the missionary army carry away every year the pick of the spiritual basket; the mystics, priests athirst for sorrows, drunk with sacrifice, bury themselves in cloisters or exile themselves among savages whom they teach. So when the cream is off, the rest of the clergy are plainly but skim milk, the scourings of the seminaries.

"Yes, but after all," he continued, "the question is not whether they are intelligent or narrow, it is not my business to take the priest to pieces to discover under the consecrated rind the nothingness of the man; not my business to abuse his inadequacy since it is thoroughly suited to the understanding of the crowd. Would it not be, after all, more courageous and more humble to kneel before a being of whose brains you know the weakness?

"And then . . then . . . I am not reduced to that, for indeed I know one in Paris, a true mystic. Suppose I go and see him!"

And he thought of a certain Abbé Gévresin, with whom he had formerly some acquaintance; he had often met him at a bookseller’s in the Rue Servandoni, old Tocane, who had rare books on liturgy and the lives of the saints.

Learning that Durtal was looking for works on Blessed Lidwine, the priest was at once interested in him, and on leaving the shop they had a long conversation. The abbé was very old and walked with difficulty, therefore he willingly took Durtal’s arm, who saw him home.

"The life of that victim of the sins of her time is a magnificent subject," he said; "you remember it, do you not?" and as they walked he sketched its lines, broadly.

"Lidwine was born towards the end of the fourteenth century, at Schiedam, in Holland. Her beauty was extraordinary, but she lost it through illness at the age of fifteen. She recovered, but while skating one day with her companions on the frozen canals, she fell and broke a rib. From the time of that accident to her death she was bed-ridden. She was afflicted with most frightful ailments, her wounds festered, and worms bred in her putrefying flesh. Erysipelas, that terrible malady of the Middle Ages, consumed her. Her right arm was eaten away, a single muscle held it to the body, her brow was cleft in two, one of her eyes became blind, and the other so weak that it could not bear the light.

"While she was in this condition, the plague ravaged Holland, and decimated the town in which she lived; she was the first attacked. Two boils formed, one under her arm, the other above the heart. ’Two boils, it is well,’ she said to the Lord, ’but three would be better in honour of the Holy Trinity,’ and immediately a third pustule brke out on her face.

"For thirty-five years she lived in a cellar, taking no solid food, praying and weeping, so chilly in winter, that each morning her tears formed two frozen streams down her cheeks.

"She thought herself still too fortunate, and entreated the Lord not to spare her, aond obtained from Him the grace that by her sufferings she might expiate the sins of others. Christ heard her prayers, visited her with His angels, communicated her with His own hand, gave her the delight of heavenly ecstasies, and caused her festering wounds to exhale delicious perfumes.

"At the moment of her death He stood by her, and restored her poor body to its former soundness. Her beauty, so long vanished, shone out again, the town was moved, the sick came in crowds, and all who drew near were healed.

"She is the true patroness of the sick," concluded the abbé, and, after a silence, he added,-

"From the point of view of the higher mysticism, Lidwine is wonderful, for in her we can verify that plan of substitution which was, and is, the glorious reason for the existence of convents."

And as, without answering, Durtal questioned him with a look, he went on,-

"You are aware, sir, that in all ages, nuns have offered themselves to heaven as expiatory victims. The lives of saints, both men and women, who desired these sacrifices abound, of those who atoned for the sins of others by sufferings eagerly demanded and patiently borne. But there is a task still more arduous and more painful than was desired by these admirable souls. It is not now that of purging the faults of others, but of preventing them, hindering their commission, by taking the place of those who are too weak to bear the shock.

"Read Saint Teresa on this subject; you will see that she gained permission to take on herself, and without flinching, the temptations of a priest who could not endure them. This substitution of a strong soul freeing one who is not strong from perils and fears is one of the great rules of mysticism.

"Sometimes this exchange is purely spiritual, sometimes on the contrary it has to do only with the ills of the body. Saint Teresa was the surrogate of souls in torment, Sister Catherine Emmerich took the place of the sick, relieved, at least, those who were most suffering; thus, for instance, she was able to undergo the agony of a woman suffering from consumption and dropsy, in order to permit her to prepare for death in peace.

"Well, Lidwine took on herself all bodily ills, she lusted for physical suffering, and was greedy for wounds; she was, as it were, the reaper of punishments, and she was also the piteous vessel in which everyone discharged the overfiowings of his malady. If you would speak of her in other fashion than the poor hagiographies of our day, study first that law of substitution, that miracle of perfect charity, that superhuman triumph of Mysticism; that will be the stern of your book, and naturally, without effort, all Lidwine’s acts graft themselves on it."

"But," asked Durtal, "does this law still take effect?"

"Yes: I know convents which apply it. Moreover, Orders like the Carmelites and the Poor Clares willingly accept the transfer to them of temptations we suffer; then these convents take on their backs, so to speak, the diabolical expiations of those insolvent souls whose debts they pay to the full."

"All the same," said Durtal, shaking his head, "if you consent to take on yourself the assaults intended for your neighbour, you must make pretty sure not to sink."

"The nuns chosen by our Lord," replied the abbé, "as victims of expiation, as whole burnt-offerings, are in fact few, and they are generally, especially in this age, obliged to unite and coalesce in order to bear without failing the weight of misdeeds which try them, for in order that a soul may bear abbe the assaults of Satan, which are often terrible, it must be indeed assisted by the angels and elect of God." And after a silence the old priest added,-

"I believe I may speak with some experience in these matters, for I am one of the directors of those nuns who make reparation in their convents."

"And yet," cried Durtal, "the world asks what is the good of the contemplative Orders."

"They are the lightning conductors of society," said the abbé, with great energy. "They draw on themselves the demoniacal fluid, they absorb temptations to vice, preserve by their prayers those who live, like ourselves, in sin; they appease, in fact, the wrath of the Most High that He may not place the earth under an interdict. Ah! while the sisters who devote themselves to nursing the sick and infirm are indeed admirable, their task is easy in comparison with that undertaken by the cloistered Orders, the Orders where penance never ceases, and the very nights spent in bed are broken by sobs."

"This priest is far more interesting than his brethren," said Durtal to himself as they parted; and, as the abbé invited his visits, he had often called on him.

He had always been cordially welcomed. On several occasions he had warily sounded the old man on several questions. He had answered evasively in regard to other priests. But he did not seem to think much of them, if Durtal might judge by what he said one day in regard to Lidwine, that magnet of sorrows.

"Notice," he said, "that a weak and honest soul has every advantage in choosing a confessor, not from the clergy who have lost the sense of Mysticism, but from the monks. They;tlone know the effects of the law of substitution, and if they see that in spite of their efforts the penitent succumbs, they, end by freeing him by taking his trials on themselves, or by sending them off to some convent in the country where resolute people can use them."

Another time the question of nationalities was discussed in a newspaper which Durtal showed him. The abbé shrugged his shoulders, putting aside the patriotic twaddle. "For me," he said calmly, "for me my country is that where I can best pray."

Durtal could not make out what this priest was. He understood from the bookseller, that the Abbé Gévresin on account of his great age and infirmity was incapacitated for the regular duties of the priesthood. "I know that, when he can, he still says his mass each morning in a convent; I believe also he receives a few of his brethren for confession in his own house;" and Tocane added with disdain, "He has barely enough to live on, and they do not look on him with favour at the archbishop’s because of his ’mystical notions.’’

There ended all he knew about him. "He is evidently a very good priest," repeated Durtal; his physiognomy declares it, and his mouth and eyes contradict each other; his eyes certainly declare his entire goodness, his lips, somewhat thick, purple and always moist, have on them an affectionate but somewhat sad smile, and to this his blue eyes give the lie — blue, childlike eyes which laugh out astonished under white eyebrows in a rather red face, touched on the cheeks like a ripe apricot, with little points of blood.

"In any case," said Durtal, waking from his meditations, "I am very wrong not to continue the relations into which I have entered with him.

"Yes, but then nothing is so difficult as to become really intimate with a priest; first by the very education he receives at the seminary the ecclesiastic thinks himself obliged to disperse his affections and not concentrate himself on particular friendships; then, like a doctor, he is a man harassed with business, who is never to be found. You can catch them now and then between two confessions or two sick calls. Nor even then are you quite certain that the eager welcome of the priest rings true, for he is just the same to all who come to him, and indeed, since I do not call on the Abbé Gévresin for his help or advice, I am afraid of being in his way, and of taking up his time, hence I am acting with discretion in not going to see him.

"Yet I am sorry; suppose I write, or go to him one morping, but what have I to say to him? I ought to know what I want before I allow myself to trouble him. If I go only to complain, he will answer I am wrong not to be a communicant, and I have nothing to answer. No : the better plan is to meet him as by chance, on the quays, where no doubt he sometimes looks over the book-stalls, or at Tocane’s, for then I can talk to him more intimately, at least less officially, about my vacillations and regrets."

So Durtal searched the quays, and never once met the abbé. He went to the bookseller’s, and pretended to look over his stock, but as soon as he pronounced the name Gévresin, Tocane exclaimed, "I have heard nothing of him, he has not been here for the last two months."

"I will not turn back, but just disturb him in his own house," said Durtal, "but he will wonder why I came back after so long an absence. Besides the awkwardness I feel in calling on people whom I have neglected, I am also troubled by thinking the abbé may suspect some interested object in my visit. That is not convenient; if I had but a good pretext; there is certainly that life of Lidwine which interests him, I might consult him on various points. Yes, but which? I have not concerned myself with that saint for a long time, and must read over again the meagre old books on her biography. After all, it will be simpler and better to be frank, and say, ’This is why I have come; I want to ask advice, which I have not determined to follow, but I have so much need of speaking, of giving the reins to my soul, that I beg you to be so kind as to lose an hour for my sake.’

"He will do it certainly and willingly.

"Then that is agreed on; suppose I go to-morrow?" But he checked himself at once. "There was nothing pressing there was plenty of time; better take time and think; ah, yes, here is Christmas close upon us, I cannot decently trouble a priest who has his penitents to confess, for there are many communicants on that day. Let him get his hard work over, and then we will see."

He was at first pleased at having invented that excuse, then he had to admit in his heart that, after all, there was not much in it, for there was nothing to show that this priest, who was not attached to a parish, was busy in hearing confessions.

It was hardly probable, but he tried to convince himself that it might be so after all, and his hesitation began again. Angry at last with the discussion, he adopted a middle course. For greater certainty, he would not call on the abbé till after Christmas, but he would not be later than a given time; he took an almanack, and swore to keep his promise — three days after that feast.

CHAPTER IV.

OH! that midnight mass! He had had the unfortunate idea of going to it at Christmas. He went to St. Severin, and found a young ladies’ day school insLlled there, instead of the choir, who, with sharp voices like needles, knitted the worn-out skeins of the canticles. He had fled to St. Sulpice, and plunged into a crowd which walked and talked as if in the open air; had heard there choral-society marches, tea-garden waltzes, firework tunes, and had conic away in a rage.

It had seemed to him superfluous to try St. Germaindes-Près, for he held that church in horror. Besides the weariness inspired by its heavy, ill-restored shell, and the miserable paintings with which Flandrin loaded it, the clergy there were specially, almost alarmingly, ugly, and the choir was truly infamous. They were like a set of bad cooks, boys who spat vinegar, and elderly choir-men, who cooked in the furnace of their throats a sort of vocal broth, a thin gruel of sound.

Nor did he think of taking refuge in St. Thomas Aquinas, where he dreaded the barking and the choruses; there was indeed St. Clotilde, where the psalmody, at least, is upright, and has not, like that of St. Thomas, lost all shame. He went there, but again encountered dance music and profane tunes, a worldly orgie.

At last he went to bed in a rage, saying to himself, "In Paris, at any rate, a singular baptism of music is reserved for the New-Born."

Next day, when he woke, he felt he had no courage to face the churches; the sacrileges of last night would, he thought, continue; and as the weather was almost fine, he went out, wandered in the Luxembourg, gained the square of the Observatoire, and the Boulevard de Port Royal, and mechanically made his way along the interminable Rue de la Sante.

He knew that street of old, and had taken melancholy walks in it, attracted by its poor houses, like those of a provincial town; then it was fit for a dreamer, for it was bounded on the right by the Prison de la Santd and Sainte Anne’s madhouse, and on the left by convents. Light and air circulated in the street, but, behind it, all was black; it was a kind of prison corridor, with cells on either side, where some were condemned to temporary sentences, and others, of their own free will, suffered lasting sorrows.

"I can imagine," thought Durtal, "how it would have been painted by an Early Flemish master; the long street paved by patient pencils, the stories open from top to bottom, and the cupboards the same; and on one side massive cells with iron bedsteads, a stoneware jug; little peepholes in the doors secured by strong bolts, inside, scoundrels and thieves, gnashing their teeth, turning round and round, their hair on end, howling like caged animals; on the other side little rooms, furnished with a pallet-bed, a stoneware jug, a crucifix, these also closed by doors ironbandsd, and within nuns or monks, kneeling on the flags, their faces clean cut against the light of a halo, their eyes lifted to heaven, their hands joined, raised from the ground in ecstasy, a pot of lilies at their side.

Then at the back of the canvas, between these two rows of houses, rises a great avenue, at the end of which in a dappled sky sits God the Father with Christ on His right, choirs of Seraphim playing on guitar and viol; God the Father immovable under his lofty tiara, His breast covered by His long beard, holds scales which balance exactly, the holy captives expiating precisely by their penances and prayirs the blasphemies of the rascals and the insane.

"It must be admitted," thought Durtal, "that this street is very peculiar, that there is probably none like it in Paris, for it unites in its course virtues and vices, which in other quarters, in spite of the efforts of the Church, trend apart as far as possible from each other."

Thus thinking he had come as far as St. Anne’s, where the street grows lighter and the houses are lower, with only one or two stories, then, gradually, there is greater space between them, and they are only joined to each other by blank ends of walls.

"At any rate," thought Durtal, "if this street has no distinction, it is very private; here at least one need not admire the impertinent decoration of ftose modern shops which expose in their windows as precious, commodities, chosen piles of firewood, and in glass sweetmeat jars, coal drops and coke lollipops."

And here is an odd lane, and he looked at an alley which led down a sharp decline into a main street, where was to be seen the tricolor flag in zinc on a washhouse he read the name: Rue de l’Ebre.

He entered it, it was but a few yards long; the whole of one side was occupied by a wall, behind which were half seen some stunted buildings, surmounted by a bell. An entrance-gate with a square wicket was placed in the wall, which was raised higher as it sloped downwards, and at the end was pierced by round windows, and rose into a little building, surmounted by a clock-tower sc low that its point did not even reach the height of the two-storied house opposite.

On the other side three hovels sloped down, closely packed together zinc pipes ran everywhere, growing like vines, ramifying like the stalks of a hollow vine along the walls, windows gaped on rusty leaden hinges. Dim courts of wretched hovels could be seen; in one was a shed where some cows were reposing in two others were coach-houses for wheel-chairs, and a rack behind the bars of which appeared the capsuled necks of bottles.

"But this must be a church," thought Durtal, looking at the little clock tower, and the three or four round bays, which seemed cut out in emery paper to look like the black rough mortar of the wall "where is the entrance?"

He found it on turning out of the alley into the Rue de la Glacière. A tiny porch gave access to the building.

He opened the door, and entered a large room, a sort of closed shed, painted yellow, with a flat ceiling, with small iron beams coloured grey, picked out with blue, and ornamented with gas-jets like a wine shop. At the end was a marble altar, six lighted tapers, and gilt ornaments, candelabra full of tapers, and under the tabernacle, a very small monstrance, which sparkled in the light of the tapers.

It was almost dark, the panes of the windows having been crudely daubed with bands of indigo and yellowish green it was freezing, the stove was not alight, and the church, paved like a kitchen floor, had no matting or carpet.

Durtal wrapped himself up as best he could and sat down. His eyes gradually grew accustomed to the obscurity of the room, and what he saw was strange; in front of the choir on rows of chairs were seated human forms, drowned in floods of white muslin. No one stirred.

Suddenly there entered by a side door a nun equally wrapped from head to foot in a large veil. She passed along the altar, stopped in the middle, threw herself on the ground, kissed the floor, and by a sudden effort, without helping herself by her arms, stood upright, advanced silently into the church, and brushed by Durtal, who saw under the muslin a magnificent robe of creamy white, an ivory cross at her neck, at her girdle a white cord and beads.

She went to the entrance-door, and there ascended a little staircase into a gallery which commanded the church.

He asked himself what could be this Order so sumptuously arrayed, in this miserable chapel, in such a district?

Little by little the room filled, choir-boys in red with capes trimmed with rabbits skin lighted the candelabra, went out, and ushered in a priest, vested in a grand cope, with large flowers, a priest tall and young, who sat down, and in a sonorous tone chanted the first antiphon of vespers.

Suddenly Durtal turned round. In the gallery an harmonium accompanied the responses of voices never to be forgotten. It was not a woman’s voice, but one having in it something of a child’s voice, sweetened, purified, sharpened, and something of a man’s, but less harsh, finer and more sustained, an unsexed voice, filtered through litanies, bolted by prayers, passed through the sieves of adoration and tears.

The priest, still sitting, chanted the first verse of the unchanging psalm, "Dixit Dominus Domino meo."

And Durtal saw in the air, in the gallery, tall white statues holding black books in their hands, chanting slowly with eves raised to heaven. A lamp cast its light on one of these figures, which for a second leant forward a little, and he saw under the lifted veil a face attentive and sorrowful, and very pale.

The verses of the vesper psalms were now sung alternately, by the nuns above and by the congregation below. The chapel was almost full; a school of girls in white veils filled one side; little girls of the middle-class, poorly dressed brats who played with their dolls occupied the other. There were a few poor women in sabots, and no men.

The atmosphere became extraordinary. The warmth of the souls thawed the ice of the room; here were not the vespers of the rich, such as were celebrated on Sundays at St. Sulpice, but the vespers of the poor, domestic vespers, in the plain chant of the country side, followed by the faithful with mighty fervour in silent and singular devotion.

Durtal could fancy himself transported beyond the city, to the depths of some village cloister; he felt himself softened, his soul rocked by the monotonous amplitude of these chants, only recognizing the end of the psalms by the return of the doxology, the ’Gloria Patri et Filio," which separated them from each other.

He had a real impulse, a dim need of praying to the Unknowable, penetrated to the very marrow by this environment of aspiration, it seemed to him that he thawed a little, and took a far-off part in the united tenderness of these bright spirits. He sought for a prayer, and recalled what St. Paphnutius taught Thais, when he cried, "Thou art not worthy to name the name of God, thou wilt pray only thus ’Qui plasmasti me miserere mci; ’ Thou who hast formed me have mercy on me." He stammered out the humble phrase, prayed not out of love or of contrition, but out of disgust with himself, unable to let himself go, regretting that he could not love. Then he thought of saying the Lord’s Prayer, but stopped at the notion that this is the hardest of all prayers to pronounce, when the phrases are weighed in the balance. For in it we declare to God that we forgive our neighbours’ trespasses. Now how many who use these words forgive others? How many Catholics do not lie when they tell the All-knowing that they hate no one?

He was roused from these reflections by sudden silence vespers were over. Then the organ played again, and all the voices of the nuns joined, those in the choir below and in the gallery above, singing the old carol "Unto us a child is born."

He listened, moved by the simplicity of the strain, and suddenly, in a minute, brutally, without understanding why, infamous thoughts filled his mind.

He resisted in disgust, wished to repulse the assault of these shameful feelings, and they were persistent. He seemed to see before him a woman whose perverse ways had long maddened him.

All at once this hallucination ceased; his eye was mechanically attracted towards the priest, who was looking at him, while speaking in a low voice to a beadle.

He lost his head, imagining that the priest guessed his thoughts and was turning him out, but this notion was so foolish, that he shrugged his shoulders, and more sensibly thought that men were not admitted to this convent of women, and that the abbe who had seen him was sending the beadle to beg him to leave.

The beadle came straight to him; Durtal was ready to take his hat, when in persuasive and gentle tones that functionary said that the procession was about to begin, that it was the custom for the gentlemen to follow the Blessed Sacrament, and that although he was the only man there, the abbé thought he would not refuse to follow the procession about to start.

Overwhelmed by this request, Durtal made a vague gesture, in which the beadle seemed to see assent.

"No," he thought as soon as he was left alone; "I will not meddle with the ceremony; first I know nothing about it, and I should spoil it all, and again I will not make a fool of myself." He prepared to slip away quietly, but he had no time to carry out his intention; the usher brought him a lighted candle and asked him to accompany him. He put the best face he could on the matter, and while thinking that he was blushing all over, he followed the beadle to the altar.

There the beadle stopped him and bid him not to move. The whole congregation was now standing, the girls’ school divided into two files, preceded by a woman carrying a banner. Durtal came in front of the first rank of nuns.

Their veils lowered before the profane, even in church, were raised before the Blessed Sacrament, before God. Durtal was able to look at these sisters for a moment; at first his disillusion was complete. He had supposed them pale and grave like the nun he had seen in the gallery, and almost all of them were red, freckled, crossing their poor hands swelled and wounded by chilblains. Their faces were puffy and all seemed at the beginning or end of a cold they were evidently country girls, and the novices, known by their grey robes under the white veil, were still more common looking; they had certainly been accustomed to farm labour, and yet on seeing them all turned to the altar, the poverty of their faces, the ugliness of their hands blue with cold, their broken nails, injured in the wash, disappeared; their eyes, modest and humble under their long lashes, changed their coarse features into pious simplicity. Lost in prayer, they did not even see his curious looks, and did not even suspect a man was there examining them.

Durtal envied the admirable wisdom of these poor girls who alone understood it was mad to wish to live. He thought : Ignorance leads to the same result as knowledge. Among the Carmelites are rich and pretty women who have lived in the world and left it, wholly convinced of the vainness of its joys and these nuns, who evidently know nothing, have had an intuition of that vacuity which it has needed years of experience for the others to gain. By different ways they have arrived at the same meetingplace. Then what clearness of thought is revealed by their entrance into an Order for if indeed they had not been gathered by Christ, what would have become of these unhappy girls? Married to drunkards and hammered by beatings; or perhaps maids in taverns, ill-treated by their masters, brutalized by the other servants, destined to the scorn of the streets and the dangers of ill-usage. And without knowing anything they have avoided it all, have remained innocent, far from these perils, and far from this defilement, under an obedience which is not ignoble, disposed by their very way of life to experience, should they be worthy, the most powerful joys which the soul of a human creature can feel. They remain, perhaps, beasts of burthen, but at any rate God’s beasts of burthen."

He had got so far in his reflections when the beadle beckoned to him. The priest, who had descended from the altar, held the little monstrance; the girls’ procession was moving before him. Durtal passed in front of the line of nuns who did not take part in the ceremony, and torch in hand he followed the beadle, who carried behind the priest an open white silk parasol.

Then the harmonium in the gallery filled the church with its drawling tones, like an enlarged accordion, and the nuns standing beside it intoned the old chant, rhythmical as a march, the "Adeste Fideles," while below the novices and the faithful repeated after each stanza the sweet chorus of invitation, "Venite adoremus."

The procession went several times round the chapel, above the heads bowed in the smoke from the censors, which the choir boys swung, turning at each pause to face the priest.

"Well, after all, I have not come so badly out of it," said Durtal to himself, when they had returned to the altar. He thought his part was finished, but, this time without asking his permission, the beadle asked him to kneel at the communion rail in front of the altar.

He was ill at ease and annoyed, at knowing that the whole school and the whole convent was behind him, nor was he accustomed to kneel; it seemed as if wedges were thrust into his limbs, as if he were subjected to the tortures d the Middle Ages. Embarrassed by his taper, which was guttering, and threatened to cover him with spots, he shifted his position quietly, trying to make himself more comfortable by slipping the skirts of his great coat between his knees and the steps; but in moving he only increased the evil, his flesh was folded back between the bones, and his skin was chafed and burning. He sweated at last with the pain, and feared to distract the fervour of the community by falling; while the ceremony went on for ever, the nuns sang in the gallery, but he listened no more and deplored the Iength of the service.

At last the moment of Benediction approached.

Then in spite of himself, seeing himself there, so near to God, Durtal forgot his sufferings, and bowed his head, ashamed to be so placed, like a captain at the head of his company, in the first rank of this maiden troop; and when in a great silence, the bell tinkled, and the priest turning, lightly cut the air in the form of a cross, and, with the Blessed Sacrament, blessed the congregation kneeling at his feet, Durtal remained, his body bent, his eyes closed, seeking to hide himself, to make himself small, and not be seen there in front amid that pious crowd.

The psalm "Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes," rang out when the beadle came to take his taper. Durtal could hardly resist a cry, when he had to stand up; his benumbed knees cracked, and their joints would hardly work.

Yet he regained his place somehow; let the crowd pass, and approaching the beadle, asked him the name of the convent, and the order to which the nuns belonged.

"They are the Franciscan missionaries of Mary," answered the man, "but the chapel is not theirs as you seem to think; it is a chapel of ease for the parish of St. Marcel de la Maison Blanche : it is onlyjoined by a corridor to the house those sisters occupy behind us there in the Rue de l’Ebre. They join in the offices, in fact, just as you and I may do, and they keep a school for the children of the district."

"It is a touching little chapel," thought Durtal, when he was alone. "It is well matched with the neighbourhood it shelters, with the gloomy brook of the tanners, which runs through the yards below the Rue de la Glacière. It gives me the effect of being to Notre Dame de Paris what its neighbour the Bièvre is to the Seine. It is the streamlet of the church, the pious pavement, the miserable suburb of worship.

"How poor and yet how exquisite are those nuns’ voices, which seem non-sexual and mellow! God knows how I hate the voice of a woman in the holy place, for it still remains unclean. I think woman always brings with her the lasting miasma of her indispositions and she turns the psalms sour. Then, all the same, vanity and concupiscence rise from the worldly voice, and its cries of adoration accompanied by the organ are only cries of carnal desire, its very pleadings in the most sombre liturgical hymns are only addressed to God from the lips outward, for at bottom a woman only mourns the mediocre ideal of earthly pleasure to which she cannot attain. Thus I thoroughly understand that the Church has rejected woman from her offices, and that the musical robe of her sequences may not be contaminated she employs the voices of the boy and the man.

"Yet in convents of women, that is changed; it is certain that prayer, communion, abstinence and vows purify the body and the soul, as well as the vocal odour which proceeds from them. The emanations from them give to the voices of the nuns, however crude, however ill-trained they may be, their chaste inflexions, their simple caresses of pure love, they recall to it the ingenuous sounds of childhood.

"In certain orders, they seem even to prune it of the greater part of its branches, and concentrate the threads of sap which remain in a few twigs;" and he thought of a Carmelite convent to which he had gone from time to time, remembered their failing, almost expiring voices, where the little health that remained to them was concentrated in three notes, voices which had lost the Musical colours of life, the tints of open air, keeping only in the cloister those of the costumes they seemed to reflect, white and brown, chaste and sombre tones.

Ah! those Carmelites, he thought of them now, as he descended the Rue de la Glacière, and he called up the memory of a profession, the thought of which took entire possession of him every time he meditated on convents. He saw again in memory a morning in the little chapel in the Avenue de Saxe, a chapel, Spanish Gothic in style, with narrow windows glazed with panes so dark that the Iight which remained in their colours did not pass through them.

At the end rose the high altar in shade, raised on six steps; on the left a large iron grating in an arch was covered with a black curtain, and on the same side, but almost at the base of the altar, a little arch traced on the plain wall, like a lancet window, with an aperture in the middle, a sort of square, a frame, without a panel, empty.

That morning the chapel, cold and dark, sparkled, lighted by groves of candles; and the odour of incense, not adulterated as in other churches by spices and gums, filled it with a dull smoke; it was crammed with people. Crouched in a corner, Durtal had turned round, and like his neighbours looked at the backs of the thurifers and priests, who were going towards the entrance. The door opened suddenly, and he saw, in a burst of daylight, a red vision of the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, passing up the nave, turning from side to side a horse-like head, in front of it a big spectacled nose, bending his tall form all on one side, blessing the congregation with a long twisted hand, like a crab’s claw.

He and his suite ascended the altar steps, and knelt at a prie-Dieu, then they took off his tippet, and vested him in a silk chasuble with a white cross embroidered in silver, and the mass began. Shortly before the communion, the black veil was gently withdrawn behind the high grating, and in a blueish light like that of the moon, Durtal faintly saw white phantoms gliding and stars twinking in the air, and close to the grating a woman’s form, kneeling motionless on the ground, she too holding a star at the end of a taper. The woman did not move but the star shook; then when the moment of communion was at hahd, the woman rose, then disappeared, and her head, as if decapitated, filled the square of the wicket opened in the arch.

Then as he leant forward he saw, for a second, a dead face, with closed lids, white, eyeless, like ancient marble statues. And all passed away, as the Cardinal bent above the grating, with the ciborium in his hand.

All was so rapid that he asked himself if he were not dreaming; the mass was over. Behind the iron grating resounded mournful psalms, slow chants drawn out, weeping, always on the same notes, wandering lights and white forms passed in the azure fluid of the incense. Monseigneur Richard was sitting, mitre on head, interrogating the postulant who had returned to her place, and was kneeling before him behind the grating.

He spoke in a low voice, and could not be heard. The whole congregation bent to listen to the novice as she pronounced her vows, but only a long murmur was heard. Durtal remembered that he had elbowed his way, and got near the choir, where, through the crossed bars of the grating, he saw the woman clad in white, prostrate on her face, in a square of flowers, while the whole convent filed past, bending over her, intoning the psalms for the dead, and sprinkling her with holy water, like a corpse.

"It is admirable," he cried, moved in the street by the memory of the scene, and he thought of what a life was that of these women! To lie on an hair matress without pillow or sheets, to fast seven months out of the twelve, except on Sundays and feasts always to eat, standing, vegetables and abstinence fare to have no fire in winter, to chant for hours on ice-cold tiles, to scourge the body, to become so humble as, however tenderly nurtured, to wash up dishes with joy, and attend to the meanest tasks, to pray from morning to midnight even to fainting, to pray there till death. They must indeed pity us, and set themselves to expiate the imbecility of a world which treats them as hysterical fools, for it cannot even understand the joy in suffering of souls like these.

"We cannot be proud of ourselves, in thinking of the Carmelites, or even of those humble Franciscan Tertiaries, who are after all more vulgar. It is true they do not belong to a contemplative order, but all the same their rules are very strict, their existence is so hard that they too can atone by their prayers and good works for the crimes of the city they protect."

He grew enthusiastic in thinking of the convents. Ah! to be earthed up among them, sheltered from the herd, not to know what books appear, what newspapers are printed, never to know what goes on outside our’s cell, among men -to complete the beneficent silence of this cloistered life, nourishing ourselves with good actions, refreshing ourselves with plain song, saturating ourselves with the inexhaustible joys of the liturgies.

Then, who knows? By force of good will, and by ardent prayer, to succeed in coming to Him, in entertaining Him, feeling Him near us, perhaps almost satisfied with His creature. And he called up before him the joys of those abbeys in which Jesus abode. He remembered that astonishing convent of Unterlinden, near Colmar, where in the thirteenth century not only one or two nuns, but the whole convent, rose distractedly before Christ with cries of joy, nuns were lifted above the ground, others heard the songs of seraphim, and their emaciated bodies secreted balm; others became transparent or were crowned with stars; all these phenomena of the contemplative life were visible in that cloister, a high school of Mysticism.

Thus wrapped in thought, he found himself at his own door, without remembering the road he had taken, and as soon as he was in his room, his whole soul dilated and burst forth. He desired to thank, to call for mercy, to appeal to someone, he knew not whom, to complain of he knew not what. All at once the need of pouring himself forth, of going out of himself, took shape, and he fell on, his knees saying to Our Lady,

"Have pity on me, and hear me; I would rather anything than continue this shaken existence, these idle stages without an aim. Pardon me, Holy Virgin, unclean as I am, for I have no courage for the battle. Ah, wouldest thou grant my prayer! I know well that I am over bold in daring to ask, since I am not even resolved to turn out my soul, to empty it like a bucket of filth, to strike it on the bottom, that the lees may trickle out and the scales fall off, but . . . but . . . thou knowest I am so weak, so little sure of myself, that in truth I shrink.

"Oh, all the same I would desire to flee away, a thousand miles from Paris, I know not where, into a cloister. My God! yet this is very madness that I speak, for I could not stay two days in a convent; nor indeed would they take me in."

Then he thought,-

"Though this once I am less dry, less unclean than is my wont, I can find nothing to say to Our Lady but insanities and follies, when it would be so simple to ask her pardon, to beg her to have pity on my desolate life, to aid me to resist the demands of my vices, not to pay as I do the royalties on my nerves, the tax on my senses.

"All the same," he said, rising, "enough of this, I will at least do what little I can; without more delay I will go to the abbé to-morrow. I will explain the struggle of my soul, and we will see what happens afterwards."

CHAPTER V.

HE was really comforted when the servant said that Monsieur l’Abbé was at home. He entered a little drawingroom, and waited till the priest, whom he heard speaking to someone in the next chamber, was alone.

He looked at the little room, and marked that nothing was changed since his last visit. It was still furnished with a velvet sofa, of which the red, once crimson, had become the faded rose colour of raspberry jam on bread. There were also two tall arm-chairs on either side of the chimney, which was ornamented by an Empire clock, and some china vases hued with sand, in which were stuck some dry stalks of reed. In a corner against the wall, under an old wooden crucifix, was a prie-dieu, marked by the knees, an oval table in the centre, some sacred engravings on the walls; and that was all.

"It is like an hotel, or an old maid’s lodging," thought Durtal. The commonness of the furniture, the curtains in faded damask, the panels hung with a paper covered with bouquets of poppies and field-flowers in false colours, were like Iodgings by the month, but certain details, above all the scrupulous cleanliness of the room, the worked cushions on the sofa, the grass mats under the chairs, an hortensia like a painted cauliflower placed in a flower-pot covered with lace, looked on the other hand like the futile and icy room of a devout woman.

"Nothing was wanting but a cage of canaries, photographs in plush frames, shell-work and crochet mats."

Durtal had got so far in his reflections when the abbé came in with extended hand, gently finding fault with his long absence.

Durtal made what excuses he could, unusual occupations, long weariness.

"And our BlesedLidwine, how do you get on with her?"

"Ah, I have not even begun her life; I am not in a state of mind which allows me to engage in it."

Durtal’s accent of discouragement surprised the priest.

"Come, what is the matter? Can I be of any use to you?"

"I do not know, Monsieur l’Abbé. I am almost ashamed to talk to you about such troubles," and suddenly he burst out, telling his sorrows in any chance words, declaring the unreality of his conversion, his struggles with the flesh, his human respect, his neglect of religious practices, his aversion from the rites demanded of him, in fact from all yokes.

The abbé listened without moving, his chin on his hand.

"You are more than forty," he said, when Durtal was silent "you have passed the age when without any impulse from thought, the awakening of the flesh excites temptations, you are now in that period when indecent thoughts first present themselves to the imagination, before the senses are agitated. We have then to fight less against your sleeping body than your mind, which stimulates and vexes it. On the other hand, you have arrears and prizes of affection to put out, you have no wife or children to receive them, so that your affections being driven back by celibacy, you will end by taking them there where at first they should have been placed you try to appease your soul’s hunger in chapels, and as you hesitate, as you have not the courage to come to a decision, to break once for all with your vices, you have arrived at this strange compromise; to reserve your tender feeling for the church and the manifestations of that feeling for women. That, if I do not mistake, is your correct balance-sheet. But, good heavens, you have not too much to complain of, for do you not see that the important thing is to care for woman only with your bodily senses? When Heaven has given you grace to be no longer taken captive by thought, all may be arranged with a little-effort of will."

"This is an indulgent priest," thought Durtal.

"But," continued the abbé, "you cannot always sit between two stools, the moment will come when you must stick to the one, and push the other away."

And looking at Durtal, who looked down without answering,-

"Do you pray? I do not ask if you say your morning prayers, for not all those, who end by entering on the divine way, after wandering for years where chance might take them, call on the Lord so soon as they awake. At break of day the soul thinks itself well, thinks itself firmer, and at once takes occasion of this fleeting energy to forget God. It is with the soul as with the body when it is sick. When night comes our sensations are stronger, pain which was quieted awakes, the fever which slept blazes up again, filth revives and wounds bleed anew, and then it thinks of the divine Miracle-worker, it thinks of Christ. Do you pray in the evening?"

"Sometimes — and yet it is very difficult the afternoon is tolerable, but you say truly when the daylight goes, evils spring up. A whole cavalcade of obscene ideas then pass through my brain how can any one be recollected at such moments?"

"If you do not feel able to resist in the street or at home, why do you not take refuge in the churches?"

"But they are closed when one has most need of them; the clergy put Jesus to bed at nightfall."

"I know it, but if most churches are closed, there are a few which remain partly open very late. Ah, St. Sulpice is among the number, and there is one which remains open every evening, and where those who visit it are always sure of prayers and Benediction: Notre Dame des Victoires, I think you know it.’’

"Yes, Monsieur l’Abbé. It is ugly enough to cause tears, it is pretentious, it is in bad taste, and the singers churn up a margarine of rancid tones. I do not go there then as I go to St. Severin and St. Sulpice, to admire there the art of the old ’Praisers of God,’ to listen, even if they are incorrectly given, to the broad, familiar melodies of plain chant. Notre Dame des Victoires is worthless from the aesthetic point of view, and yet I go there from time to time, because alone in Paris it has the irresistible attraction of true piety, it alone preserves intact the lost soul of the Time. At whatever hour one goes there people are praying there, prostrate in absolute silence; it is full as soon as it is open, and full at its closing, there is a constant coming and going of pilgrims from all parts of Paris, arriving from the depths of the provinces, and it seems that each one, by the prayers that he brings, adds fuel to the immense brazier of Faith whose flames break out again under the smoky arches like the thousands of tapers which constantly burn, and are renewed from morning till evening, before Our Lady.

"Well, I who seek the most deserted corners and the darkest places in the chapels, I who hate mobs, mix almost willingly with those I find there; because there everyone is isolated, no one is concerned with his neighbour, you do not see the human bodies which throng you, but you feel the breath of souls around. However refractory, however damp you may be, you end by taking fire at this contact, and are astonished to find yourself all at once less vile; it seems to me that the prayers which elsewhere when they leave my lips fall back to the ground exhausted and chilled, spring upwards in that place, are borne on by others, grow warm and soar and live.

"At St. Severin I have indeed experienced the sensation of a help spreading from the pillars and running through the arches, but, as I think, the aid is less strong. Perhaps since the Middle Ages that church makes use of, but cannot renew the celestial effluvia with which it is charged; while at Notre Dame the help which springs up from the very pavement is for ever vivified by the uninterrupted presence of an ardent crowd. In the one it is the impregnate stone, the church itself which brings consolation, in the other it is above all things the fervour of the crowds which fill it.

"And then I have the strange impression that the Virgin, attracted and retained by so great faith, only spends a little while in other churches, goes there as a visitor, but has made her home, and really resides in Notre Dame."

The abbé smiled.

"Come, I see that you know and love it; and yet the church is not on our left bank, beyond which, you said to me one day, there is no sanctuary worth having."

"Yes, and I am surprised at it, especially as it is placed in a thoroughly commercial quarter, two paces from the Exchange, whose ignoble shouts can be heard in it."

"It was itself an Exchange," said the abbé.

"In what way?"

"After having been baptized by the monks, and having served as a chapel for the discalced Augustinians, it was horribly desecrated in the Revolution, and the Exchange was set up within its walls."

"I was not aware of that detail," said Durtal.

"But," continued the abbé, "it was with it, as with those holy women, who, if we believe their biographers, recovered by a life of prayer the virginity they had formerly lost. Our Lady washed it from its violation, and though it is comparatively modern, it is at the present day saturated with emanations, infused by effluences of angels, penetrated with divine drugs, it is for sick souls what certain thermal springs are for the body. People keep their season there, make their novenas, and obtain their cure.

"Now to come back to our point; I tell you you will do wisely, if on your bad evenings you will attend Benediction in that church. I shall be surprised if you do not come out cleansed and at peace."

"If he have only that to offer me, it is little enough," thought Durtal. And after a disappointed silence he rejoined,

"But, Monsieur l’Abbé, even were I to visit that sanctuary, and follow the offices in other churches, when temptations assail me, even were I to confess and draw near the Sacraments, how would that advantage me? I should meet as I came out the woman whose very sight inflames my senses, and it would be with me as after my leaving St. Severin all unnerved; the very feeling of tenderness which I had in the chapel would destroy me, and I should fall back into sin."

"What do you know about it?" and the priest suddenly rose, and took long strides through the room.

"You have no right to speak thus, for the virtue of the Sacrament is formal, the man who has communicated is no longer alone. He is armed against others and defended :gainst himself," and crossing his arms before Durtal he exclaimed,-

"To lose one’s soul for the pleasure of momentary gratification! what madness. And since the time of your conversion, does not that disgust you?"

"Yes, I am disgusted with myself, but only after my swinish desires are satisfied. If only I could gain true repentence."

"Rest assured," said the abbé, who sat down again, "you will find it."

And, seeing that Durtal shook his head,

"Remember what Saint Teresa said: ’One trouble of those who are beginning is, that they cannot recognize whether they have true repentance for their faults; but they have it, and the proof is their sincere resolution to serve God.’ Think of that sentence, for it applies to you; that repugnance to your sins which wearies you is witness to your regret, and you have a desire to serve the Lord, since you are in fact struggling to go to Him."

There was a moment of silence.

"Well, then, Monsieur l’Abbé, what is your advice?"

"I advise you to pray in your own house, in church, everywhere, as much as you can. I do not prescribe any religious remedy, I simply invite you to profit by some precepts of pious hygiene, afterwards we will see."

Durtal remained undecided, discontented, like those sick persons who find fault with doctors, who, to satisfy them, prescribe only colourless drugs.

The priest laughed.

"Confess," he said, looking him in the face, "confess that you are saying to yourself, ’It was not worth while to put myself out, for I am no further advanced, this good fellow, the priest, practises expectant medicine; instead of cutting short my crises with energetic remedies, he palters, advises me to go to bed early, not to catch cold-"

"Oh, Monsieur l’Abbé," protested Durtal.

"Yet I do not wish to treat you like a child, or talk to you like a woman now attend to me!

"The way in which your conversion has worked leaves me in no doubt whatever. There has been what Mysticism calls the divin touch, only — note this — God has dispensed with human intervention, even with the interference of a priest, to bring you back into the road you have left for more than twenty years.

"Now we cannot reasonably suppose that the Lord has acted lightly, and that He will now leave His work unaccomplished. He will carry it through if you put no obstacle in His way.

"In fact you are at this moment like a block in His hands; what will He do with it? I do not know, but since He has kept to Himself the conduct of your soul, let Him act; be patient, He will explain His action; trust in Him, He will help you; be content to protest with the Psalmist: ’Doce me facere voluntatem tuam, quia Dens meus es tu.’

"I tell you again I believe in the preventive virtue, the formal power of the Sacraments. I quite understand the system of Père Milleriot, who obliged those persons to communicate whom he thought would afterwards fall again into sin. For their only penance he obliged them to communicate again and again, and he ended by purifying them with the Sacred Species, taken in large doses. It is a doctrine at once realistic and exalted.

"But reassure yourself," continued the abbe, looking at Durtal, who seemed wearied, "I do not intend to experiment on you in this way; on the contrary, my advice is that in the state of ignorance in which we are of God’s will, you abstain from the Sacraments.

"For you should desire them, and it should come from you rather than from Him; be sure that sooner or later you will thirst for Penance, hunger for the Eucharist. Well, when unable to restrain yourself longer, you ask for pardon and entreat to be allowed to approach the Holy Table, we shall see, we will ask Him what way He will choose to take, in order to save you."

"But there are not, I presume, several ways of confessing and communicating?"

"Certainly not, that is just what I meant to say... but..."

And the priest hesitated, at a loss for words.

"It is quite certain," he began again, "that art has been the principal means which the Saviour has used to make you absorb the Faith. He has taken you on your weak side — or strong side, if you like that better. He has infused into your nature the chief mystical works; he has persuaded and converted you, less by the way of reason than the way of the senses; and indeed those are the special conditions you have to take into account.

"On the other. hand your soul is not humble and simple, you are a sort of ’ sensitive,’ whom the least imprudence, he least stupidity of a confessor would at once repel.

"Therefore that you may not be at the mercy of a troublesome impression, certain precautions must be taken. In the state of weakness and feebleness in which you are, a disagreeable face, an unlucky word, antipathetic surroundings, a mere nothing would be enough to rout you — is it not so?"

"Alas!" sighed Durtal, "I am obliged to answer that you are right; but, Monsieur l’Abbé, I do not think I shall have to fear such disillusions if when the moment you predict has come you will allow me to make my confession to you."

The priest was silent for a while; then said,

"No doubt, since I have met you, I may probably be useful to you, but I have an idea that my part will be confined to pointing out the road to you; I shall be a connecting link, and nothing more, you will end as you have begun, without help, alone." The abbé remained in thought, then shook his head, and went on "Let us leave the subject, however, for we cannot anticipate the designs of God to sum up, try to stifle in prayer your attacks of the flesh, it is a less matter not to be overcome at the moment, than to direct all your efforts not to be so."

Then the priest added gently to rouse the spirits of Durtal, whom he saw to be depressed,

"If you fall do not despair, and throw the handle after the hatchet. Say to yourself, that, after all Lust is not the most unpardonable of faults, that it is one of two sins for which the human being pays cash, and which are consequently expiated in part at least before death. Say to yourself that wantonness and avarice refuse all credit and will not wait; and in fact, whoever unlawfully commits a fleshly act is almost always punished in his lifetime. For some there are bastards to provide for, sickly wives, low connections, broken careers, abominable deceptions on the part of those they have loved. On whichever side we turn when women are concerned we have to suffer, for she is the most powerful instrument of sorrow which God has given to man.

"It is the same with the passion for gain. Every being who allows himself to be overcome by that hateful sin, pays for it as a rule before his death. Look at the Panama business. Cooks, housekeepers, small proprietors who till then had lived in peace, seeking no inordinate gains, no illicit profit, threw themselves like madmen into that business. They had one only thought, to gain money; the chastisement of their cupidity was, as you know, sudden."

"Yes," said Durtal, laughing, "the de Lesseps were the agents of providence, when they stole the savings of fools, who had moreover got them probably by thieving."

"In a word," said the abbé, "I repeat my last advice do not be at all discouraged if you sink. Do not despise yourself too much; have the courage to enter a church afterwards; for the devil catches you by cowardice, the false shame, the false humility he suggests, nourish, maintain, solidify your wantonness in some measure.

"Well! no good-bye; come and see me soon again."

Durtal found himself in the street a little confused. "It is evident," he murmured, as he stalked along, "that the Abbé Gévresin is a clever spiritual watchmaker. He has dexterously taken to pieces the movement of my passions, and made the hours of idleness and weariness strike, but, after all, his advice comes only to this stew in your own juice and wait.

"Indeed he is right; if I had come to the point I should not have gone to him to chatter, but really to confess. What is strange is that he does not at all seem to think he will have to put me through the wash-tub; and to whom does he mean me to go — to the first comer who will wind about me his spool of commonplaces, and stroke me with his big hands without seeing clearly?

"Well, well. . . what is the time?" He looked at his watch. "Six o’clock, and I do not care to go home. What shall I do till dinner?"

He was near St. Sulpice. He went in and sat down, to clear his thoughts a little, taking a place in the Chapel of Our Lady, which at that hour was almost empty.

He felt no wish to pray, and rested there, looking at the great arch of marble and gold, like a scene in a theatre, where the Virgin, the only figure in the light, advances towards the faithful, as from a decorated grotto, on plaster clouds.

Meanwhile two Little Sisters of the Poor came and knelt not far from him, and meditated, their heads between heir hands.

He thought as he looked at them,-

"Those souls are to be envied who can thus be abstracted in prayer. How do they manage it? For, in fact, it is not easy, if one thinks of the sorrows of the world, to praise the vaunted mercy of God. It is all very fine to believe that He exists, to be certain that He is good; in fact, we do not know Him — we are ignorant of Him. He is, and, in fact, He can only be, immanent, permanent, and inaccesible. He is we know not what, and at most we know what He is not. Try to imagine Him, and the senses fail, for He is above, about, and in each one of us. He is three and He is one; He is each and He is all; He is without beginning, and he will be without end; He is above all and for ever incomprehensible. If we try to picture Him to ourselves and give Him a human wrappage, we come back to the simple conception of the early times, we represent Him under the features of an ancestor. Some old Italian model, some old Father Tourgéneff, with a long beard, and we cannot but smile, so childish is the likeness of God the Father.

"He is, in fact, so absolutely above the imagination and the senses, that He comes only nominally into prayer, and the impulses of humanity ascend especially to the Son, Who only can be addressed, because He became man, and is to us somewhat of an elder brother, because, having wept in human form, we think He will hear us more readily, and be more compassionate to our sorrows.

"As to the third Person, He is even more disconcerting than the first. He is especially the unknowable. How can we imagine this God formless and bodiless, this Substance equal to the two others, who, as it were, breathe Him forth? We think of Him as a brightness, a fluid, a breath; we cannot even lend to Him as to the Father the face of a man, since on the two occasions that He took to Himself a body, He showed Himself under the likenesses of a dove and of tongues of fire, and these two different aspects do not help to a suggestion of the new appearance He might assume.

"Certainly the Trinity is terrible, and makes the brain reel. Ruysbrock has moreover said admirably, ’Let those who would know and study what God is, know that it is forbidden; they will go mad.’

"So," he continued, looking at the two Little Sisters, who were now telling their beads, "these good women are right not to try to understand, and to confine themselves to praying with all their heart to the Mother and the Son.

"Moreover, in all the lives of the saints which they have read, they have made certain that Jesus and Mary always appeared to the elect to console and strengthen them.

"In fact, how stupid I am. To pray to the Son is to pray to the two others, for in praying to one among them I pray at the same time to the three, since the three make but one. And the Substances are, however, special, because if the divine Essence is one and simple, it is so in the threefold distinction of the Persons; but, again, what is the use of fathoming the Impenetrable?

"Yet," he continued, remembering the interview he had just had with the priest, "how will all this end? If the abbé be right, I no longer belong to myself; I am about to enter the unknown, which frightens me. If only the sound of my vices consents to be silent, but I feel that they rise furiously within me. Ah, that Florence" — and he thought of a woman to whose vagaries he was riveted — "continues to walk about in my brain. I see her behind the lowered curtain of my eyes, and when I think of her I am a terrible coward."

He endeavoured once more to put her away, but his will was overcome at the sight of her.

He hated, despised, and even cursed her, but the madness of his illusions excited him; he left her disgusted with her and with himself; he swore he would never see her again, but did not keep his resolve.

He saw her now in vision extend her hand to him.

He recoiled, struggling to free himself; but his dream continued mingling her with the form of one of the sisters whose gentle profile he saw.

Suddenly he started, returned to the real world, and saw that he was at St. Sulpice, in the chapel. "It is disgusting that I should come here to soil the church with my horrible dreams; I had better go."

He went out in confusion, thinking, "Perhaps if I visit Florence once again, I may perhaps put an end to this haunting sense of her presence, seeing and knowing the reality."

And he was obliged to answer himself that he was becoming idiotic, for he knew by experience that past desire grows in proportion as it is nourished. "No, the abbé was right; I have to become and to remain penitent. But how? Pray? How can I pray, when evil imaginations pursue me even in church? Evil dreams followed me to La Glacière; here they appear again, and smite me to the ground. How can I defend myself? for indeed it is frightful to be thus alone, to know nothing and have no proof, to feel the prayers which one tears out of oneself fall into the silence and the void without a gesture to answer, without a word of encouragement, without a sign. I do not even know if He be there, and if He listens. The abbé tells me to wait an indication, an order from on high; but, alas! they come to me from below."