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J.K. Huysmans
THE CATHEDRAL
Translated by Clara Bell
_Publishing History_
First published in France in 1898
First English edition in 1898
THE CATHEDRAL.
CHAPTER I.
At Chartres, as you turn out of the little market-place, which is swept
in all weathers by the surly wind from the flats, a mild air as of a
cellar, made heavy by a soft, almost smothered scent of oil, puffs in
your face on entering the solemn gloom of the sheltering forest.
Durtal knew it well, and the delightful moment when he could take
breath, still half-stunned by the sudden change from a stinging north
wind to a velvety airy caress. At five every morning he left his rooms,
and to reach the covert of that strange forest he had to cross the
square; the same figures were always to be seen at the turnings from the
same streets; nuns with bowed heads, leaning forward, the borders of
their caps blown back and flapping like wings, the wind whirling in
their skirts, which they could hardly hold down; and shrunken women, in
garments they hugged round them, struggling forward with bent shoulders
lashed by the gusts.
Never at that hour had he seen anybody walking boldly upright, without
straining her neck and bowing her head; and these scattered women
gathered by degrees into two long lines, one of them turning to the
left, to vanish under a lighted porch opening to a lower level than the
square; the other going straight on, to be swallowed up in the darkness
by an invisible wall.
Closing the procession came a few belated priests, hurrying on, with one
hand gathering up the gown that ballooned behind them, and with the
other clutching their hats, or snatching at the breviary that was
slipping from under one arm, their faces hidden on their breast, to
plough through the wind with the back of their neck; with red ears, eyes
blinded with tears, clinging desperately, when it rained, to umbrellas
that swayed above them, threatening to lift them from the ground and
dragging them in every direction.
The passage had been more than usually stormy this morning; the squalls
that tear across the district of La Beauce, where nothing can check
them, had been bellowing for hours; there had been rain, and the puddles
splashed under foot. It was difficult to see, and Durtal had begun to
think that he should never succeed in getting past the dim mass of the
wall that shut in the square, by pushing open the door behind which lay
that weird forest, redolent of the night-lamp and the tomb, and
protected from the gale.
He sighed with satisfaction, and followed the wide path that led through
the gloom. Though he knew his way, he walked cautiously in this alley,
bordered by enormous trunks, their crowns lost in shadow. He could have
fancied himself in a hothouse roofed with black glass, for there were
flagstones under foot, and no sky could be seen, no breeze could stir
overhead. The few stars whose glimmer twinkled from afar belonged to our
firmament; they quivered almost on the ground, and were, in fact,
earth-born.
In this obscurity nothing was to be heard but the fall of quiet feet,
nothing to be seen but silent shades visible against the twilight like
shapes of deeper darkness.
Durtal presently turned into another wide walk crossing that he had
left. There he found a bench backed by the trunk of a tree, and on this
he leaned, waiting till the Mother should awake, and the sweet interview
interrupted yesterday by the close of the day should begin again.
He thought of the Virgin, whose watchful care had so often preserved him
from unexpected risk, easy slips, or greater falls. Was not She the
bottomless Well of goodness, the Bestower of the gifts of good Patience,
the Opener of dry and obdurate hearts? Was She not, above all, the
living and thrice Blessed Mother?
Bending for ever over the squalid bed of the soul, she washed the sores,
dressed the wounds, strengthened the fainting weakness of converts.
Through all the ages She was the eternal supplicant, eternally
entreated; at once merciful and thankful; merciful to the woes She
alleviated, and thankful to them too. She was indeed our debtor for our
sins, since, but for the wickedness of man, Jesus would never have been
born under the corrupt semblance of our image, and She would not have
been the immaculate Mother of God. Thus our woe was the first cause of
Her joy; and this supremest good resulting from the very excess of Evil,
this touching though superfluous bond, linking us to Her, was indeed the
most bewildering of mysteries; for Her gratitude would seem unneeded,
since Her inexhaustible mercy was enough to attach Her to us for ever.
Thenceforth, in Her immense humility, She had at various times
condescended to the masses; She had appeared in the most remote spots,
sometimes seeming to rise from the earth, sometimes floating over the
abyss, descending on solitary mountain peaks, bringing multitudes to Her
feet, and working cures; then, as if weary of wandering to be adored,
She wished--so it had seemed--to fix the worship in one place, and had
deserted Her ancient haunts in favour of Lourdes.
That town was the second stage of Her progress through France in the
nineteenth century. Her first visit was to La Salette.
This was years ago. On the 19th of September, 1846, the Virgin had
appeared to two children on a hill; it was a Saturday, the day dedicated
to Her, which, that year, was a fast day by reason of the Ember week. By
another coincidence, this Saturday was the eve of the Festival of Our
Lady of Seven Dolours, and the first vespers were being chanted when
Mary appeared as from a shell of glory just above the ground.
And she appeared as Our Lady of Tears in that desert landscape of
stubborn rocks and dismal hills. Weeping bitterly, She had uttered
reproofs and threats; and a spring, which never in the memory of man had
flowed excepting at the melting of the snows, had never since been dried
up.
The fame of this event spread far and wide; frantic thousands scrambled
up fearful paths to a spot so high that trees could not grow there.
Caravans of the sick and dying were conveyed, God knows how, across
ravines to drink the water; and maimed limbs recovered, and tumours
melted away to the chanting of canticles.
Then, by degrees, after the sordid debates of a contemptible lawsuit,
the reputation of La Salette dwindled to nothing; pilgrims were few,
miracles were less often proclaimed. The Virgin, it would seem, was
gone; She had ceased to care for this spring of piety and these
mountains.
At the present day few persons climb to La Salette but the natives of
Dauphiné, tourists wandering through the Alps, or invalids following the
cure at the neighbouring mineral springs of La Mothe. Conversions and
spiritual graces still abound there, but bodily healing there is next to
none.
"In fact," said Durtal to himself, "the vision at La Salette became
famous without its ever being known exactly why. It may be supposed to
have grown up as follows: the report, confined at first to the village
of Corps at the foot of the mountain, spread first throughout the
department, was taken up by the adjacent provinces, filtered over all
France, overflowed the frontier, trickled through Europe, and at last
crossed the seas to land in the New World which, in its turn, felt the
throb, and also came to this wilderness to hail the Virgin.
"And the circumstances attending these pilgrimages were such as might
have daunted the determination of the most persevering. To reach the
little inn, perched on high near the church, the lazy rumbling of slow
trains must be endured for hours, and constant changes at stations; days
must be spent in the diligence, and nights in breeding-places of fleas
at country inns; and after flaying your back on the carding-combs of
impossible beds, you must rise at daybreak to start on a giddy climb, on
foot or riding a mule, up zig-zag bridle-paths above precipices; and at
last, when you are there, there are no fir trees, no beeches, no
pastures, no torrents; nothing--nothing but total solitude, and silence
unbroken even by the cry of a bird, for at that height no bird is to be
found.
"What a scene!" thought Durtal, calling up the memories of a journey he
had made with the Abbé Gévresin and his housekeeper, since leaving La
Trappe. He remembered the horrors of a spot he had passed between Saint
Georges de Commiers and La Mure, and his alarm in the carriage as the
train slowly travelled across the abyss. Beneath was darkness increasing
in spirals down to the vasty deeps; above, as far as the eye could
reach, piles of mountains invaded the sky.
The train toiled up, snorting and turning round and round like a top;
then, going into a tunnel, was swallowed by the earth; it seemed to be
pushing the light of day away in front, till it suddenly came out into a
clearing full of sunshine; presently, as if it were retracing its road,
it rushed into another burrow, and emerged with the strident yell of a
steam whistle and deafening clatter of wheels, to fly up the winding
ribbon of road cut in the living rock.
Suddenly the peaks parted, a wide opening brought the train out into
broad daylight; the scene lay clear before them, terrible on all sides.
"Le Drac!" exclaimed the Abbé Gévresin, pointing to a sort of liquid
serpent at the bottom of the precipice, writhing and tossing between
rocks in the very jaws of the pit.
For now and again the reptile flung itself up on points of stone that
rent it as it passed; the waters changed as though poisoned by these
fangs; they lost their steely hue, and whitened with foam like a bran
bath; then the Drac hurried on faster, faster, flinging itself into the
shadowy gorge; lingered again on gravelly reaches, wallowing in the sun;
presently it gathered up its scattered rivulets and went on its way,
scaly with scum like the iridescent dross on boiling lead, till, far
away, the rippling rings spread and vanished, skinned and leaving behind
them on the banks a white granulated cuticle of pebbles, a hide of dry
sand.
Durtal, as he leaned out of the carriage window, looked straight down
into the gulf; on this narrow way with only one line of rails, the train
on one side was close to the towering hewn rock, and on the other was
the void. Great God! if it should run off the rails! "What a hash!"
thought he.
And what was not less overwhelming than the appalling depth of the abyss
was, as he looked up, the sight of the furious, frenzied assault of the
peaks. Thus, in that carriage, he was literally between the earth and
sky, and the ground over which it was moving was invisible, being
covered for its whole width by the body of the train.
On they went, suspended in mid-air at a giddy height, along interminable
balconies without parapets; and below, the cliffs dropped
avalanche-like, fell straight, bare, without a patch of vegetation or a
tree. In places they looked as if they had been split down by the blows
of an axe--huge growths of petrified wood; in others they seemed sawn
through shaley layers of slate.
And all round lay a wide amphitheatre of endless mountains, hiding the
heavens, piled one above another, barring the way to the travelling
clouds, stopping the onward march of the sky.
Some made a good show with their jagged grey crests, huge masses of
oyster shells; others, with scorched summits, like burnt pyramids of
coke, were green half-way up. These bristled with pine woods to the very
edge of the precipices, and they were scarred too with white
crosses--the high roads, dotted in places with Nuremberg dogs,
red-roofed hamlets, sheepfolds that seemed on the verge of tumbling
headlong, clinging on--how, it was impossible to guess, and flung here
and there on patches of green carpet glued on to the steep hill-sides;
while other peaks towered higher still, like vast calcined hay-cocks,
with doubtfully dead craters still brooding internal fires, and trailing
smoky clouds which, as they blew off, really seemed to be coming out of
their summits.
The landscape was ominous; the sight of it was strangely discomfiting;
perhaps because it impugned the sense of the infinite that lurks within
us. The firmament was no more than a detail, cast aside like needless
rubbish on the desert peaks of the hills. The abyss was the
all-important fact; it made the sky look small and trivial, substituting
the magnificence of its depths for the grandeur of eternal space.
The eye, in fact, turned away with disappointment from the sky, which
had lost its infinitude of depth, its immeasurable breadth, for the
mountains seemed to touch it, pierce it, and uphold it; they cut it up,
sawing it with the jagged teeth of their pinnacles, showing mere
tattered skirts of blue and rags of cloud.
The eye was involuntarily attracted to the ravines, and the head swam at
the sight of those, vast pits of blackness. This immensity in the wrong
place, stolen from above and cast into the depths, was horrible.
The Abbé had said that the Drac was one of the most formidable torrents
in France; at the moment it was dormant, almost dry; but when the
season of snows and storms comes it wakes up and flashes like a tide of
silver, hisses and tosses, foams and leaps, and can in an instant
swallow up villages and dams.
"It is hideous," thought Durtal. "That bilious flood must carry fevers
with it; it is accursed and rotten with its soapy foam-flakes, its
metallic hues, its scrap of rainbow-colour stranded in the mud."
Durtal now thought over all these details; as he closed his eyes he
could see the Drac and La Salette.
"Ah!" thought he, "they may well be proud of the pilgrims who venture to
those desolate regions to pray where the vision actually appeared, for
when once they are there they are packed on a little plot of ground no
bigger than the Place Saint Sulpice, hemmed in on one side by a church
of rough stone daubed with cement of the colour of Valbonnais mustard,
and on the other by a graveyard. The horizon is a circle of cones, of
dry scoriæ, like pumice, or covered with short grass; above them, the
glassy slope of perpetual ice and snow; to walk on, a scanty growth of
grass moth-eaten by sand. In two words, to sum up the scene, it was
nature's scab, the leprosy of the earth.
"From the artistic point of view, on this microscopic grand parade,
close to the spring whose waters are caught in pipes with taps, three
bronze statues stand in different spots. One, a Virgin, in the most
preposterous garments, her headgear a sort of pastry-mould, a Mohican's
bonnet, is on her knees weeping, with her face hidden in her hands. Then
the same Woman, standing up, her hands ecclesiastically shrouded in her
sleeves, looks at the two children to whom she is speaking; Maximin,
with hair curled like a poodle, twirling a cap like a raised pie, in his
hand; Mélanie buried in a cap with deep frills and accompanied by a dog
like a paper-weight--all in bronze. Finally the same Person, once more
alone, standing on tip-toe, her eyes raised to heaven with a
melodramatic expression.
"Never has the frightful appetite for the hideous that disgraces the
Church in our day been so resolutely displayed as on this spot; and if
the soul suffered in the presence of the obtrusive outrage of this
degrading work--perpetrated by one Barrême of Angers and cast in the
steam foundries of Le Creusot--the body too had something to endure on
this plateau under the crushing mass of hills that shut in the view.
"And yet it was hither that thousands of sick creatures had had
themselves hauled up to face the cruel climate, where in summer the sun
burns you to a cinder while, two yards away, in the shade of the church,
you are frozen.
"The first and greatest miracle accomplished at La Salette was that of
bringing such an invasion to this precipitous spot in the Alps, for
everything combines to forbid it.
"But crowds came there year after year, till Lourdes took possession of
them; for it is since the apparition of the Virgin there that La Salette
has fallen into disrepute.
"Twelve years after the vision at La Salette, the Virgin showed herself
again, not in Dauphiné this time, but in the depths of Gascony. After
the Mother of Tears, Our Lady of Seven Dolours, it was Our Lady of
Smiles, of the Immaculate Conception, the Sovereign Lady of Joy in
Glory, who appeared; and here again it was to a shepherdess that she
revealed the existence of a spring that healed diseases.
"And here it is that consternation begins. Lourdes may be described as
the exact opposite to La Salette; the scenery is magnificent, the hills
in the foreground are covered with verdure, the tamed mountains permit
access to their heights; on all sides there are shady avenues, fine
trees, living waters, gentle slopes, broad roads devoid of danger and
accessible to all; instead of a wilderness, a town, where every
requirement of the sick is provided for. Lourdes may be reached without
adventures in warrens of vermin, without enduring nights in country
inns, or days of jolting in wretched vehicles, without creeping along
the face of a precipice; and the traveller is at his destination when he
gets out of the train.
"This town then was so admirably chosen for the resort of crowds, that
it did not seem necessary that Providence should intervene with such
strong measures to attract them.
"But God, who forced La Salette on the world without availing Himself of
the means of fashionable notoriety, now changed His tactics; with
Lourdes, advertisement appeared on the scene.
"This it is that confounds the mind: Jesus condescending to make use of
the wretched arts of human commerce; adopting the repulsive tricks which
we employ to float a manufacture or a business.
"And we wonder whether this may not be the sternest lesson in humility
ever given to man, as well as the most vehement reproof hurled at the
American abominations of our day--God reduced to lowering Himself once
more to our level, to speaking our language, to using our own devices
that He may make Himself heard and obeyed; God no longer even trying to
make us understand His purpose through Himself, or to uplift us to that
height.
"In point of fact, the way in which the Lord set to work to promulgate
the mercies peculiar to Lourdes is astounding. To make them known He is
no longer content to spread the report of its miracles by word of mouth;
no, and it might be supposed that in His eyes Lourdes is harder to
magnify than La Salette--He adopted strong measures from the first. He
raised up a man whose book, translated into every language, carried the
news of the vision to the most distant lands, and certified the truth of
the cures effected at Lourdes.
"To the end that this work should stir up the masses, it was necessary
that the writer destined to the task should be a clever organizer, and
at the same time a man devoid of individuality of style and of any novel
ideas. In a word, what was needed was a man devoid of talent; and that
is quite intelligible, since from the point of view of appreciating art
the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the profane public.
And our Lord did the thing well; he selected Henri Lasserre.
"Consequently the mine exploded as required, rending souls and bringing
crowds out on to the road to Lourdes.
"Years went by. The fame of the sanctuary is an established fact.
Indisputable cures are effected by supernatural means and certified by
clinical authorities, whose good faith and scientific skill are above
suspicion. Lourdes has its fill; and yet, little by little, in the long
run, though pilgrims do not cease to flow thither, the commotion about
the Grotto is diminishing. It is dying out, if not in the religious
world, at any rate in the wider world of the careless or the doubting,
who must be convinced. And our Lord thinks it desirable to revive
attention to the benefits dispensed by His Mother.
"Lasserre was not such an instrument as could renew the half-exhausted
vogue enjoyed by Lourdes. The public was soaked in his book; it had
swallowed it in every vehicle and in every form; the end was achieved;
this budding-knife of miracles was a tool that might now be laid aside.
"What was now wanted was a book entirely unlike his; a book that would
influence the vaster public, whom his homely prosiness would never
reach. Lourdes must make its way through denser and less malleable
strata, to a public of higher class, and harder to please. It was
requisite, therefore, that this new book should be written by a man of
talent, whose style nevertheless should not be so transcendental as to
scare folks. And it was an advantage that the writer should be very well
known, so that his enormous editions might counterpoise those of
Lasserre.
"Now in all the realm of literature there was but one man who could
fulfil these imperative conditions: Émile Zola. In vain should we seek
another. He alone with his battering push, his enormous sale, his
blatant advertisement, could launch Lourdes once more.
"It mattered little that he would deny supernatural agency and endeavour
to explain inexplicable cures by the meanest hypotheses; it mattered
little that he mixed mortar of the medical muck of a Charcot to make his
wretched theory hold together; the great thing was that noisy debates
should arise about the book of which more than a hundred and fifty
thousand copies proclaimed the name of Lourdes throughout the world.
"And then the very disorder of his arguments, the poor resort to a
'breath that heals the people,' invented in contradiction to all the
data of positive science on which he prided himself, with the purpose of
making these extraordinary cures intelligible--cures which he had seen,
and of which he dared not deny the reality or the frequency--were
admirable means of persuading unprejudiced and candid inquirers of the
authenticity of the recoveries effected year after year at Lourdes.
"This avowed testimony to such amazing facts was enough to give a fresh
impetus to the masses. It must be remarked, too, that the book betrays
no hostility to the Virgin, of whom it speaks only in respectful terms
on the whole; so is it not very credible that the scandal to which this
work gave rise was profitable?
"To sum up: it may be asserted that Lasserre and Zola were both useful
instruments; one devoid of talent, and for that very reason penetrating
to the very lowest strata of the Catholic methodists; the other, on the
contrary, making himself welcome to a more intelligent and cultivated
public, by those splendid passages where the flaming multitude of
processions moves on, and amid a cyclone of anguish, the triumphant
faith of the white ranks is exultant.
"Oh, yes! She is fond of Her Lourdes, is Our Lady, and pets it. She
seems to have centred all Her powers there, all Her favours; Her other
sanctuaries are perishing that this one may live!
"Why?
"Why, above all, have created La Salette and then sacrificed it, as it
were?
"That She should have appeared there is quite intelligible," thought
Durtal, answering himself. "The Virgin is more highly venerated in
Dauphiné than in any other province; chapels dedicated to Her worship
swarm in those parts, and She meant perhaps to reward their zeal by Her
gracious presence.
"On the other hand, She appeared there with a special and very definite
end in view: to preach repentance to mankind, and especially to priests.
She ratified by certain miracles the evidence of this mission which She
confided to Mélanie, and then, that being accomplished, She could desert
the spot where She had, no doubt, never intended to remain.
"And after all," he went on, after a moment's reflection, "may we not
admit an even simpler solution, namely, this:--
"Mary vouchsafes to appear under various aspects to satisfy the tastes
and cravings of each soul. At La Salette, where She descended in a
distressful spot, all in tears, She revealed Herself no doubt to certain
persons, more especially to the souls in love with sorrow, the mystical
souls that delight in reviving the anguish of the Passion and following
the Mother in Her heart-breaking way to the Cross. She would thus seem
less attractive to the vulgar who do not love woe or weeping; it may be
added that they still less love reproof and threats. The Virgin of La
Salette could not become popular, by reason of Her aspect and address,
while She of Lourdes, who appeared smiling, and prophesied no
catastrophes, was easy of access to the hopes and gladness of the crowd.
"She was, in short, in that sanctuary, the Virgin of the world at large,
not the Virgin of mystics and artists, the Virgin of the few, as at La
Salette.
"What a mystery is this direct intervention of the Christ's Mother on
earth!" thought Durtal.
And he went on: "It is clear, on reflection, that the churches founded
by Her may be classed in two very distinct groups.
"One group where She has revealed Herself to certain persons, where
waters spring and bodily ills are healed: La Salette and Lourdes.
"The other, where She has never been gazed on by human beings, or where
Her appearance occurred in immemorial times, in forgotten centuries, the
dead ages. In those chapels prayer alone is in force, and Mary answers
it without the help of any waters. Indeed, She effects more moral than
physical cures. Notre Dame de Fourvières at Lyon, Notre Dame de
Sous-Terre at Chartres, Notre Dame des Victoires at Paris, to mention
only three.
"Wherefore this difference? None can understand, and probably none will
ever know. At most may we suppose that in compassion for the everlasting
craving of our hapless souls wearied with prayer without sight, She
would fain confirm our faith and help to gather in the flock by showing
Herself.
"In all this obscurity," Durtal went on, "is it at least possible to
discern some dim landmarks, some vague law?
"As we gaze into the darkness, two spots of light appear," he replied to
himself.
"In the first place, this: She appears to none but the poor and humble;
She addresses the simple souls who have in a way handed down the
primitive occupation, the biblical function of the Patriarchs; She
unveils herself to the children of the soil, to the shepherds, to girls
as they watch the flock. Both at La Salette and at Lourdes She chose
little pastors for Her confidants, and this is intelligible, since, by
acting thus, she confirms the known will of Her Son; the first to behold
the infant Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem were in fact shepherds, and
it was from among men of the lowest class that Christ chose His
apostles.
"And is not the water that serves as a medium of cure prefigured in the
Sacred Books--in the Old Testament by the River Jordan, which cleansed
Naaman of his leprosy; and in the New by the probationary pool stirred
by an angel?
"Another law seems no less probable. The Virgin is, as far as possible,
considerate of the temperament and individual character of the persons
She appears to. She places Herself on the level of their intellect, is
incarnate in the only material form that they can conceive of. She
assumes the simple aspect these poor creatures love, accepting the blue
and white robes, the crown and wreaths of roses, the trinkets and
garlands and frippery of a first Communion, the ugliest garb.
"There is not indeed a single case where the shepherd maids who saw Her
described Her otherwise than as a 'beautiful lady' with the features of
the Virgin of a village altar, a Madonna of the Saint-Sulpice shops, a
street-corner Queen.
"These two rules are more or less universal," said Durtal to himself.
"As to the Son, it would seem that He never now will reveal Himself in
human form to the masses. Since His appearance to the Blessed Mary
Margaret, whom He employed as a mouthpiece to address the people, He has
been silent. He keeps in the background, giving precedence to His
Mother.
"He, it is true, reserves for Himself a dwelling in the secret places,
the hidden regions, the strongholds of the soul, as Saint Theresa calls
them; but His presence is unseen and His words spoken within us, and
generally not apprehended by means of the senses."
Durtal ceased speaking, confessing to himself how inane were these
reflections, how powerless the human reason to investigate the
inconceivable purposes of the Almighty; and again his thoughts turned to
that journey to Dauphiné which haunted his memory.
"Ah! but the chain of the High Alps and the peaks of La Salette," said
he to himself; "that huge white hotel, that church coloured with dirty
yellow lime-wash, vaguely Byzantine and vaguely Romanesque in its
architecture, and that little cell with the plaster Christ nailed to a
flat black wooden Cross--that tiny Sanctuary plainly white-washed, and
so small that one could step across it in any direction--they were
pregnant with her presence, all the same!"
"Surely She revisited that spot, in spite of Her apparent desertion, to
comfort all comers; She seemed so close at hand, so attentive and so
grieving, in the evening as one sat alone by the light of a candle, that
the soul seemed to burst open like a pod shedding the fruit of sin, the
seeds of evil deeds; and repentance, that had been so tardily evolved,
and sometimes so indefinite, became so suddenly despotic and
unmistakable that the penitent dropped on his knees by the bed, and
buried his head sobbing in the sheets. Ah, those were evenings of mortal
dulness and yet sweetly sad! The soul was rent, its very fibres laid
bare, but was not the Virgin at hand, so pitiful, so motherly, that
after, the worst was over She took the bleeding soul in her arms and
rocked it to sleep like a sick child.
"Then, during the day, the church afforded a refuge from the frenzy of
giddiness that came over one; the eye, bewildered by the precipices on
every side, distracted by the sight of the clouds that suddenly gathered
below and steamed off in white fleece from the sides of the rocks, found
rest under the shelter of those walls.
"And finally, to make up for the horrors of the scene and of the
statues, to mitigate the grotesqueness of the inn-servants, who had
beards like sappers and clothes like little boys--the caps, and holland
blouses with belts, and shiny black breeches, like cast iron, of the
children at the Saint Nicolas school in Paris--extraordinary characters,
souls of divine simplicity expanded there."
And Durtal recollected the admirable scene he had watched there one
morning.
He was sitting on the little plateau, in the icy shade of the church,
gazing before him at the graveyard and the motionless swell of mountain
tops. Far away, in the very sky, a string of beads moved on, one by one,
on the ribbon of path that edged the precipice. And by degrees these
specks, at first merely dark, assumed the bright hues of dresses,
assumed the form of coloured bells surmounted by white knobs, and at
last took shape as a line of peasant women wearing white caps.
And still in single file they came down the square.
After crossing themselves as they passed the cemetery, they went each to
drink a cup of water at the spring and then turned round; and Durtal,
who was watching them, saw this:
At their head walked an old woman of at least a hundred, very tall and
still upright, her head covered by a sort of hood from which her stiff,
wavy hair escaped in tangled grey locks like iron wire. Her face was
shrivelled like the peel of an onion, and so thin that, looking at her
in profile, daylight could be seen through her skin.
She knelt down at the foot of the first statue, and behind her, her
companions, girls of about eighteen for the most part, clasped their
hands and shut their eyes; and slowly a change came over them.
Under the breath of prayer, the soul, buried under the ashes of worldly
cares, flamed up, and the air that fanned it made it glow like an inward
fire, lighting up the thick cheeks, the stolid, heavy features. It
smoothed out the crackled surface of wrinkles, softened in the younger
women the vulgarity of chapped red lips, gave colour to the dull brown
flesh, overflowed in the smile on lips half parted in silent prayer, in
timid kisses offered with simple good faith, and returned no doubt in an
ineffable thrill by the Holy Child they had cherished from His birth,
who, since the martyrdom of Calvary, had grown to be the Spouse of
Sorrows.
They felt, perhaps, something of the raptures of the Blessed Virgin who
is Mother and Wife and at the same time the beatified Handmaid of God.
And in the silence a voice as from the remotest ages arose, and the
ancestress said, "_Pater Noster_," and they all repeated the prayer, and
then dragged themselves on their knees up the steps of the way of
crosses, where the fourteen upright posts, each with its cast metal
bas-relief, bordered a serpentine path, dividing the statues from the
groups. Thus they went forward, stopping long enough to recite an _Ave_
on each step they climbed, and then, helping themselves with their
hands, they mounted to the next. And when the rosary was ended the old
woman rose, and they solemnly followed her into the church, where they
all prayed a long time, prostrate before the altar; and the grandmother
stood up, gave each holy water at the door, led her flock to the spring
where they all drank again, and then they went away, without speaking a
word, one after another up the narrow path, ending as black specks just
as they had come, and vanishing on the horizon.
"Those women have been two days and two nights crossing the mountains,"
said a priest, coming up to Durtal. "They started from the depths of
Savoy, and have travelled almost without rest to spend a few minutes
here; they will sleep to night in a cow-house or a cave, as chance may
direct, and to-morrow by daybreak they will start again on their
weariful way."
Durtal was overpowered by the radiant splendour of such faith.
It was possible, then, to find souls ever young, souls ever new, souls
as of undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not,
outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges,
and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who,
without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God,
while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious
elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these
women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle
ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless
ideas, hardly able to express themselves, hardly knowing how to read,
wept with love in the presence of the Inaccessible, whom they compelled
by their humility and single-heartedness to appear, to become actual to
their mind.
"Yes, it was but just that the Virgin should cherish them and choose
them above all others to be Her vessels of election.
"Yes. For they are unburdened with the dreadful weight of doubt, they
are endowed with almost total ignorance of evil.
"And yet are there not some souls too experienced, alas! in the culture
of wrong-doing, who nevertheless find mercy at Her feet? Has not the
Virgin other sanctuaries less frequented, less well known, which yet
have outlived the wear of time, the various caprice of the ages; very
ancient churches where She welcomes you if you love Her in solitude and
silence?"
And Durtal, coming back to Chartres once more, looked about him at the
persons who were waiting in the warm shade of the indefinite forest till
the Virgin should awake, to worship Her.
With dawn, now beginning to break, this forest of the church under whose
shade he was sitting became absolutely unintelligible. The shapes,
faintly sketched, were transformed in the gloom which blurred every
outline as it slowly faded. Below, in the vanishing mist, rose the
immemorial trunks of fabulous white trees, planted as it seemed in wells
that held them tightly in the rigid circle of their margin; and the
night, now almost diaphanous on the level of the ground, was thicker as
it rose, cutting them off at the spring of the branches, which were
still invisible.
Durtal, as he raised his head, gazed into deep obscurity unlighted by
moon or star.
Looking up still, but straight before him, he saw in the air, through
the hazy twilight, sword-blades already bright, gigantic blades without
hilts or handles, thinner towards the point; and these blades, standing
on end at an immense height, appeared in the gloom they cut, to be
patterned with vague intaglios or in ill-defined relief.
As he peered into space to the right and left, he was aware of a
gigantic panoply on each side at a vast height, resting on blocks of
darkness, and consisting of a colossal shield riddled with holes,
hanging above five broader swords, without hilts, but damascened on
their flat blades with indefinite designs of bewildering niello.
Little by little the tentative sun of a doubtful winter's day pierced
the fog, which vanished in blueness; the shield that hung to the left of
Durtal, the north, was the first to come to life; rosy fires and the
lurid flames of punch gleamed in its hollows, while below, in the middle
blade, there started forth in the steel-grey arch, the gigantic image of
a negress robed in green with a brown mantle. Her head, wrapped in a
blue kerchief, was set in a golden glory, and she stared out, hieratic
and wild-looking, with white, wide-open eyes.
And this engimatical Ethiop had on her knees a black infant whose eyes,
in the same way, stood out like snowballs from the dusky face.
All about her, very gradually, the other swords, still so dim, began to
glow, blood rippling from their crimsoned points as if from recent
slaughter; and this trickling red formed a setting for the shapes of
beings come, no doubt, from the distant shores of Ganges: on one side a
king playing on a golden harp; on the other a monarch wielding a sceptre
ending in the turquoise-blue petals of a fabulous lily.
Then, to the left of the royal musician there was another man, bearded,
with a walnut-stained face, the eye-sockets vacant and covered by round
spectacles; on his head were a diadem and a tiara, in his hands a
chalice and a paten, a censer and a loaf; while to the right of the
other sovereign who held the sceptre, a still more harassing shape came
forth against the blue background of the sword--a sort of oriental
brigand, escaped perhaps from the prison cells of Persepolis or Susa, a
bandit as it seemed, wearing a little scarlet cap edged with yellow, in
shape like an inverted jam-pot, and a tan-coloured gown with white
stripes on the skirt; and this clumsy and ferocious personage bore a
green palm and a book.
Durtal turned away to sound the depths of darkness, and before him, at a
giddy height on the horizon, more sword-blades gleamed. The scrawls
which might have been mistaken in the darkness for patterns embossed or
incised on the surface of the steel, developed into figures draped in
long, straight, pleated robes; and at the highest point of the firmament
there hovered amid a sparkle of rubies and sapphires a woman crowned,
pale of face, dressed like the Moorish mother of the northern side in
Carmelite-brown and green; and she too held an infant, a child, like
herself, of the white race, clasping a globe in one hand, and extending
the other in benediction.
Last of all, the still dark side, the late side, to Durtal's right hand
and further south, till now wrapped in the half-dispelled morning haze,
was lighted up; the shield opposite to that on the north caught the
blaze, and below it, against the polished metal of the broad blade
facing that which presented the negress queen, appeared a woman of
somewhat olive hue, in raiment like the others, of myrtle-green and
brown, holding a sceptre, and with her, too, there was a child. And
round her again emerged images of men piled up one above the other,
shouldering each other in the narrow field they filled.
For a quarter of an hour nothing was clearly defined; then the real
things asserted themselves. In the middle of the swords, which were in
fact mosaic of glass, the figures stood out in broad daylight. In the
field of each window with its pointed arch bearded faces took form,
motionless in the midst of fire; and on all sides, in the thicket of
flames, as it were the burning bush of Horeb where God showed His glory
to Moses, the Virgin was seen in an unchangeable attitude of imperious
sweetness and pensive grace, mute and still, and crowned with gold.
She was, indeed, many; She came down from the empyrean to lower levels,
to be closer to Her flock, and at last found a place where they might
almost kiss Her feet, at the corner of an aisle that was always in
gloom; but there She wore a different aspect.
She stood forth in the middle of a window, like a tall, blue plant, and
the garnet-red foliage was supported by black iron rods.
Her colour was slightly coppery, almost Chinese, with a long nose and
rather narrow eyes; on the head there was a black coif, and She looked
steadily before Her, while the lower part of the face with its short
chin, the mouth rather drawn by two grave lines, gave it an expression
of suffering that was even a little morose. And here again, under the
immemorial name of Notre Dame de la belle Verrière, she held an infant
in a dress of raisin-purple, a child barely visible in the mixture of
dark hues all about it.
In short, She to whom all appealed was there; everywhere under the
forest roof of this cathedral the Virgin was present. She seemed to have
come from all the ends of the earth, under the semblance of every race
known in the Middle Ages: black as an African, tawny as a Mongolian,
pale coffee colour as a half-caste, and white as an European, thus
declaring that, as mediator for the whole human race, She was everything
to each, everything to all; and promising by the presence of Her Son,
whose features bore the character of each race, that the Messiah had
come to redeem all men without distinction.
And it seemed as though the sun, as it mounted higher, followed the
growth of the Virgin, taking its birth in the window where She was still
a babe in that northern transept where Saint Anne, her mother, of the
black face, sat between David, the king of the golden harp, and Solomon,
the bearer of the blue-lilied sceptre, each against a background of
purple, to prefigure the royal birth of the Son; between Melchizedec,
the mitred patriarch, holding the censer, and Aaron, in the curious red
cap bordered with lemon yellow, representing prophetically the
Priesthood of Christ.
And at the end of the apse, quite high up, there was another
Mary--triumphant, looking down the sacred grove, supported by figures
from the Old Testament and by Saint Peter. It was She again who in the
south transept faced Saint Anne, She, now a woman and herself a mother,
amid four enormous men bearing pick-a-back on their shoulders four
smaller figures; these were the four Greater Prophets who had foretold
the coming of the Messiah--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel,
bearing the four Evangelists, and thus artlessly expressing the
parallelism of the Old and New Testaments, and the support given by the
Old Covenant to the New.
And then, as though Her presence were not fully ubiquitous, as though
She desired that, turn where they might, Her worshippers should ever see
Her, the Virgin was to be found on a smaller scale in less important
positions; enthroned in the centre of the shields, in the heart of the
great rose-windows, and finally, ceasing to appear as a mere picture,
took shape, materialized as a statue of black wood standing on a
pedestal in a full hooped skirt like a silver bell.
The sheltering forest had vanished with the darkness; the tree-trunks
remained, but rose with giddy flight from the ground, unbroken pillars
to the sky, meeting at a vast height under the groined vault; the forest
was seen as an immense church blossoming with roses of fire, pierced
with glowing glass, crowded with Virgins and apostles, patriarchs and
saints.
The genius of the middle ages had devised the skilful and pious lighting
of this edifice, and harmonized the ascending march of day to some
extent with its windows. The walls and the aisles were very dark, the
daylight creeping, mysteriously subdued, along the body of the church.
It was lost in the stained glass, checked by dark bishops, and opaque
saints completely filling the dusky-bordered windows with the dead hues
of a Persian rug; the panes absorbed the sun's rays, refracting none,
arrested the powdered gold of the sunbeams in the dull violet of purple
egg-fruit, the tawny browns of tinder or tan, the too-blue greens, and
the wine-coloured red stained with soot, like the thick juice of
mulberries.
As it reached the chancel, the light came in through brighter and
clearer colours, through the blue of translucent sapphires, through pale
rubies, brilliant yellow, and crystalline white. The gloom was relieved
beyond the transepts near the altar. Even in the centre of the cross the
sun pierced clearer glass, less storied with figures, and bordered with
almost colourless panes that admitted it freely.
At last, in the apse, forming the top of the cross, it poured in,
symbolical of the light that flooded the world from the top of the Tree;
and the pictures were diaphanous, just lightly covered with flowing
lines and aerial tints, to frame in a sheaf of coloured sparks the image
of a Madonna, less hieratic and barbaric than the others, and a fairer
Infant, blessing the earth with uplifted hand.
By this time the Cathedral of Chartres was alive with the clatter of
wooden shoes, the rustle of petticoats, and the tinkle of mass-bells.
Durtal left the corner of the transept where he had been sitting with
his back to a pillar, and turned to the left, towards a bay where there
was a framework ablaze with lighted tapers before the statue of the
Virgin.
And schools of little girls under the guidance of Sisters, troops of
peasant women and countrymen, poured out of every aisle, knelt in front
of the image, and then came up to kiss the pedestal.
The appearance of these folks suggested to Durtal that their prayers
were not like those that are sobbed out at evening twilight, the
supplications of women worn and dismayed by the weary hours of day.
These peasant souls prayed less as complaining than as loving; these
people, kneeling on the flags, had come for Her sake rather than for
their own. There was here and now a pause from grieving, a sort of
reprieve from tears; and this attitude was in harmony with the special
aspect adopted by Mary in this cathedral; She was seen there, in fact,
under the form of a child and of a young mother; She was the Virgin of
the Nativity, rather than our Lady of Dolour. The old artists of the
Middle Ages seemed to have feared to sadden Her by reminding Her of
memories too painful, to have striven to prove by this delicate reserve,
their gratitude to Her who in this sanctuary had ever shown Herself to
be the Dispenser of Mercies, the Lady Bountiful of Grace.
Durtal felt in himself an answering thrill, the echo of the prayers
chanted all round him by these loving souls; and he let himself melt
away in the soothing sweetness of the hymns, asking for nothing,
silencing his ungratified desires, smothering his secret repining,
thinking only of bidding an affectionate good-morning to the Mother to
whom he had returned after such distant wanderings in the land of sin,
after such a long absence.
And now that he had seen Her, that he had spoken to Her, he withdrew,
making room for others who came in greater numbers as the day grew. He
went home to get some food; and as he cast a last sweeping glance at the
beautiful church, remembering the warlike imagery of its details, the
buckler-shape of the rose-windows, the sword-blades of the lower lights,
the casque and helmet forms of the ogee, the resemblance of some
grisaille glass with its network of lead to a warrior's shirt of mascled
mail; as, outside, he gazed at one of the two belfries carved into
scales like a pine cone--like scale-armour--he said to himself that the
"Builders for God" must have borrowed their ideas from the military
panoply of the knights; that thus they had endeavoured to perpetuate the
memory of their exploits by representing the magnified image of the
armour with which the Crusaders girt themselves when they sailed to win
back the Holy Sepulchre.
And the interior of the church seemed, as a whole, to impress the same
idea and complete the symbolical images of the details by its vaulted
nave, of which the groined roof was so like the reversed hull of a
vessel, suggesting the graceful form of the ships that made sail for
Palestine.
Only, in the present day, such memories of heroic times were vain. In
this city of Chartres, where Saint Bernard preached the second crusade,
the vessel was stranded for ever, her hull overset, her anchor out.
And looking down on the unthinking city, the Cathedral kept watch alone,
beseeching pardon for the inappetency for suffering, for the inertia of
faith that her sons displayed, uplifting her towers to the sky like two
arms, while the spires mimicked the shape of joined hands, the ten
fingers all meeting and upright one against another, in the position
which the image-makers of old gave to the dead saints and warriors they
carved upon tombs.