WE made our first stage below Compiègne to Pont Sainte Maxence. I was
abroad a little after six the next morning. The air was biting, and
smelt of frost. In an open place a score of women wrangled together over
the day’s market; and the noise of their negotiation sounded thin and
querulous like that of sparrows on a winter’s morning. The rare
passengers blew into their hands, and shuffled in their wooden shoes to
set the blood agog. The streets were full of icy shadow, although the
chimneys were smoking overhead in golden sunshine. If you wake early
enough at this season of the year, you may get up in December to break
your fast in June.
I found my way to the church; for there is always something to see about
a church, whether living worshippers or dead men’s tombs; you find there
the deadliest earnest, and the hollowest deceit; and even where it is not
a piece of history, it will be certain to leak out some contemporary
gossip. It was scarcely so cold in the church as it was without, but it
looked colder. The white nave was positively arctic to the eye; and the
tawdriness of a continental altar looked more forlorn than usual in the
solitude and the bleak air. Two priests sat in the chancel, reading and
waiting penitents; and out in the nave, one very old woman was engaged in
her devotions. It was a wonder how she was able to pass her beads when
healthy young people were breathing in their palms and slapping their
chest; but though this concerned me, I was yet more dispirited by the
nature of her exercises. She went from chair to chair, from altar to
altar, circumnavigating the church. To each shrine she dedicated an
equal number of beads and an equal length of time. Like a prudent
capitalist with a somewhat cynical view of the commercial prospect, she
desired to place her supplications in a great variety of heavenly
securities. She would risk nothing on the credit of any single
intercessor. Out of the whole company of saints and angels, not one but
was to suppose himself her champion elect against the Great Assize! I
could only think of it as a dull, transparent jugglery, based upon
unconscious unbelief.
She was as dead an old woman as ever I saw; no more than bone and
parchment, curiously put together. Her eyes, with which she interrogated
mine, were vacant of sense. It depends on what you call seeing, whether
you might not call her blind. Perhaps she had known love: perhaps borne
children, suckled them and given them pet names. But now that was all
gone by, and had left her neither happier nor wiser; and the best she
could do with her mornings was to come up here into the cold church and
juggle for a slice of heaven. It was not without a gulp that I escaped
into the streets and the keen morning air. Morning? why, how tired of it
she would be before night! and if she did not sleep, how then? It is
fortunate that not many of us are brought up publicly to justify our
lives at the bar of threescore years and ten; fortunate that such a
number are knocked opportunely on the head in what they call the flower
of their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in private
somewhere else. Otherwise, between sick children and discontented old
folk, we might be put out of all conceit of life.
I had need of all my cerebral hygiene during that day’s paddle: the old
devotee stuck in my throat sorely. But I was soon in the seventh heaven
of stupidity; and knew nothing but that somebody was paddling a canoe,
while I was counting his strokes and forgetting the hundreds. I used
sometimes to be afraid I should remember the hundreds; which would have
made a toil of a pleasure; but the terror was chimerical, they went out
of my mind by enchantment, and I knew no more than the man in the moon
about my only occupation.
At Creil, where we stopped to lunch, we left the canoes in another
floating lavatory, which, as it was high noon, was packed with
washerwomen, red-handed and loud-voiced; and they and their broad jokes
are about all I remember of the place. I could look up my history-books,
if you were very anxious, and tell you a date or two; for it figured
rather largely in the English wars. But I prefer to mention a girls’
boarding-school, which had an interest for us because it was a girls’
boarding-school, and because we imagined we had rather an interest for
it. At least—there were the girls about the garden; and here were we on
the river; and there was more than one handkerchief waved as we went by.
It caused quite a stir in my heart; and yet how we should have wearied
and despised each other, these girls and I, if we had been introduced at
a croquet-party! But this is a fashion I love: to kiss the hand or wave
a handkerchief to people I shall never see again, to play with
possibility, and knock in a peg for fancy to hang upon. It gives the
traveller a jog, reminds him that he is not a traveller everywhere, and
that his journey is no more than a siesta by the way on the real march of
life.
The church at Creil was a nondescript place in the inside, splashed with
gaudy lights from the windows, and picked out with medallions of the
Dolorous Way. But there was one oddity, in the way of an _ex voto_,
which pleased me hugely: a faithful model of a canal boat, swung from the
vault, with a written aspiration that God should conduct the _Saint
Nicolas_ of Creil to a good haven. The thing was neatly executed, and
would have made the delight of a party of boys on the waterside. But
what tickled me was the gravity of the peril to be conjured. You might
hang up the model of a sea-going ship, and welcome: one that is to plough
a furrow round the world, and visit the tropic or the frosty poles, runs
dangers that are well worth a candle and a mass. But the _Saint Nicolas_
of Creil, which was to be tugged for some ten years by patient
draught-horses, in a weedy canal, with the poplars chattering overhead,
and the skipper whistling at the tiller; which was to do all its errands
in green inland places, and never get out of sight of a village belfry in
all its cruising; why, you would have thought if anything could be done
without the intervention of Providence, it would be that! But perhaps
the skipper was a humorist: or perhaps a prophet, reminding people of the
seriousness of life by this preposterous token.
At Creil, as at Noyon, Saint Joseph seemed a favourite saint on the score
of punctuality. Day and hour can be specified; and grateful people do
not fail to specify them on a votive tablet, when prayers have been
punctually and neatly answered. Whenever time is a consideration, Saint
Joseph is the proper intermediary. I took a sort of pleasure in
observing the vogue he had in France, for the good man plays a very small
part in my religion at home. Yet I could not help fearing that, where
the Saint is so much commanded for exactitude, he will be expected to be
very grateful for his tablet.
This is foolishness to us Protestants; and not of great importance
anyway. Whether people’s gratitude for the good gifts that come to them
be wisely conceived or dutifully expressed, is a secondary matter, after
all, so long as they feel gratitude. The true ignorance is when a man
does not know that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine that
he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the funniest windbag
after all! There is a marked difference between decreeing light in
chaos, and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back-parlour with a box of
patent matches; and do what we will, there is always something made to
our hand, if it were only our fingers.
But there was something worse than foolishness placarded in Creil Church.
The Association of the Living Rosary (of which I had never previously
heard) is responsible for that. This Association was founded, according
to the printed advertisement, by a brief of Pope Gregory Sixteenth, on
the 17th of January 1832: according to a coloured bas-relief, it seems to
have been founded, sometime other, by the Virgin giving one rosary to
Saint Dominic, and the Infant Saviour giving another to Saint Catharine
of Siena. Pope Gregory is not so imposing, but he is nearer hand. I
could not distinctly make out whether the Association was entirely
devotional, or had an eye to good works; at least it is highly organised:
the names of fourteen matrons and misses were filled in for each week of
the month as associates, with one other, generally a married woman, at
the top for _zélatrice_: the leader of the band. Indulgences, plenary
and partial, follow on the performance of the duties of the Association.
‘The partial indulgences are attached to the recitation of the rosary.’
On ‘the recitation of the required _dizaine_,’ a partial indulgence
promptly follows. When people serve the kingdom of heaven with a
pass-book in their hands, I should always be afraid lest they should
carry the same commercial spirit into their dealings with their
fellow-men, which would make a sad and sordid business of this life.
There is one more article, however, of happier import. ‘All these
indulgences,’ it appeared, ‘are applicable to souls in purgatory.’ For
God’s sake, ye ladies of Creil, apply them all to the souls in purgatory
without delay! Burns would take no hire for his last songs, preferring
to serve his country out of unmixed love. Suppose you were to imitate
the exciseman, mesdames, and even if the souls in purgatory were not
greatly bettered, some souls in Creil upon the Oise would find themselves
none the worse either here or hereafter.
I cannot help wondering, as I transcribe these notes, whether a
Protestant born and bred is in a fit state to understand these signs, and
do them what justice they deserve; and I cannot help answering that he is
not. They cannot look so merely ugly and mean to the faithful as they do
to me. I see that as clearly as a proposition in Euclid. For these
believers are neither weak nor wicked. They can put up their tablet
commanding Saint Joseph for his despatch, as if he were still a village
carpenter; they can ‘recite the required _dizaine_,’ and metaphorically
pocket the indulgence, as if they had done a job for Heaven; and then
they can go out and look down unabashed upon this wonderful river flowing
by, and up without confusion at the pin-point stars, which are themselves
great worlds full of flowing rivers greater than the Oise. I see it as
plainly, I say, as a proposition in Euclid, that my Protestant mind has
missed the point, and that there goes with these deformities some higher
and more religious spirit than I dream.
I wonder if other people would make the same allowances for me! Like the
ladies of Creil, having recited my rosary of toleration, I look for my
indulgence on the spot.