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 them. 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, soft 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 Cæsar 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 of 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 and 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 Tenebræ 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 and strange attraction, as certain statues
of a reredos, or religious pictures of the elder Breughel. Lastly, the
Miserere of Josquin de Près, choirmaster 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 Filiæ;" 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 iræ," 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 iræ" 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 iræ' 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 iræ' to
that of the 'De Profundis,' and the melody of the 'De Profundis' to that
of the 'Dies iræ.' 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 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 aide, 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 æternam dona eis Domine
Et lux perpetua luceat eis."
It seems that after all the lamentations of the "De Profundis" and the
"Dies iræ," 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 in
judicium 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 iræ," 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 he 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 iræ," 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 have 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
iræ" 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. All 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."