Before long Jean's whole mind was given over to the catechizings
and sermons and hymns preparatory to the First Communion.
Intoxication with the music of chants and organ, drowned in the
scent of incense and flowers, hung about with scapularies, rosaries,
consecrated medals, and holy images, he, like his companions, assumed
a certain air of self-importance and wore a smug, sanctified look.
He was cold and unbending towards his aunt, who spoke with far
too much unconcern about the "great day." Though she had long
been in the habit of taking her nephew to Mass every Sunday,
she was not "pious." Most likely she confounded in one common
detestation the luxury of the rich and the pomps of the Church
service. She had more than once been overheard informing one
of the cronies she used to meet on the boulevards that she was
a religious woman, _but_ she could not abide priests, that she
said her prayers at home, and these were every bit as good as
the fine ladies' who flaunted their crinolines in church. His
father was more in sympathy with the lad's new-found zeal; he
was interested and even a little impressed. He undertook to bind
a missal with his own hands against the ceremony.
When the days arrived for retreats and general confessions, Jean
swelled with pride and vague aspirations. He looked for something
out of the ordinary to happen. Coming out at evening from
Saint-Sulpice with two or three of his schoolfellows, he would
feel an atmosphere of miracle about him; some divine interposition
_must_ be forthcoming. The lads used to tell each other strange
stories, pious legends they had read in one of their little books
of devotion. Now it was a phantom monk who had stepped out of the
grave, showing the stigmata on hands and feet and the pierced
side; now a nun, beautiful as the veiled figures in the Church
pictures, expiating in the fires of hell mysterious sins. Jean
had _his_ favourite tale. Shuddering, he would relate how St.
Francis Borgia, after the death of Queen Isabella, who was lovely
beyond compare, must have the coffin opened wherein she lay at rest
in her robe embroidered with pearls; in imagination he pictured
the dead Queen, invested her form with all the magic hues of the
unknown, traced in her lineaments the enchantments of a woman's
beauty in the dark gulf of death. And as he told the tale, he could
hear, in the twilight gloom, a murmur of soft voices sighing in
the plane trees of the Luxembourg.
The great day arrived. The bookbinder, who attended the ceremony
with his sister, thought of his wife and wept.
He was most favourably impressed by the _curé's_ homily, in which
a young man without faith was compared to an unbridled charger
that plunges over precipices. The simile struck his fancy, and
he would quote it years after with approbation. He made up his
mind to read the Bible, as he had read Voltaire, "to get the
hang of things."
Jean withdrew from the houselling cloth, wondering to be just
the same as ever and already disillusioned. He was never again
to recover the first fervent rapture.