the divine offices, but only to give the alarm to the peasants at
the approach of the enemy and the signal for flight.


As it was in the days of Jean de Venette, so it is now. I thought of
that mournful passage as I wandered next day among the ruins of
Choisy-au-Bac, a village not twenty miles from the place where Jean de
Venette was born, and saw old women cowering among the ruins of their
burnt-out homes.

If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day
he would have little difficulty in finding his way about the city, for
though she must have aged perceptibly she can have changed but little.
The timbered mills on wooden piles still stand moored in the middle of
the river like so many ships, just as they stood in the twelfth century,
and the cathedral with its Gothic portals and great rose-window--though
it has grown in stature and added here and there a touch of the
flamboyant in its tracery, even as a man will break out into insurgent
adventures when he feels the first chill of age--is stamped with the
characters of the fourteenth century. And I think Jean de Venette would
find a congenial spirit in my friend the bishop, Monsignor Marbot, for
like Jean he is a lover of the poor. It was Monsignor Marbot who went in
procession to the battlefield of the Marne with crucifix and banner and
white-robed acolytes, and in an allocution of singular beauty
consecrated those stricken fields with the last rites of the Church. And
it was Monsignor Marbot who remained at his post all through the German
occupation to protect his flock while the Hun roamed over his diocese
like a beast of prey. Though the Hun thinks nothing of shooting a
_maire_, and has been known to murder many an obscure village priest, he
fights shy of killing a bishop; there might be trouble at the Holy See.