Pueri Dominum!--their very faces caught for him a sort of quaint
unreality from the memory [102] of those others, the children of the
Catacombs, but a little way below them.

Here and there, mingling with the record of merely natural decease,
and sometimes even at these children's graves, were the signs of
violent death or "martyrdom,"--proofs that some "had loved not their
lives unto the death"--in the little red phial of blood, the palm-
branch, the red flowers for their heavenly "birthday." About one
sepulchre in particular, distinguished in this way, and devoutly
arrayed for what, by a bold paradox, was thus treated as, natalitia--
a birthday, the peculiar arrangements of the whole place visibly
centered. And it was with a singular novelty of feeling, like the
dawning of a fresh order of experiences upon him, that, standing
beside those mournful relics, snatched in haste from the common place
of execution not many years before, Marius became, as by some gleam
of foresight, aware of the whole force of evidence for a certain
strange, new hope, defining in its turn some new and weighty motive
of action, which lay in deaths so tragic for the "Christian
superstition." Something of them he had heard indeed already. They
had seemed to him but one savagery the more, savagery self-provoked,
in a cruel and stupid world.

And yet these poignant memorials seemed also to draw him onwards to-
day, as if towards an image of some still more pathetic suffering,
[103] in the remote background. Yes! the interest, the expression,
of the entire neighbourhood was instinct with it, as with the savour
of some priceless incense. Penetrating the whole atmosphere,
touching everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to
make all this visible mortality, death's very self--Ah! lovelier than