her teachers, ever in their company for songs, novenas, or decorations of
white flowers around the statues of the Holy Virgin.--Then, the priests,
in their most sumptuous costumes, appeared in front of the magnificent
gold of the tabernacle, on a platform elevated and theatrical, and the
mass began, celebrated, in this distant village, with excessive pomp as
in a great city. There were choirs of small boys chanting in infantile
voices with a savage ardor. Then choruses of little girls, whom a sister
accompanied at the harmonium and which the clear and fresh voice of
Gracieuse guided. From time to time a clamor came, like a storm, from the
tribunes above where the men were, a formidable response animated the old
vaults, the old sonorous wainscoting, which for centuries have vibrated
with the same song.--

To do the same things which for numberless ages the ancestors have done
and to tell blindly the same words of faith, are indications of supreme
wisdom, are a supreme force. For all the faithful who sang there came
from this immutable ceremony of the mass a sort of peace, a confused but
soft resignation to coming destruction. Living of the present hour, they
lost a little of their ephemeral personality to attach themselves better
to the dead lying under the slabs and to continue them more exactly, to
form with them and their future descendants only one of these resisting
entireties, of almost infinite duration, which is called a race.



CHAPTER IV.

"Ite missa est!" The high mass is finished and the antique church is
emptying. Outside, in the yard, among the tombs, the assistants scatter.
And all the joy of a sunny noon greets them, as they come out of the