En Route Part 46

And there were other evenings ... the Octave of the Feast of All Souls at St. Sulpice and at St. Thomas Aquinas, where, after the Vespers of the Dead, they brought out again the old Sequence which has disappeared from the Roman Breviary, the "Lanquentilus in Purgatorio."

This church was the only one in Paris which had retained these pages of the Gallican hymnal, and had them sung by two ba.s.ses without a choir; but these singers, so poor as a rule, no doubt were fond of this air, for if they did not sing it with art, at least they put a little soul into its delivery.

And this invocation to the Madonna, in which she was adjured to save the souls in Purgatory, was as sorrowful as the souls themselves, and so melancholy, so languid, that the surroundings were forgotten, the ugliness of that sanctuary of which the choir was a theatre scene, surrounded by closed dressing-rooms and garnished with l.u.s.tres, one might think oneself for a few moments far from Paris, far from that population of devout women and servant girls, which attend that place in the evening.

"Ah! the Church," he said to himself, as he descended the path which led to the great pond, "what a mother of art is she!" and suddenly the noise of a body falling into the water interrupted his reflections.

He looked behind the hedge of reeds and saw nothing but great circles running on the water, and all at once in one of these rings a small dog-like head appeared holding a fish in its mouth; the beast raised itself a little out of the water, showed a thin body covered with fur, and gazed on Durtal quietly with its little black eyes.

Then in a flash it pa.s.sed the distance which separated it from the bank, and disappeared under the gra.s.ses.

"It is the otter," he said to himself, remembering the discussion at table between the stranger priest and the oblate.

And he went to gain the other pond, when he encountered Father Etienne.

He told him his adventure.

"Impossible!" cried the monk, "no one has ever seen the otter; you must have mistaken it for a water rat, or some other animal, for that beast, for which we have watched for years, is invisible."

Durtal gave him a description of it.

"It is certainly the otter," admitted the guest-master, surprised.

It was evident that this otter lived in the pond in a legendary state.

In monotonous lives, in days like those in a cloister, it took the proportions of a fabulous subject, of an event whereof the mystery would occupy intervals seized between prayers and offices.

"We must point out to M. Bruno the exact spot where you remarked it, for he will begin to hunt it again," said Father Etienne after a silence.

"But how can it trouble you in eating your fish, since you do not angle for them?"

"I beg your pardon; we fish for them to send them to the Archbishop,"

answered the monk, who went on: "Still, it is very strange that you saw the beast!"

"When I leave this," thought Durtal, "they will certainly speak of me as the gentleman who saw the otter."

While talking, they had arrived at the cross pond.

"Look," said the father, pointing out the swan, who rose in a fury, beat his wings, and hissed.

"What is the matter with him?"

"The matter is that the white hue of my habit infuriates him."

"Ah! and why?"

"I do not know; perhaps he wants to be the only one who is white here; he spares the lay brothers, while as for a father ... wait, you will see."

And the guest-master walked quietly towards the swan.

"Come," he said to the angry creature, who splashed him with water; and he held out his hand which the swan snapped.

"See," said the monk, showing the mark of a red pinch printed on the flesh.

And he smiled, holding his hand, and quitted Durtal, who asked himself whether, in acting thus, the Trappist were not wishing to inflict on himself some corporal punishment to atone for some distraction the evening before; some peccadillo.

"That stroke of the beak must have pinched him horribly, for the tears came into his eyes. How could he expose himself with joy to such a bite?"

And he remembered that one day at the office of None, one of the young monks made a mistake in the tone of an antiphon; at the moment that the office ended, he knelt before the altar, then he lay his whole length on the tiles on his face, his mouth pressed on the ground, till the stroke of the prior's bell gave him the order to get up.

This was a voluntary punishment for a negligence committed, a forgetfulness. Who knows whether Father Etienne did not in his turn punish himself for a thought he deemed to border on sin, in getting himself thus pinched?

He consulted the oblate on the point in the evening, but M. Bruno contented himself with a smile, without answering.

And when Durtal spoke to him of his speedy departure for Paris, the old man shook his head.

"Considering," he said, "the fear and the discomfort that Communion caused you, you would act wisely if you approach the Holy Table immediately on your return."

And seeing that Durtal did not reply, but hung his head,

"Believe a man who has known these trials; if you do not force yourself while you are still under the warm impression of La Trappe, you will float between desire and regret without advancing; you will be ingenious in discovering excuses for not making your confession; you will try to think it impossible to find in Paris an abbe who understands you. Now allow me to a.s.sure you nothing is more false. If you desire an expert and easy confidant, go to the Jesuits; if you wish above all a zealous-souled priest, go to St. Sulpice.

"You will find there honest and intelligent ecclesiastics, excellent hearts. In Paris, where the clergy of the parishes are so mixed, they are at the top of the basket of the priesthood, and, as may be imagined, they form a community, live in cells, do not dine out; and as the Sulpician rule forbids them to aspire to honours, or places, they do not run the chance of becoming bad priests by ambition. Do you know them?"

"No; but to resolve that question, which in fact constantly troubles me, I count on a priest whom I often see, on the very man who, in fact, sent me into this Trappist monastery.

"And that," he went on, "makes me remember," and he rose to go to Compline, "that I have as yet forgotten to write to him. It is true that now it is too late, I should arrive at his house almost as soon as my letter. It is strange, but by force of walking in one's own, by force of living to oneself, the days run by, and there is no time to do anything here!"

CHAPTER VIII.

He had hoped for his last day at La Trappe a morning of quiet, when his mind might lounge, a mixture of spiritual siesta and of working, charmed by a round of offices, and not at all that the idea persistent and obstinate that he must quit the monastery next day, would spoil all the pleasures he had promised himself.

Now that he had no longer to cleanse himself, and pa.s.s under the winnowing of confession, to present himself for the Communion in the morning, he remained irresolute, not knowing any longer how to occupy his time, terrified by the recommencement of that life of the world which would upset all the barriers of forgetfulness, and would get at him at once above all the broken defences of the cloister.

Like a captured animal, he began to rub against the bars of his cage, made the tour of the enclosure, filling his sight with those places where he had tasted hours so kindly and so cruel.

He felt in himself a shaking of the ground, a disturbance of soul, an absolute discouragement before the prospect of re-entering into his habitual existence, of mixing himself anew with the coming and going of men, and he experienced at the same time a great fatigue of brain.

He dragged himself along the walks in a state of complete discomfort, in one of those attacks of religious spleen which determine, while they last during years, the "taedium vitae" of the cloisters. He had a horror of any life but this, and the soul overwrought by prayers was failing in a body insufficiently rested and ill-nourished; it had no further desire, asked only to be let alone, to sleep, to fall into one of those states of torpor in which everything becomes indifferent, in which one ends by losing consciousness gently, by being stifled without suffering.

He might well, to re-act on him as a consolation, promise himself to a.s.sist in Paris at the offices of the Benedictine nuns, that he would keep himself on the outskirts of society, to himself; and he was at once obliged to answer that these subterfuges are impossible, that the very movement of the town is against all decoys, that isolation in a chamber is in no degree like the solitude of a cell, that ma.s.ses celebrated in a chapel open to the public cannot be likened to the private Offices of the Trappists.

Then what is the good of trying to misunderstand? It is with the soul as with the body, which is better on the sea sh.o.r.e, or in the mountains, than shut up in a town. There is a better spiritual air even at Paris, in certain religious quarters of the left bank, than in the districts situated on the other bank, more lively in certain churches, more pure, for example, at Notre Dame des Victoires than in churches such as La Trinite and the Madeleine.

But the monastery was, as it were, the true sh.o.r.e and high plateau of the soul. There the atmosphere was balsamic, strength returned, lost appet.i.te for G.o.d was there recovered, there was health succeeding weakness, a regimen, fortified and sustained, instead of languor and the restricted exercises of the towns.