— Guilt? he murmured, walking with the letter unfolded in his hand. — Because of guilt, my son cannot study for the ministry. Guilt. good God! are You hiding somewhere under this welter of fear, this chaos of blood and mutilation, these terrors of weak minds… A feeling of guilt, dear Heaven what other kind of Christian ministers do you send us? or have there ever been? The fool!. and I thought I could spare him. Perhaps, if he knew the truth. An abrupt shudder broke through his whole frame, and he stood as though he had been pierced, the shock of the past in that woman's voice perhaps, — Pagan indeed!. and his faltering withdrawal, — Set foot inside myself.? He sniffed, as though to clear his head of vaporous memories risen from some chill sanctuary deep in the basilica of the past; and squared his shoulders as he had coming forth from that subterranean Mithraeum under the church of Saint Clement of Rome. And suddenly he sought the empty sky for the sun.
But the sudden cooling of the air, and this letter, had startled the old man into the present, from which he turned and trudged back in a lucidity of memory against which he was defenseless. The memories became facts, including him unsparingly in their traffic but shut him unmercifully out from intrusion, left him walking slowly and impotent among their hard thrusts. The shrill cry of Heracles, echoed down from the house on two voices; and the dark-stained faces of the mirrors mounted in the cross. His discovery upon her corpse's head that Aunt May had worn a transformation, hidden from him those last years of her life with the care of Blessed Clara. That plain casket gone deep in earth, while the other stood a man's height above the earth, anticipating dehiscence, ready to shell in falling: Camilla, and her death of which he never spoke, the white carriage mounting the rock-studded road, its course marked by the stations of the Cross and droppings of animals still too fresh to be picked up for fuel, toward the cypress trees. That desolate Eucharist on Christmas Day at Nuestra Señora de la Otra
Vez: the accidents of reality, Christ made of buffalo hide, or was it human skin? in the cathedral at Burgos. The bewilderment of the bulls, the port, and Columbus surrounded by lions. Then the trees of Tuscany in spired erection, the apologetic decay of the Conte di Brescia, the marble porch at Lucca so beautiful that no one ever stopped to look at it; and the image; and the words of William Rufus, to Bishop Gundulf of Rochester, — By the Holy Face of Lucca, God shall never have me good for all the evil that He hath wrought upon me!
Tearing his eyes from the empty place in the sky where the sun had set, he stopped stumbling back by years and ran, vaulted through centuries. The letter he had torn in pieces lay on the moving air for an instant, was caught, spread up over the ground and blew away from him like a handful of white birds startled into the sky.
II
Très curieux, vos maîtres anciens. Seulement les plus beaux, ce sont les faux.
On the terrace of the Dome sat a person who looked like the young George Washington without his wig (at about the time he dared the Ohio country). She read, with silently moving lips, from a book before her. She was drinking a bilious-colored liquid from a globular goblet; and every twenty or so pages would call to the waiter, in perfect French, — Un Ricard., and add one to the pile of one-franc saucers before her. — Voilà ma propre Sainte Chapelle, she would have said of that rising tower (the sentence prepared in her mind) if anyone had encouraged conversation by sitting down at her table. No one did. She read on. Anyone could have seen it was transition she was reading, if any had looked. None did. Finally an unshaven youth bowed slightly, as with pain, murmured something in American, and paused with a dirty hand on the back of a chair at her table. — J'vous en prie, she said, lucid, lowering transition, waiting for him to sit down before she went on. — Mursi, he muttered, and dragged the chair to another table.
Paris lay by like a promise accomplished: age had not withered her, nor custom staled her infinite vulgarity.
Nearby, a man exhibited two fingers, one dressed as a man, one as a woman, performing on a table top. Three drunken young Englishmen were singing The Teddy Bears' Picnic. Three dirty children from Morocco were selling peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. Someone said that there was going to be a balloon ascension that very afternoon, in the Bois. Someone else said that Karl Marx's bones were buried at Highgate. Someone said, — I'm actually going to be analyzed. Psychoanalyzed. A boy with a beard, in a state of black corduroy (corde du roi) unkemptness which had taken as long as the beard to evolve, said, — I've got to show these pictures, I've got to sell some of them, but how can I have people coming up there with him there? He's dying. I can't put him out on the street, dying like that. even in Paris. A girl said that she had just taken a villa right outside Paris, a place called Saint Forget. — Of course it's a hideous place, and Ah had to pay a feaíul sum to get the tiasome French family that was there out of it, but it's such a sweet little old address to get mail at. Another girl said, — My conçerage has been returning all my mail marked ankonoo just because I oney gave her ten francs poorbwar. People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian. Someone said, in slurred (blase) French, — Un cafe au lait.
Over this grandstand disposal of promise the waiters stared with a distance of glazed indulgence which all collected under it admired, as they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of haute couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one's stay. Marvelous to wide eyes, pricked ears, and minds of that erectile quality betraying naive qualms of transatlantic origin (alert here under hair imitative long-grown, uncombed, on the male, curtly shorn on the girls) was this spectacle of culture fully realized. They regarded as the height of excellence that nothing remained to be done, no tree to be planted nor building torn down (they had not visited Le Bourget; found the wreckage up behind the Hotel de Ville picturesque), no tree too low nor building too high (those telescoping lampposts on the Pont du Carrousel), no bud of possibility which had not opened in the permanent bloom of artificial flowers, no room for that growth which is the abiding flower of humility.
"A mon très aimé frère Lazarus, ce que vous me mandez de Petrus 1'apostre de notre doux Jesus.," wrote Mary Magdalen. "Notre fils Césarion va bien.," wrote Cleopatra to Julius Caesar. There was a letter from Alexander the Great to Aristotle ("Mon ami. "); from Lazarus to Saint Peter (concerning Druids); from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius; Judas's confession (to Mary Magdalen); a passport signed by Vercingetorix; notes from Alcibiades, Pericles, and a letter to Pascal (on gravitation) from Newton, who was nineteen when Pascal died. But M. Chasles, eminent mathematician of the late nineteenth century, paid 140,000 francs for this collection of autographs, for he believed them genuine: they were, after all, written in French. So the Virgin appeared to Maximin and M^'lanie at La Salette, identified Herself by speaking to them in French which they did not understand, broke into their local patois for long enough to put across Her confidences, and then returned to Her native language for farewelclass="underline" any wonder that transatlantic visitors approached it with qualms? murmured in tones spawned in forests, on the plains in unrestricted liberty, from the immensity of mountains, the cramped measure of their respect, approached in reverence the bier where every shade of the corpse was protected from living profanation by the pallbearers of the Academic Française.