raming panels of rock
crystal, on the great altar. Many bishops arrived, with King Lewis the
Saint himself accompanied by his mother, to assist at the search for
and disinterment of the sacred relics. In [69] their presence, the
Bishop of Auxerre, with vestments of deep red in honour of the relics,
blessed the new shrine, according to the office De benedictione
capsarum pro reliquiis. The pavement of the choir, removed amid a
surging sea of lugubrious chants, all persons fasting, discovered as if
it had been a battlefield of mouldering human remains. Their odour
rose plainly above the plentiful clouds of incense, such as was used in
the king's private chapel. The search for the Saint himself continued
in vain all day and far into the night. At last from a little narrow
chest, into which the remains had been almost crushed together, the
bishop's red-gloved hands drew the dwindled body, shrunken
inconceivably, but still with every feature of the face traceable in a
sudden oblique ray of ghastly dawn.

That shocking sight, after a sharp fit as though a demon were going out
of him, as he rolled on the turf of the cloister to which he had fled
alone from the suffocating church, where the crowd still awaited the
Procession of the relics and the Mass De reliquiis quae continentur in
Ecclesiis, seemed indeed to have cured the madness of Denys, but
certainly did not restore his gaiety. He was left a subdued, silent,
melancholy creature. Turning now, with an odd revulsion of feeling, to
gloomy objects, he picked out a ghastly shred from the common bones on
the pavement to wear about his neck, and in a little while found his
way to the monks [70] of Saint Germain, who gladly received him into
their workshop, though secretly, in fear of his foes.

The busy tribe of variously gifted artists, labouring rapidly at the
many works on hand for the final embellishment of the cathedral of St.
Etienne, made those conventual buildings just then cheerful enough to
lighten a melancholy, heavy even as that of our friend Denys. He took
his place among the workmen, a conventual novice; a novice also as to
whatever concerns any actual handicraft. He could but compound sweet
incense for the sanctuary. And yet, again by merely visible presence,
he made himself felt in all the varied exercise around him of those
arts which address themselves first of all to sight. Unconsciously he
defined a peculiar manner, alike of feeling and expressio