reover, there was in the
advent of the procession a kind of climax. As it came nearer, the great
crowd moved more quickly towards it; children were lifted up, and by one
of Sully's wide pillars a group of three young soldiers climbed on a
rail to see the great sight better. The Cardinal-Archbishop, very old
and supported by his priests, half walked and half tottered down the
length of the people; his head, grown weary with age, barely supported
the mitre, from which great jewels, false or true, were flashing. In his
hand he had a crozier that was studded in the same way with gems, and
that seemed to be made of gold; the same hands had twisted the metal of
it as had hammered the hinges of the cathedral doors. Certainly there
here appeared one of the resurrections of Europe. The matter of life
seemed to take on a fuller stuff and to lift into a dimension above that
in which it ordinarily moves. The thin, narrow, and unfruitful
experience of to-day and yesterday was amplified by all the lives that
had made our life, and the blood of which we are only a last expression,
the race that is older even than Rome seemed in this revelation of
continuity to be gathered up into one intense and passionate moment. The
pagan altar of Tiberius, the legend of Dionysius, the whole circle of
the wars came into this one pageant, and the old man in his office and
his blessing was understood by all the crowd before him to transmit the
centuries. A rich woman thrust a young child forward, and he stopped and
stooped with difficulty to touch its hair. As he approached the
traveller it was as though there had come great and sudden news to him,
or the sound of unexpected and absorbing music.

The procession went on and closed; the High Mass followed; it lasted a
very long time, and the traveller went out before the crowd had moved
and found himself again in the glare of the sun on the Parvis.

He went over the bridge to find his eating-shop near the archives, and
eat the first food of that day, thinking as he went that certainly there
are an infinity of lives side by side in our cities, and each ignores
the rest; and yet, that to pass from what we know of these to what we do
not--though it is the most wonderful journey in the world--is one that
no one undertakes unless accident or a good fortune pushes him on. He
desired to make another such journey.

He came back to find me in London, and spoke to me of Paris as of a city
newly discovered: as I