alive by our more or less regular presence, our more or less
frequent communion, our more or less fervent prayers.

"For instance, take Notre Dame at Paris; I know that it has been
restored and patched from end to end, that its sculpture is mended where
it is not quite new; in spite of Hugo's rhetoric it is second-rate, but
it has its nave and its wondrous transept; it is even endowed with an
ancient statue of the Virgin before which Monsieur Olier had knelt, and
very often. Well, an attempt was made to revive there the worship of Our
Lady, to incite a spirit of pilgrimage thither; but all is dead! That
Cathedral no longer has a soul; it is an inert corpse of stone; try
attending Mass there, try to approach the Holy Table--you will feel an
icy cloak fall on you and crush you. Is it the result of its emptiness,
of its torpid services, of the froth of runs and trills they send up
there, of its being closed in a hurry in the evening and never open till
so late in the morning, long after daybreak? Or has it something to do
with the permitted rush of tourists, of London gapers that I have seen
there talking at the top of their voice, sitting staring at the altar
when the Holy Elements were being consecrated just in front of them? I
know not--but of one thing I am certain, the Virgin does not inhabit
there day and night and always, as she does Chartres.

"Look at Amiens, again, with its colourless windows and crude daylight,
its chapels enclosed behind tall railings, its silence rarely broken by
prayer, its solitude. There too is emptiness; and why I know not, but to
me the place exhales a stale odour of Jansenism. I am not at large
there, and prayer is difficult; and yet the nave is magnificent, and the
sculptures in the ambulatory, finer even than those of Chartres, may be
pronounced unique.

"But here, too, the soul is absent.

"It is the same with the Cathedral of Laon--bare, ice-bound, dead past
hope; while some are in an intermediate state, dying, but not yet cold:
Reims, Rouen, Dijon, Tours, and Le Mans for instance; even in these
there is some refreshment; and Bourges, with its five porches opening on
a long perspective of aisles, and its vast deserted spaces; or Beauvais,
a melancholy fragment, having no more than a head and arms flung out in
despair like an appeal for ever ignored by Heaven, have still preserved
some of the aroma of olden days. Meditation is possible there; but
nowhere, nowhere is there such comf