, that She was touched by these accents, created by
the saints she had loved, to embody for ever, in a definite melody, and
in unique words, the scattered praise of the faithful, the unformulated
rejoicing of the multitude.

Suddenly his exalted mood was sobered. The _Te Deum_ was ended; a roll
of drums and a clarion flourish rang out from the transept. And while
the brass band of Chartres cannonaded the old walls with the balista of
mere noise, he fled to breathe away from the crowd, which, however, did
not nearly fill the church; and then, after the ceremony, he went to see
the parade of representatives of the various institutions in the town,
who came to pay their respects to the new Bishop in his palace.

There he could laugh and not be ashamed. The forecourt was packed full
of priests. All the superiors of the different Archdeaconries--Chartres,
Chateaudun, Nogent le Rotrou, and Dreux--had left there, within the
great gate, their following of parish priests and cures, who were pacing
round and round the green circus of a grass plot.

The big-wigs of the town, not at all less ridiculous than the pensioners
of the Little Sisters of the Poor, crowded in, driving the ecclesiastics
into the garden walks. Teratology seemed to have emptied out its
specimen bottles; it was a seething swarm of human larvae, of strange
heads--bullet-shaped, egg-shaped, faces as seen through a bottle or in a
distorting mirror, or escaped from one of Redon's grotesque albums; a
perfect museum of monsters on the move. The stagnation of monotonous
toil, handed down for generations from father to son in a city of the
dead, was stamped on every face, and the Sunday-best festivity of the
day added a touch of the absurd to hereditary ugliness.

Every black coat in Chartres had come out to take the air. Some dated
from the days of the Directory, swallowed up the wearer's neck, climbed
up high behind the nape, muffled the ears and padded the shoulders;
others had shrunk by lying in the drawer, and their sleeves, much too
short, cut the wearer round the armholes so that he dared not move.

A miasma of benzine and camphor exhaled from these groups. The clothes,
only that morning taken out of pickle to be aired by the good wife, were
pestilential. The stove-pipe hats were to match. Left to themselves on
wardrobe shelves, they had surely grown taller; they towered immense,
displaying on their mill-board column a thin covering of hairs.

This assembly