Chapter XIII: In the Marne (2)

The town officers tried to get Carton out by a back door, but Marat's murderers were too quick for them, and the poor youth was torn to pieces. While this was doing the Procureur-Syndic provided another victim. He arrested on some pretext a retired officer of the army, M. de Montrosier, ex-commandant of Lille, then in the house of his father-in-law, M. Andrieux, one of the first magistrates of Reims. M. de Montrosier being taken to prison, the Maratist mob broke again into the prison, dragged him out, killed him, and carried his head all over Reims on a pike. Meanwhile a detachment went out to a neighbouring village in quest of two of the canons of Reims, who had taken refuge there, brought them back to the city, and shot them dead in the street. Night now coming on, the apostles of the 'moral unity of France,' many of them by this time being exceedingly drunk, kindled a huge bonfire in front of the Hôtel de Ville, flung into it the mutilated corpses of their victims, and towards midnight laying hands upon two priests, MM. Romain and Alexandre, threw them into the flames! Another band during the evening broke into the venerable church of St.-Rémi, and tearing down the shields and banners which for fourteen centuries had hung above the tomb of the great Archbishop who made France a Christian kingdom, brought these to the bonfire and consumed them.

During this day of horrors, the electors of the department had been in session. As the news reached them of what was going on in the streets, one thought came into the minds of all the decent men among them, to get through as fast as possible and quit the city. At the first ballot 442 electors were present. At the seventh only 203 remained. Of these 135, being the compact 'Republican' minority, gave their votes on that ballot to Drouet, the postmaster's son of Ste-Ménéhould, Mr. Carlyle's 'bold old dragoon,' who stopped the carriage of Louis XVI. at Varennes. He was one of the special adherents of Marat, and a most vicious and venal creature, as his own memoirs, giving among other matters an account of his grotesque attempt to fly down out of his Austrian prison with a pair of paper wings, abundantly attest. He escaped the guillotine, and naturally enough turned up under the empire as an obsequious sub-prefect at Ste-Ménéhould. The whole of the elections, which in normal circumstances would have occupied at least three days, were hurried through before midnight of the first day.

Couplet, called Beaucourt, was satisfied. But so were not the 'men of the 10th of August,' They got their pay of course, but they wanted more blood. At 9 A.M. the next morning they seized the venerable curé of St.-Jean, the Abbé Paquot, and dragged him before Couplet, insisting that he should take the constitutional oath. Couplet tried to explain that the time for taking it had expired on August 26. But the courageous Abbé, looking his assassins in the face, said to them: 'I will not take it, it is against my conscience. If I had two souls I would gladly give one of them for you. I have but one, and it belongs to my God.' He had hardly uttered the words when he was struck down and cut to pieces. Almost at the same moment another priest more than eighty years of age, the curate of Rilly, refusing to take the oath, was hanged upon the bar of a street lantern before the eyes of the Mayor of Reims, who tried in vain to disperse or control these _sans-culottes_, who, according to Mr. Carlyle, 'howled and bellowed, but did not bite.'

By this time the news came of the surrender of Verdun to the Prussians, and the tocsin began to sound from the great bells of the cathedral. The citizens of Reims suddenly took courage from the sense of the national peril, not to fall upon and slay helpless and unarmed prisoners, but to make head against the murderers and scoundrels who were domineering over their city. The local National Guards began to appear, and were shortly reinforced by a column of Volunteers from the country armed to meet the invaders. The Mayor took command of them and marched to the Hôtel de Ville. There they found that one Chateau, an agent of Couplet, had been secretly denounced by his employer as a spy and promptly hanged by the Parisians on the same lantern-bar from which the night before they had hanged the aged curé of Rilly. His dead body had been flung into the still blazing bonfire kept up all night with woodwork from the pillaged churches of Reims. The champions of 'moral unity' had also laid hands on the wife of this wretched man, and were on the point of throwing her alive into the flames when the Mayor and the troops appeared. The order to 'charge bayonets' was given and the whole brood of scoundrels thereupon broke and fled in all directions.

All these details, with others too loathsome to be here reproduced, are, as I have said, taken from an official _procès verbal_ drawn up at Reims on September 8, 1792, and signed by every member of the Council-General. This record was produced when in 1795, after the fall of Robespierre had opened the way for the great reaction which finally made Napoleon master of France, the tribunals of the Department of the Marne took steps to bring to justice such of the assassins of 1792 as they could lay hands upon. On the 26 Thermidor, An III., two wretches, one a newspaper-vendor and the other a slopshop-keeper, were condemned to death and executed for the murder of the Abbé Paquot and of the curé of Rilly. Two others, a glazier and a shoemaker, were condemned to six years in the chain-gang.

The evidence on which these assassins were convicted in 1795 had then been for two years in the hands of the municipal authorities at Reims. But during these two years France had been the football of the employers and accomplices of these assassins. The municipal authorities had been powerless to prevent these murders, which were committed in the public streets and under the protection of the Procureur-Syndic of the department, the official representative at Reims of the 'Minister of Justice,' Danton, at Paris. They were equally powerless to punish them.

The Mayor of Reims was fortunate to escape denunciation at Paris for his attempt to save the lives of some of the victims. That was an offence against the 'moral unity' which the First Republic tried to establish.

There was a heroic Mayor in those days at Lille named André. When the Duke of Saxe-Teschen with his wife, a sister of Marie Antoinette, appeared before Lille at the head of an Austrian army and demanded the surrender of the place, Mayor André, who was a Republican but not of the 'moral unity' type, replied that he had sworn to keep the place, and he would keep his oath. With the help of the Ancient Artillery Corporations of the old Flemish city (Corporations of which the 'Honourable Artillery Corps' of London and of Boston are offshoots), Mayor André did keep his oath and kept Lille. The Minister Roland, the respectable confederate of the virtuous Pétion, sent him promises of help, but no help. Why? Because Mayor André had taken the lead in a masculine protest of the honest people of Lille against that ruffianly invasion of the Tuileries by the mob on June 20 which the virtuous Pétion, Mayor of Paris, and his respectable confederate Roland had for their own purposes promoted. So Mayor André got words and no troops. But Lille took care of herself; bore a tremendous bombardment for days without flinching, and finally, in the early days of October, saw the Saxon Duke and his army march away, Valmy having opened the eyes of Brunswick to the utter futility and fanfaronnade of the French emigrant noblesse and princes, who had drawn up for him and persuaded him against his own better judgment to sign the too famous and fatal proclamation with which he heralded the Austro-Prussian advance into France. Mayor André having thus saved the grand North-eastern bulwark of France, his services had to be in some way recognised. But in what way? Paris voted that Lille had deserved well of the nation, which was obvious enough; also that Lille should get a million of francs towards repairing damages, which million of francs, I am assured, never reached Lille; also that a grand monument should commemorate the valour and constancy of Lille. But the grand monument was never erected until half a century afterwards, when King Louis Philippe took the matter up, and carried it through.

With the proclamation of the Republic in September 1792 it ceased to be meritorious in Mayors and other municipal personages to protect life and property, repulse foreign invaders and punish domestic criminals. Varlet, the self-appointed 'Apostle of Liberty,' the man with the camp-chair and the red cap, whom Carnot, the grandfather of the present President, actually insisted that the Assembly should welcome to its floor, gave the keynote of the new order of things. 'We must draw a veil,' he exclaimed, 'over the Declaration of the Rights of Man!' And a veil was indeed drawn over the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Here at Reims, as elsewhere, proscriptions and confiscations were the order of the day. The glorious Cathedral of Reims itself, the Westminster and Canterbury in one of France, was in continual peril. Nothing really saved it and the Archi-episcopal palace but the religious and patriotic reverence of the people of Reims for the memory of Jeanne d Arc. In that Archi-episcopal palace the peasant girl of Domrémy, the Virgin saviour of France, had been lodged. In that Cathedral she had stood, her banner in her hand, and watched the solemn consecration of her mission and her triumph. The emissaries of plunder and murder from Paris shrank from driving the Rémois to extremities on that issue. But they desecrated the building and defaced it as much as they dared.

I am told that Robespierre during his dictatorship interfered to put a stop to the vandalism of his disciples here, and that we owe to him the preservation of the magnificent groups which still exist of statues representing scenes in the life of the Virgin Mary. The groups above the head of the Virgin on the double lintel had already been dashed to pieces when he was appealed to. The groups below, still unharmed, afford unanswerable proof that the sculptors of this part of Europe in the thirteenth century must have been familiar with the best traditions of their art. If Robespierre preserved these, we may forgive him not only for sending his dear Camille Desmoulins and his detested Danton to the guillotine, but even for replacing the shattered groups of the Nativity, the Presentation, and the Death of the Virgin with this inscription of his own devising: 'The French people believe in the existence of God and in the immortality of the soul!' Under the First Consul this inscription gave place to the Latin dedication now visible.

Pillaging he did not prevent, perhaps could not. One wizened old reprobate, Ruhl, got himself great Republican _kudos_ by persistently putting about a legend that he had successfully stolen the sacred ampulla, from which St.-Rémi had anointed Clovis King of France, and had dashed it to pieces in public. That he did indeed dash in pieces publicly a flask of glass is, I am assured, indubitable. But not less indubitable is it that he did not dash in pieces the sacred ampulla. Ruhl was a bit of a scholar, and his legend was obviously suggested to him by the traditional story of the Frankish warrior who smashed a sacred vase at Soissons, and whose own head the stalwart King Clovis afterwards clove in twain with his battle-axe on the Champ de Mars in requital of the deed. Curiously enough, it was written that the head of Ruhl should likewise in the end be smashed, as it was by himself with a pistol at Paris, May 20, 1795, to save it from the guillotine!

All the churches of Reims did not escape so well as the Cathedral. St.-Nicaise, 'the jewel of Reims' and the masterpiece of a famous architect of the thirteenth century, Hues Libergiers, whose name is preserved in that of one of the chief streets of Reims, was pillaged and then pulled down, the materials and the site being sold at a 'mock auction' to Santerre, the enterprising brewer, who 'pulled the wires' of all the patriotic emotions of the Faubourg St.-Antoine from the outset of the Revolution, got himself thereby made a general, and in that capacity conducted Louis XVI. to the scaffold, where, as all the world knows, he ordered the drums to drown the last words of the King. He was an incorrigible and indefatigable speculator, and while he drove a roaring trade at Paris in beer, he was always on the look out for demolished churches and convents in the provinces. Napoleon took his measure promptly, subsidised and used him to good purpose. Hearing once that there was a ferment brewing in St.-Antoine, the Emperor sent an officer to Santerre. 'Go and tell that fellow,' he said, 'that if I hear one word from the Faubourg St.-Antoine I will have him instantly shot.'

The 'Titanic' and 'transcendental' Faubourg remained as mute as a mouse!

In no French city are the memories of the Revolutionary orgie more offensively out of key with the actual aspect and the great associations of the place than in Reims. Whatever may have been the ways of the working people here forty years ago, I have always been struck by their quiet and orderly demeanour, as well as by the general air of prosperity and animation which pervades the city. Its grand Cathedral, the most consummate type which exists of the great ogival architecture of the thirteenth century, stands, the archæologists tell us, on the spot where the Romans planted their citadel sixteen centuries ago. Like a citadel, it dominates the whole city to-day; a fortress no longer, like the Roman citadel, of armed force, but of faith, charity, and hope. Seven centuries have not shaken the solidity of its massive fabric. They who built it 'dreamt not of a perishable home.' But only a year ago a serious dislocation appeared in the framework of the stupendous rose-window over the grand entrance, and this, with other unsatisfactory symptoms observable here and there in the building, lend colour to the theory that the great chalk bed upon which the Cathedral stands may have been affected by the percolation of water from some deep trenches which, it seems, were dug near the northern and southern towers at the entrance of the Cathedral, during the year 1879, and unfortunately left open during the very inclement winter which followed.

This is a rather alarming theory, particularly if it be true, as it is said to be, that since 1880 the towers have perceptibly come out of plumb.

Fortunately the see of Reims is now in the charge of a prelate who fully appreciates the value to art and to civilisation, as well as to France and to the Church, of this magnificent edifice. When he came here from the bishopric of Tarbes, his first episcopate, in November 1874, one of the earliest steps taken by the present Cardinal Langénieux was to get a full report on the condition of the Cathedral from M. Millet, the accomplished successor of M. Viollet-le-Duc in the great work of the conservation and restoration of the historical monuments of France. M. Millet, on August 25, 1875, reported that the flying buttresses needed immediate attention, and that 'the gables and vaults of the western façade were seriously damaged, so that the rain water was penetrating the masonry and threatening the destruction of the numerous statues and sculptured ornaments of the grand western portal.' This portal, as every traveller knows, is simply matchless in the world. The Archhishop thereupon invited four of his personal friends, all at that time members of the Ministry--MM. Dufaure, Léon Say, Wallon, and Caillaux--to Reims, to see for themselves the state of the Cathedral. They came and inspected the building, and after their return to Paris prepared a bill, which became a law in December 1875, appropriating a sum of 2,033,411 francs in ten yearly instalments to the restoration of the Cathedral. The work began at once under the direction of M. Millet, who unfortunately died in 1879.

It was prosecuted after his death by another able architect, M. Brugère, and is now in the hands of M. Darcy, who has shown by his work at Evreux and St.-Denis that he is no unworthy successor of Viollet-le-Duc. The appropriation made in 1875 has been expended, but I am glad to find, on looking into the Budget for 1890 of the Ministry of Public Worship, that a sum of 301,508 fr. 26 c. is still available for the works at Reims. This budget, by the way, is an instructive document. It shows that the whole outlay of the State in France upon all objects connected with public worship and religion in France and Algiers, excepting the service of the chaplains in the army and the navy, amounted in 1889 to a little more than one franc per head of the population! The whole expense in connection with the Catholic Church, the Calvinist and Lutheran confessions, the Israelitish religion and the Mussulmans, was no more than 45,337,145 francs, a sum less than the amount annually expended by the Protestant Episcopal Church of the single State of New York upon keeping up its churches, colleges, and clergy! What proportion this sum bears to the present annual income of the Church property confiscated under the first Republic it would be interesting to ascertain. A Protestant friend of mine in the south of France, who has made some investigations into this subject, tells me that it cannot possibly represent above _ten per cent_. of the present actual product of the former property of the Church. Of the whole sum, 228,000 francs were spent on the civil servants of the ministry. There are seven sub-chiefs of bureaux in this ministry, all of them now doubtless good atheists, who receive salaries of from 3,400 to 5,400 francs a year. The highest salary paid to a Protestant pastor even in Paris is 3,000 francs, or 120_l._ a year. The curé of Notre-Dame de Paris receives 2,400 francs, or less than 100_l._ a year. There are 580 curés of the first class who receive from 1,500 to 1,600 francs a year; 275 curés of the second class receiving 1,500 francs a year, and 2,527 curés of the third class receiving from 1,200 to 1,300 francs a year. The thirty-one clerks in the Ministry receive from 1,800 to 4,500 francs a year. The Vicar-General of Paris receives no more than 4,500 francs a year. The Archbishop of Paris receives, like all the other archbishops, 15,000 francs, or 600_l._, a year, which is the salary paid to the Director of the Ministry! The Grand Rabbi of the Central Consistory receives 12,000 and the Grand Rabbi of Paris 5,000 francs a year, and the salaries paid to the Israelitish ministers of religion range from 2,500 down to 600 francs, the latter amount being less by 300 francs than the wages of the servants in the Ministry. The Muftis and Imams in office receive from 300 to 1,200 francs a year. All these salaries, with the outlay on the construction, rent, or maintenance of buildings of all kinds used for religious purposes, pensions, and travelling expenses, are comprised in the total appropriation of 45,337,145 francs, or a little more than 1,800,000_l._ for the year 1889. During the same year 12,760,745 francs were appropriated for the Fine Arts service. I do not say that the sum thus devoted to the Fine Arts out of the pockets of the taxpayers of France was at all too large. But I do say that it is out of all proportion large as compared with the sum voted out of the pockets of the taxpayers to the maintenance of religious institutions, which an overwhelming majority of the people of France regard, and rightly regard, as essential to the stability of law and order. Furthermore, this Budget of 1889 shows the spirit in which the fanatics of 'moral unity' are prosecuting their war against all religions in France. In 1883 the Government's budget amounted to 53,528,206 francs. Here we have a reduction within six years of more than 8,000,000 francs. In 1883 M. Jules Roche, now a deputy for the first district of Chambéry and an ally of M. Clémenceau, proposed to reduce the Budget of Public Worship to 4,588,800 francs! The Third Republic, it will be seen, is getting on towards the proposition of M. Jules Roche--a proposition which clearly combines everything that is most open to objection in a legal connection between the State and religion with everything that is most odious and dangerous in an open war of the State against religion.

During these six years the leaders of this war against religion have never dared to draw up a statistical account of the strength of the various religious bodies in France. In 1882 one of their followers, M. Alfred Talandier, on February 13, rashly proposed that a table should be officially prepared of the state of religious opinions in France; but the managers of the cause of 'moral unity' were too wily to walk into that trap; they quietly stifled the proposition. It really might be a little awkward, even for a Parliamentary oligarchy with a strongly-bitted Executive well in hand, to confront, let us say, 37,500,000 of Catholics, Protestants, Israelites, not to mention the Mussulmans in Africa, with a proposition to abolish a Budget of Worship amounting to a little over a franc a head, for the purpose of reducing France to a complete 'moral unity' of absolute unbelief in God and in the immortality of the human soul!

Cardinal Langénieux took possession, as I have said, of the Archi-episcopal See of Reims in November 1874. Seldom has the right man been put into the right place more exactly at the right moment. It was in September 1874 that M. Challemel-Lacour unfolded the Republican programme of war to the knife against all religion. In September 1874, too, as I have mentioned, the burning of the factory at Val-des-Bois called out a general demonstration of sympathy from the Catholic working-men's clubs all over France, which attracted public attention to the movement; and in October 1874 Pius IX. issued a brief recognising its importance and earnestly commending it.

The new Archbishop of Reims was exceptionally fitted by his training and his experience to promote such a movement.

He was a Benedictine of the school of Cluny, bred in the traditions of that illustrious Order, to which, without exaggeration, it may be said that we owe almost everything that is best worth having in our Western civilisation. For upon what does human society rest in the last resort if not upon the two great pillars of the rule of St. Benedict--Obedience and Labour? As a priest, the new Archbishop had successively and successfully administered two of the most important parishes in Paris, one in the workmen's quarter of the Faubourg St.-Antoine, the other in the quarter of the noblesse, in the Faubourg St.-Germain.

After a single year passed in the Episcopate at Tarbes, that pleasant city on the Adour which all the winds of the Pyrenees have not yet quite disinfected of the memory of Barère, he was translated to this great historic see in the prime of his vigour. For fifteen years he has so ruled it that the Christians of Reims and of the Marne now seize with delight upon every opportunity of manifesting their incorrigible indifference to the 'moral unity of France.' You meet workmen in the streets going about their work with religious medals openly displayed. The churches of Reims are filled with men on great Church festivals. Taking all the districts of the Marne together, the Revisionists and Monarchists at the elections of 1889 outnumbered considerably the Government Republicans. These latter polled 35,046 votes in the Marne, against 40,287 polled by the former. The Radicals, who are very strong in the first district of Reims, polled 11,037 votes there against a Revisionist vote of 9,230. Do not these figures show, what I believe to be the truth, that the 'true Republican' policy of reducing France to 'moral unity' by trampling on the traditions and coercing the consciences of the French people is steadily dividing the French people into two great camps--the camp of the Social and Radical revolution and the camp of the Monarchy? That there was no necessity for this is illustrated by what I have said as to the relations between the Cardinal Archbishop of Reims and the Republican Ministers of 1875 who came here on his invitation, and then took steps to secure the preservation and restoration of the Cathedral. One of these Republican Ministers, M. Léon Say, who is largely responsible for clothing the present Government with the power which it abuses, has just been signally humiliated by the present Government and the dominant majority.

In the second district of Bergerac in the Dordogne, the Monarchist candidate for the Chamber, M. Thirion Montauban, received 6,708 votes, against 6,439 given to his Republican competitor. I took a special interest in this election, because M. Thirion-Montauban is the present proprietor of the house of Michel de Montaigne, which came into his possession through his marriage with the daughter of M. Magne, the eminent Finance Minister of Napoleon III. I made a visit there late in the summer, and found him busy with his canvass, on lines of respect for personal liberty and the right of men to think their own thoughts as to life and death, which would have commanded the cordial sympathy of the great Gascon sceptic. The tower, the study, the bedroom of Montaigne are preserved by him with religious care. The inscriptions on the walls which John Sterling copied so lovingly half a century ago are there still, and if indeed there be a life of faith as Tennyson says, 'in honest doubt,' the Pyrrhonist seigneur who thought before Pascal that the true philosophy was to laugh at philosophy, would not find himself a stranger in his old haunt to-day because its lower hall has been consecrated as a chapel.

The opponents of M. Thirion-Montauban behaved throughout the contest with extraordinary violence, and on one occasion put him into serious personal peril. However, he was elected. When the Chamber met in November his election was contested. M. Léon Say took an active part in maintaining the validity of the returns which gave the seat to M. Thirion-Montauban, and the evidence in the case was overwhelmingly in his favour. Nevertheless after the Report of the Committee was made, the majority of the Chamber coolly invalidated the choice of the electors, and seated the candidate who had not been elected. It was an open secret that this was done quite as much to punish M. Léon Say as to exclude M. Thirion-Montauban.

Intolerant as the 'true Republicans' are towards their political opponents, they are still more intolerant towards those 'false Republicans' who hesitate at framing the policy of a French Republic in the nineteenth century upon the principles which led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Were Socrates alive and a Frenchman, he would stand no chance for a government chair of philosophy in a competition with the little atheist Aristodemus, and were David Hume to reappear at Reims, where he got his early schooling, he would certainly find himself treated by the authorities as no better than a Catholic.

The irreligion of the Third Republic is a dogmatic irreligion. Bayle would find no favour in its eyes, because protesting, as he said he did 'from his inmost soul protest, against everything that was ever said or done,' he must of course protest against the Nihilism of M. Marcou and M. Paul Bert.

Unfortunately for the 'true Republicans,' it is essential to their success that with the religious faith they should also abolish the patriotic traditions of France. M. Jules Simon, a Republican and a Republican Minister of Public Instruction, has found himself compelled to denounce in the clearest and strongest language the deliberate attempt which these 'true Republicans' are making 'to teach the children of France that the glory of France began with 1789, and that it was never so great as under the Convention.'

Stuff like this is actually taught in the schools into which it is the object of the present French Government to drive by statute all the children of the country.

'These men,' says M. Jules Simon, 'who proscribe the name of Jesus Christ and forbid it to be mentioned in the schools of France, on the pretext that public education must be neutral in such matters, do not hesitate to have children compelled to attend schools in which they are taught that Louis XIV. was a tyrant without greatness or ability, and that Louis XVI. was an enemy of his country justly condemned and executed.'

Of the great historic France--the France which aided the American colonies to establish their independence, after contesting with England the dominion of North America and of India for more than a century--the France of Montesquieu and of Rabelais, of Henri IV. and Sully, of François I. and St.-Louis, of Chivalry and of the Crusades, the coming generation of Frenchmen, if these fanatics can get their way, will know no more than their Annamite fellow-citizens in Asia. It is not surprising that a Government controlled by such men with such objects should have amnestied the criminals of the Commune. The _pétroleurs_ who destroyed the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville were only trying in their practical way to abolish the history of France before 1789.

Here at Reims the history of France, I think, will die very hard. No one could doubt this who visited the Department of the Marne in the month of July 1887.

When the 'moral unity' men began their sinister work in 1880, the Cardinal Archbishop of Reims was earnestly urging upon the Holy See the beatification of the great French pontiff, Urban II., the disciple, friend and successor of Hildebrand, and the canonisation of Jeanne d'Arc, 'that whitest lily in the shield of France, with heart of virgin gold.'

On July 14, 1881, Leo XIII. confirmed the beatification of Urban II. and fixed of course the date of his death, July 29, as his place in the calendar of Church festivals. In July 1882 a solemn Triduum appointed by a Papal Rescript was celebrated with extraordinary pomp in the Cathedral of Reims.

Two Cardinals, one the special Legate of the Pope, more than twenty bishops, several abbots of the great Benedictine Order of which Urban II. was a member, and hundreds of the clergy from all parts of France, were present. The Cardinal Legate was attended by Monsignor Cataldi, so long and so well known to all foreigners in Rome as the master of the ceremonies to the Pope. The Cathedral was crowded. 'What I should like to know,' said a quiet shrewd master workman who described to me the effect produced by the scene in the Cathedral, 'what I should like to know is why the Catholics of Reims have not the right upon such occasions to escort the Legate of the Head of the Church from the railway station to the Cathedral with a procession and with music and with banners? Is that liberty I ask you?'

The question seems to me natural enough, particularly as I see that only the other day the Freemasons at Grenoble were permitted to force themselves, marching in a body with all their regalia and their emblems, into the funeral procession of a Prefect who was not a member of their order at all, and against the protest of the Bishop of Grenoble, who had been asked by the family of the dead man to give him the burial rites of the Church. That the Freemasons like other citizens should attend the funeral as individuals the Bishop was ready to admit, but he not unnaturally declined to acquiesce in the deliberate parade on such an occasion of a body openly and undisguisedly hostile to Christianity in all its forms.

Without a procession, however, the Triduum of the great Pope of the Crusades was a great success in 1882. It led to the organisation of a movement for erecting a magnificent monument to the memory of Urban II. at his native place. Châtillon-sur-Marne, one of the loveliest little towns in the valley of the Marne, situated about twenty miles from Reims. Early in 1887 this monument was completed, and on July 21 in that year it was unveiled with a solemn ceremonial in the presence of the Cardinal Archbishop of Reims, of the Papal Nuncio at Paris, and of many French bishops, among them the great orator of the Chamber of Deputies, Monseigneur Freppel, Bishop of Angers. He delivered a most impressive discourse on the significance of the Crusades, every sentence of which was weighted with pregnant allusions to the actual condition of religious liberty in France. These allusions were curiously emphasised by the absence of the Bishop of Orléans, detained at his post in the city of 'Jeanne d'Arc' by the sudden 'laicisation' of the schools in his diocese!

The day was what a perfect day in the summer of Northern France can be. The scene might have been planned by a poet or a painter. There are other Châtillons in France more famous in history, and held in higher honour therefore by those useful men the makers of guide-books, than Châtillon-sur-Marne; and it is in the nature of all castles to stand on picturesque sites, as of great rivers to flow by large towns. But neither the Châtillon which saw the birth of the Admiral de Coligny, nor the Châtillon which saw Napoleon throw away his sceptre with his scabbard, stands more beautifully than the quiet little town which nestles on its green plateau beneath the still majestic ruins of the château in which the great Pope of the Crusades was born. It overlooks, in the verdant valley of the Marne, the ancient priory of Binson, superbly renovated now, and restored in great measure through the zeal and energy of the Benedictine Archbishop of Reims. Around it sweeps a great circle of green and wooded hills, dotted over with fair mansions and lordly parks. For this province of Champagne is a land of wealth as well as of labour.

From a shattered tower of the old feudal fortress floated side by side the flags of France and of the Holy See. Beside the ruins rose, sharply defined and well detached against the summer sky, the colossal statue of Urban II. upon its lofty pedestal of granite. About it were arrayed in a pomp of colour and of flowing vestments, the host of ecclesiastics drawn together to do homage and honour in the sight of all men to the illustrious French pontiff, whom the Church found not unworthy in days of great stress and sore trial to take up and carry forward the work of his friend and teacher and predecessor, Hildebrand. One need not be a Catholic to recognise the debt of mankind to Gregory VII., of whom, dying in exile and in seeming defeat at Salerno, Sir James Stephen has truly said that he has 'left the impress of his gigantic character upon all succeeding ages.' One need only be a moderately civilised man of common sense to recognise the debt of mankind to Odo de Châtillon, known in the pontificate as Urban II. Wherever in the world the evensong of the Angelus breathes peace on earth to men of good-will, it speaks of the great pontiff and of the Truce of God which he founded, that the races of Christian Europe, suspending their internecine strife, might unite to roll back into Asia once for all the threatening invasion of Islam.

But the thousands upon thousands of people of both sexes and of all conditions in life who filled the vast plateau of Châtillon on that summer day in July 1887, and hailed with tumultuous shouts the monument of this great Frenchman and great Pope, visibly took a more than historic interest in the occasion. They were moved not only by those 'mystic chords of memory' of which President Lincoln knew the social and political value much better than the French fanatics of 'moral unity,' but by a vivid consciousness of the present peril of their country, their homes and their faith. Once more, as in the eleventh century and in the eighteenth, France needs to-day 'an invincible champion of the freedom of the Church, a defender of public peace, a reformer of morals, a scourge of corruption.'

This was the true significance of this memorable scene in the Marne. It was in the minds of that whole multitude, and it stirred them all with a common impulse when the eloquent Bishop of Angers, after sketching in a bold and striking outline the career of Urban II., thus drove its lesson home:--'Urban II. and the Popes of the Middle Ages have made for evermore impossible any return to the pagan theory of the omnipotence of the State. Ah, no doubt, despite that signal defeat, despotism will return to the charge. More than once in the course of the ages we shall see fresh appeals to violence against a power which can defend itself only by appealing to moral authority. We shall see, as we saw under Henry of Germany, emperors, kings, and republics strive to forge chains for the Church by their laws and their decrees. But the memory of the heroic struggles of the eleventh century will not pass out of the minds of the people. Canossa will remain for ever an inevitable stage in the progress of every power which undertakes to suppress religion and the Church.'

This festival of Urban II. fell in the week which includes the anniversary of the coronation of Charles VII. at Reims in the presence of Jeanne d'Arc, and the Cardinal Archbishop availed himself in July 1887 of this circumstance to crown the manifestation at Châtillon by a solemn commemoration in the Cathedral at Reims of the triumph of the peasant-girl of Domrémy. He was a schoolfellow at St.-Sulpice and has been a lifelong friend of Gounod, and upon his suggestion the great French composer produced for the commemoration his Mass of Jeanne d'Arc. He came from Paris himself to superintend the execution of the music. Simple, grand, choral, in the manner of Palestrina, music of the cathedral, not of the concert, I must leave my readers to imagine what its effect was beneath those vast and magnificent arches which had looked down four centuries ago upon the Maid of Orléans kneeling with her banner in her hand before the newly-anointed King who owed his crown to Heaven and to her, and praying that, now her mission was fulfilled, 'the gentle prince would let her go back to her own people and to tend her sheep.'

I do not think it would be easy to convince anyone who that day witnessed the profound and silent emotion of those assembled thousands in the Cathedral of Reims that the religious sentiment is either dead or dying in France! In the evening of the same day the Cathedral was thronged again, and thousands of men stood there for an hour, as I saw men stand in Rome last year under the preaching of Padre Agostino, to listen to a very remarkable sermon from one of the most eloquent preachers in France, Canon Lemann of Lyons. In the course of this sermon the preacher incidentally, but with an obvious and courageous purpose, dwelt at some length upon the energy with which Urban II. had denounced and repressed the 'false Crusaders' who, under cover of the uprising of Christendom against the infidel, fell upon, persecuted, and massacred the Jews in Europe. This quiet and earnest protest against the 'Jew-baiting' tendency which is showing itself in France, as well as in Germany, was plainly understood, and as plainly commanded the sympathy of his hearers. This was the case also with his admirable treatment of the international aspects of the story of the Maid of Orléans. There was not a trace of Chauvinism in his citation of the simple and downright message sent by the Pucelle to the English before Orléans. 'I have been sent by God to throw you out of France.' Out of France she did throw them. 'In this,' said the preacher, 'Jeanne d'Arc did a great service to England as well as to France. The fair-haired nation of the North had fought side by side with France, Coeur de Lion with Philip Augustus, in the Crusades. When, therefore, the destined queen of the seas sought to establish herself as a Continental power in the heart of Europe, the Lord put in her way that grain of star-dust from Domrémy, forced her back to her vocation, and bade her content herself with being sovereign on the ocean.'

I spoke of this allusion to the Jews with a most accomplished ecclesiastic who dined at the Archi-episcopal palace. He was very much pleased with it. 'One of the most mischievous things done,' he said, 'by the present Government is that it is certainly fomenting--I cannot say whether ignorantly or wilfully--a great deal of popular hostility to the Jews by giving important official positions to men who, though Israelites by blood, are in most cases no better Israelites than they are Christians. Very nearly half the préfectures in France are filled by such persons. When, as is too often the case, they carry out offensive and tyrannical measures against the Catholic schools and congregations in an unnecessarily offensive and tyrannical manner, it is very easy, as you must see, for hasty or malevolent persons to persuade the people that they do this because they are Jews, and as Jews hate the Christians. I know that the best Israelites in France regret this as much as I do. The policy of this Government is aimed as clearly at the extinction of the Jewish as of the Christian faith; at the Grand Rabbis as mercilessly as at the Archbishops of France.'

This same ecclesiastic gave me some particulars of the virulence with which the anti-religious war is waged. He told me of one case of recent date in Paris in which the authorities of a hospital neglected for two days to pay any heed to the entreaties of a poor patient that they would send for a priest to attend him, the doctors having given him to understand that for him the end was near. The chaplains, it will be remembered, have been expelled from all the public hospitals. Finally some person in charge of the place, more humane than his fellows, sent out to a Lazarist house in the neighbourhood and asked the Lazarists to send a priest. The priest came. He was received very rudely, kept waiting a long time in an ante-room, and when he was finally conducted through the wards to the dying man, all sorts of vulgar and foolish jeers were uttered about his mission as he passed along; and it was with the greatest trouble that he finally succeeded in imposing some sort of decent respect for the death-bed of this poor sufferer upon the hospital attendants.

'This is the spirit,' said the priest who told me the tale, 'of the Commune, or rather of those Communards who murdered the hostages. These murderers simply put this spirit into deeds instead of words. They made the name of the Commune so odious that when Victor Hugo in 1876 proposed a general amnesty of the condemned Communards, the Chamber rejected it without taking a vote.

'In 1880 the same general amnesty was proposed, and the Chamber adopted it by a very large majority. Do you wonder that thoughtful men look with horror on the current which is carrying us in such a direction as that? At this moment two men of high personal character, Admiral Krantz and M. Casimir Périer, are lending their support to a Government which represents this current, and yet Admiral Krantz and M. Casimir Périer have recorded their deliberate conviction that the men who clamoured for an unconditional, indiscriminate amnesty for the Communards were simply abusing the name of clemency for the rehabilitation of crime.

'Look again,' he said, 'at the spirit in which the laicization of the schools is conducted. There are a hundred families we will say in a village. Ninety-nine of these families are Christian families, not families of saints--I wish I knew such a village as that!--but Christian families. Go into their homes, and you will see the crucifix hanging in the chambers, religious prints upon the walls. One family is a family of atheists. I suppose the case, for as a matter of fact I know no such family. But I will suppose it. There is a school in the village, and in that school there hangs a crucifix, the gift of some pious resident. Ninety-nine fathers and mothers of the village desire that crucifix to be respected. One father and one mother (a bold supposition this!) desire it to be removed. The authorities send in a man who plucks it down, before the children, and throws it out of the door. I simply state what has happened over and over again! Is there any respect for equal rights--for the rule of the majority, for freedom of conscience in such proceedings? Take the case of the Virgin of Béziers. In that ancient city stood two statues of the Virgin, one in bronze and one in marble. The civil authorities called upon the Church to suppress them. The Church authorities of course declined to do this. Thereupon the civil authorities take the money of the taxpayers and expend it in depriving the city of these two monuments. Suppose the Turkish authorities were to do a thing like this in a town full of Christians under their dominion, what would all the civilised world say about the Turks?

'And it is done in a French city by Frenchmen either to carry out their own self-will or to exasperate and insult their fellow-citizens, or for both reasons at once!

'Still another case you can see for yourself at Domrémy. There under a pious and patriotic foundation to which Louis XVIII largely contributed the home of Jeanne d'Arc, religiously preserved in its original state, was confided to the keeping of some Sisters. They dwelt in a neat edifice constructed on the grounds purchased to secure the house of the Pucelle, and there the children of Domrémy and the neighbouring communes came to school and were gratuitously taught. Only the other day the local authorities were instigated, I know not by whom--perhaps by the friends of M. Ferry at St.-Dié, which is not very far off--to "laicize" instruction in Domrémy. To this end they turn the Sisters out, put the home of Jeanne d'Arc under the charge of a lay guardian, who has to be paid by the State, of course, tax the commune to pay a lay teacher, and make the school a lay school at the very door of the home of the village maiden to whose religious faith France owes her freedom and her national existence!'

I made a visit to Nancy and the Department of the Meurthe et Moselle not long after I had this conversation in Reims. The Mother Superior of the great Sisterhood of Christian Doctrine at Nancy confirmed this amazing story of the performances at Domrémy, and gave me many particulars of the petty persecutions to which the Sisters who conduct schools all over France are subjected. The schools are open at all hours to the invasion of Inspectors, who magnify their office too often in the eyes of the children by treating the teachers (lay as well as religious) with the sort of amiable condescension which marks the demeanour of an agent of the octroi overhauling the basket of a peasant-woman at a barrier. If a Sister has a religious book, her own property, lying on her desk, it is violently snatched up, and the children are invited to say whether it has been used to poison their young minds with religious ideas. 'In short,' said the Mother Superior very quietly, 'our Sisters are really much better treated in Protestant countries than in Catholic France.'

Domrémy-la-Pucelle is a typical agricultural village of Eastern France. It is in the Department of the Vosges and in the verdant valley of the Meuse. I drove to it on a lovely summer's morning after visiting Vaucouleurs, where the Pucelle came before the stout Captain Robert de Beaudricourt and said to him, 'You must take me to the King. I must see him before Mid Lent, and I will see him if I walk my legs off to the knees!' This interview began her marvellous career.

From certain articles in newspapers about a drama of _Jeanne d'Arc_, now performing at Paris, I gather that Jeanne's moral conquest of France which preceded and led to her material victory over the English invaders, has at last been satisfactorily explained by the scientific believers in hypnotism! Of this I can only say, with President Lincoln on a memorable occasion, 'for those who like this kind of explanation of historical phenomena, I should suppose it would be just the kind of explanation they would like.'

The country between Vaucouleurs and Domrémy is agreeably diversified, well wooded in parts, and rich in fair meadow-lands. At Montbras a little old lady dwells and looks after her affairs in one of the most picturesque château of the sixteenth century to be seen in this part of France, machicolated, crenellated, and dominated by lofty towers. We passed, too, through Greux, a small village on the Meuse, the dwellers in which were astute enough to get themselves exempted by Charles VII from all talliages and subsidies 'by fabricating documents' to prove that Jeanne d'Arc was born there. The incident is curious as going to show that the 'downtrodden serfs' and 'manacled villeins' of the middle ages had their wits about them, and could take care of themselves when an opportunity offered, as well as the 'oppressed tenantry' of modern Ireland. Domrémy, which is no bigger than Greux, neither of them having three hundred inhabitants, straggles along the highway. The houses are well built--the church is a handsome, ogival building of the fifteenth century, restored in our day, but quite in keeping with the place and its associations. Within it, under a tomb built into the wall, lie the two brothers Tiercelin, sons of the godmother of Jeanne, who bore their testimony manfully to the character of the deliverer of France, when the Church was at last compelled to intervene in the interest of truth and justice between the French Catholics who had worshipped her as a 'creature of God,' and the English Catholics who had burned her as an emissary of the Evil One.