And thinking over his memories of the morning, Durtal saw again, as he closed his eyes, at the end of the semicircular apse, the procession of red and black robes, white surplices, joining in front of the altar, descending the steps together, making their way together to the catafalque, dividing again on each aide, joining to mix afresh in the great gangway between the chairs.
This slow and silent procession, led by incomparable Suisses, in mourning, their swords horizontal, and a general's epaulets in jet, advanced, preceded by a cross, in front of the corpse laid on tressels, and far-off in all that confusion of lights falling from the roof, and lighted flambeaux round the catafalque and on the altar, the white of the tapers disappeared, and the priests who bore them seemed to march with empty hands uplifted as though to point out the stars which accompanied them, twinkling above their heads.
Then when the bier was surrounded by the clergy, the "De Profundis" burst forth from the depths of the sanctuary, intoned by invisible singers.
"That was good," said Durtal to himself. At the Madeleine the voices of the children are sharp and feeble, and the basses are badly trained and failing; we are evidently far from the choir of St. Sulpice, but all the same it was superb; then what a moment was that of the priests' communion, when suddenly arising from the murmuring of the choir, the voice of the tenor threw above the corpse the magnificent plain chant antiphon—
"Requiem æternam dona eis Domine
Et lux perpetua luceat eis."
It seems that after all the lamentations of the "De Profundis" and the "Dies iræ," the presence of God, who comes then upon the altar, brings consolation, and sanctions the confident and solemn pride of that melodious phrase, which then invokes Christ, without dread and without tears.
The mass ended, the celebrant disappeared, and, as at the moment when the corpse entered, the clergy, preceded by the Suisses, advanced towards the body, and in the blazing circle of the tapers, a priest, in his cope, said the mighty prayers of the general absolution.
Then the liturgy took a higher tone, and became still more admirable. Mediative between the sinner and the judge, the Church, by the mouth of her priest, implores the Lord to pardon the poor soul: "Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo Domine"—then after the amen given by the organ and all the choir, a voice arose in the silence, and spoke in the name of the dead:—
"Libera me!"
and the choir continued the old chant of the tenth century. Just as in the "Dies iræ," which appropriates to itself fragments of these plaints, the Last Judgment flamed out, and pitiless responses declare to the dead the reality of his alarms, declare to him that at the end of Time the Judge will come with the crash of thunder to chastise the world.
The priest marched round the catafalque, sprinkling it with beads of holy water, incensed it, gave shelter to the poor weeping soul, consoled it, took it to himself, covered it, as it were, with his cope, and again, intervened to pray that, after so much weariness and sorrow, the Lord will permit the unhappy one to sleep the sleep that knows no waking, far from earth's noises.
Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more august mission been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who has no doubt forgotten her since that day, and may even have persecuted her up to the hour of his death.
Nor does the Church shrink from the task. Before that fleshly dust heaped in a chest, she thinks of that sewage of the soul, and cries: "From the gates of hell deliver him, O Lord!" but at the end of the general absolution, at the moment when the procession, turning its back, is on the way to the sacristy, she too seems disquieted. Perhaps recalling in an instant, the ill deeds done by that body while it was alive, she seemed to doubt if her supplications were heard, and the doubt her words would not frame, passed into the intonation of the last amen, murmured at the Madeleine, by children's voices.
Timid and distant, plaintive and sweet, this amen said: "We have done what we could, but … but … " And in the funereal silence which followed the clergy leaving the nave, there remained only the ignoble reality of the empty husk, lifted in the arms of men, thrust into a carriage, like the refuse of the shambles carted off each morning to be made into soap at the factories.
"If," continued Durtal, "in opposition to these sad prayers, these eloquent absolutions, we call up before us a marriage mass, all is changed. There the Church is disarmed and her musical liturgy is as nought. Then she may well play Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and borrow from profane authors the gaiety of their songs to celebrate the brief and empty joy of the body. Imagine, and indeed it happens, the canticle of the Virgin used to magnify the glad impatience of a bride. Fancy the Te Deum, to hymn the blessedness of a bridegroom!"
Far away from this infamous barter of the flesh, plain chant remains shut up in the antiphonaries, like a monk in the cloister, and when it goes forth, it is to cast up before Christ his garnered pains and sorrows. It gathers and sums them up in admirable supplications, and if, fatigued with pleading it adores, its impulse is to glorify eternal events, Palm Sunday and Easter, Pentecost and the Ascension, Epiphany and Christmas, then its joy bursts forth so magnificently, that it springs beyond the world to show its ecstatic joy at the feet of God.
As to the very ceremonies of the funeral, they are now only the regular way of getting money, an official routine, a prayer-wheel which is turned mechanically without thought of it.
The organist while he plays thinks of his family, and considers how wearied he is; the bellows-blower thinks, as he fills the pipes, of the half-pint which will dry his sweat; the tenors and basses are careful of their effects, and admire themselves in the more or less rippled water of their voices; the choir boys dream of their scampers after mass; and, moreover, not one of them at all understands a word of the Latin they sing and abridge, as for instance the "Dies iræ," of which they suppress a part of the stanzas.
In its turn beadledom calculates the sum the dead man brings in, and even the priest, wearied with the prayers of which he has read so many, and needing his breakfast, prays mechanically from the lips outward, while the assistants are in a hurry that the mass to which they have not listened should come to an end, that they may shake hands with the relations, and leave the dead.
There is absolute inattention, profound weariness. Yet how terrible is that thing on the tressels that is waiting there in the church, that empty dwelling-place, that body which is already breaking up. Liquid manure that stinks, gases which evaporate, flesh that rots is all that remains!
And the soul, now that life is over, and all begins? No one thinks of it, not even the family worn out by the length of the service, absorbed in their own sorrow; who in fact regret only the visible presence of the being they have lost; no one except myself, thought Durtal, and a few curious people, who associate themselves in their alarm with the "Dies iræ" and the "Libera," of which they understand both the language and the meaning.
Then by the external sound of the words, without the aid of contemplation, without even the help of thought, the Church acts.
There it is, the miracle of her liturgy, the power of her word, the constantly renewed prodigy of phrases created by revolving time, of prayers arranged by ages which are dead. All has passed, nothing exists that was raised up in those bygone times. Yet those sequences remain intact, cried aloud by indifferent voices and cast out from empty hearts, plead, groan, and implore even with efficacy, by their virtual power, their talismanic might, their inalienable beauty by the almighty confidence of their faith. The Middle Ages have left us these to help us to save, if it may be, the soul of the modern and dead fine gentleman.
At the present time, concluded Durtal, there is nothing left peculiar to Paris, but the ceremonies, very like each other, of taking the veil and of funerals. It is unfortunate that when we have to do with a sumptuous corpse, undertakers have their way.
They then bring out their terrible upholstery, plated statues of our Lady in atrocious taste, zinc basins in which blaze bowls of green punch, tin