Nothing could calm
the smart of the wound reopened in Pierre's heart--neither the warm
peacefulness into which he entered, nor the silent solemnity of the
broad, deep fabric, whose new stonework was quite bare, without a single
painting or any kind of decoration; the nave being still half-barred by
the scaffoldings which blocked up the unfinished dome. At that early hour
the masses of entreaty had already been said at several altars, under the
grey light falling from the high and narrow windows, and the tapers of
entreaty were burning in the depths of the apse. So Pierre made haste to
go to the sacristy, there to assume his vestments in order that he might
say his mass in the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul.
But the floodgates of memory had been opened, and he had no thought but
for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites
and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years
previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on
man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a
first experiment: he had gone to Lourdes, there to seek the innocent
belief of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young
nations bending beneath the terror born of ignorance; but he had rebelled
yet more than ever in presence of what he had witnessed at Lourdes: that
glorification of the absurd, that collapse of common sense; and was
convinced that salvation, the peace of men and nations nowadays, could
not lie in that puerile relinquishment of reason.
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