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The Vatican is said to contain 20 courts, and 11,000 halls, chapels, salons, and private apartments, most of which are occupied by collections and show-rooms, while only a small part is set apart for the papal court.
There were splendid state-apartments, cabins, chapels, and pulpits in each, and they were amply provided with awnings, cushions, streamers, standards, gilded saints, and bands of music. To take part in an ostentatious pageant, nothing could be better devised. To fulfil the great objects of a war-vessel to sail and to fight they were the worst machines ever launched upon the ocean.
"It was difficult to imagine that this peaceful country, with its pretty cottages, its innumerable chapels, whose bells were then calling its people to worship, and its troops of white-robed men and women answering the summons, was the barbarous Madagascar of twenty years ago."
Pancras, where the population was 100,000, and the church would only accommodate 300. These facts seem almost incredible; probably the writer from whom they are quoted overlooked subsidiary chapels attached to the parish church. It is, however, very clear that in London and many of the large towns no energetic efforts had for a long time been made to meet necessities of very crying urgency.
Almost everywhere the chapels were of wood or clapboards, and thatched; not more than eight or nine centres of population could boast of possessing a stone church; many hamlets still lacked a chapel and imitated the Lower Town of Quebec, whose inhabitants attended service in a private house.
Thus, he says not a word of those fearful spectacles which struck horror to the hearts of the Spaniards in their visit to the teocallis, the pyramidal mound garnished with human skulls, the hideous idols and the blood-stained priests, the chapels drenched with gore, and other evidences of a diabolical worship. Not unfrequently he fills up what he considers as gaps in the ordinary narratives.
It was their office to inspect the chapels and passages, to point out the places where new passages might be formed, and to portion out and sell the spots in which burials might take place. The water in the wells of the catacombs was subsequently found to possess the virtue of healing to a marvellous degree.
To make us forgive it at all, how much it must also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself! Beneath the church of Montmajour is a most extraordinary crypt, almost as big as the edifice above it and making a complete subterranean temple, surrounded with a circular gallery, or deambulatory, which expands at intervals into five square chapels.
Many other lesser towers and spires rose above churches and chapels that were lost amid the densely crowded houses all about them, but de Sigognac had eyes only for the grand old cathedral, which overwhelmed him with astonishment and delight.
It is now connected with a convent of French nuns, and when we rang at a side door, one of the sisterhood answered the summons, and admitted us into the church. This, like that of the Capuchins', had a vaulted roof over the nave, and no side aisles, but rows of chapels instead.
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