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Further on, some very poor soldiers, in sheepskin doublets and leathern hose, were kneeling together before a sort of rough screen, on which were hung images painted in the manner of Greek eikons. These men had long and silky beards, and their smooth brown hair hung out over their shoulders in well-combed waves, and some of them had beautiful faces.
Marat, especially was treated as divine and "was universally deified," and "divine" worship of his image was everywhere set up in churches. And the "worship of the Beast" came about easily, and as the natural transition from the world's earlier adulation of the "Man of Sin." Millions upon millions of his image, in the form of charms, were worn like the eikons of the Greek church.
No man spoke in rudeness or coarseness to his neighbor, as do men in the cities where they have law. No man did injustice to his neighbor, for fair play and an even chance were gods in the eyes of all, eikons above each pinon-burning hearth in all that valley of content.
Eikons, the sacred memorials which the Greek Christians hang in their homes, representing the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ in her arms, were also for sale in great numbers. Some of these were merely painted boards or silvered or gilded metal; others were of expensive material, incrusted with jewels.
Faces appeared to him, faces of old, an endless procession of faces clear-cut as ever . . . his brother monks, bearded and unkempt . . . debauched acolytes . . . pilgrims from the Holy Land . . . glittering festal robes . . . vodka orgies, endless chants and litanies, holy lamps burning, somber eikons with staring eyes . . . the smell of greasy lukewarm cabbage soup, of unwashed bodies and boot leather and incense.
In all the Eikons, either cheap or dear, the painted faces and heads of the Virgin and child were visible through openings in the metal or board. "At Easter time," said one of the dealers in ecclesiastical wares, "we sell thousands of candles for the great midnight celebration of the lighting of the candles.
You will not think this remark flippant if you are familiar with French cemeteries, if you know those great family sepulchres, fitted up as little chapels, through whose doors, crowned with the black cross, you may see the great wax tapers in the candelabra at the altar, the stained-glass windows with the figure of the Madonna and Child, the eikons of Christ, the praying-stools, the vases, the busts or photographs of the deceased worthy people who not only thought life worth living but death worth dying, and did the one and the other respectably and becomingly.
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