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He began to mutter, holding his sabre above his head, and the men took up the savage chant, standing close together in the road: "'Ça ira! Ça ira!" It was the horrible song of the Terror. "'Que faut-il au Républicain? Du fer, du plomb, et puis du pain! "'Du fer pour travailler, Du plomb pour nous venger, Et du pain pour nos frères!"
This Abbé Plomb looks like a scared sacristan; he goes about gaping at invisible crows, and he seems so ill at ease, so loutish, so awkward and this is our learned man and devoted mystic, in love with his Cathedral! Certainly it is not safe to judge of an Abbé from appearances.
"True," said the Abbé Plomb, "and yet Peter of Capua uses it, with an interpretation of love and charity, to figure the Virgin; Saint Mechtildis, again, says that roses are symbolical of martyrs, and in another passage of her work on 'Specific Grace, she compares this flower to the virtue of patience."
"Blue was used in the Middle Ages for all the services to the Virgin, and it has only fallen into desuetude since the eighteenth century," replied the Abbé Plomb; "and that only in the Latin Church, for the orthodox Churches of the East still wear it." "And why this neglect?" "I do not know, any more than I know why so many colours formerly used in our services have been forgotten.
Durtal, looking in at a window, saw a dormitory with rows of white beds, and he was amused, for never had he seen beds so tiny. A lad was in the room, whom he called, by tapping on the pane, and asked whether the Abbé Plomb were still about the place. The boy nodded an affirmative, and showed Durtal into a waiting-room. This room was like the office of an exceedingly inferior and pious hotel.
"How many worshippers can the Cathedral contain? Well, nearly 18,000," said the Abbé Plomb. "But I need hardly tell you, I suppose, that it is never full; that even during the season for pilgrimages the vast crowds of Mediæval times never assemble here. Ah, no! Chartres is not exactly what you would call a pious town!"
"Only Saint Matthew remains; but here I give in, for I know of no vegetable species that can reasonably be assigned to him." "Nay, do not think it hopeless," cried the Abbé Plomb. "A mediæval legend tells us that balms exuded from his tomb; hence he was represented as holding a branch of cinnamon, symbolical of the fragrance of virtue, says Saint Melito."
I must not sit dreaming, but go to join the Abbé Plomb; and the weather is clouding over again! I certainly have no luck." As he crossed the square he was lost again in meditations, captivated once more by the haunting thought of the Cathedral, and saying to himself as he looked up at the spires, "How many varieties there are in the immense family of the Gothic; and what dissimilarities.
"Not to forget that, according to the translation of Origen, the Lily among Thorns is the Church in the midst of its enemies," the Abbé Plomb put in. "Then it is Jesus, His Mother, the Angels, the Church, the Virgins, everything at once!" exclaimed Durtal. "We cannot but wonder how these mystic gardeners could discern so many meanings in one and the same plant!"
A brass wicket was opened and closed, and a housekeeper, shuffling up in old shoes, half opened the door. Durtal was met by the Abbé Plomb, who was watching for him, and who led him into a room full of statues; there were carved images in every spot on the chimney-shelf, on a chest of drawers, on a side table, and in the middle of the room.
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