United States or New Caledonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In an instant he was back again, drawing long breaths of misery. He passed his tongue over his lips, and opened his eyes on the darkening apse before him. The organ was silent now, and the choir was gone, and the lights out. The sunset colour, too, had faded from the walls, and grim cold faces looked down on him from wall and vault.
He was taken by the charms of that church, its silence, the shadow which fell on the apse, from the height of its palm trees of stone, and he ended by caring for nothing and sinking on a chair, filled with one sole desire, not to enter again on the life of the streets, never to leave his refuge, never to move. The next day, which was a Sunday, he went to the Benedictine nuns to hear High Mass.
The presbytery wall is rough masonry, as if it had been external, and there are no signs of its having been decorated in any way; but the oblong plan with the apse some way within is found also at Salona, and in Syria and North Africa. Traces of a wall parallel to that of the north aisle, and beyond it, suggest the existence of rooms to the north.
Saturnin, the cathedral, whose apse was shaded by the garden of the chapter, a sweet and peaceful solitude, from which a beggar drove them by himself asking an alms from them. They were building rapidly in the neighborhood of the railway station; a new quarter was growing up there, and they bent their steps in that direction.
I have a shuddering sense of what there is inside hideous smoked Madonnas; fleshless saints in mosaic, staring down idiotic astonishment and rebuke from the apse; skin-clad skeletons hanging on crosses, or stuck all over with arrows, or stretched on gridirons; women and monks with heads aside in perpetual lamentation. I have seen enough of those wry-necked favourites of heaven at Constantinople.
Breaking the concrete piles and rending the unsound soil, the explosion, which was certain to be one of extraordinary violence, would doubtless split the edifice atwain, and hurl one-half down the slopes descending towards Paris, whilst the other on the side of the apse would crumble and collapse upon the spot where it stood.
Other works of this century, not mentioned in the annals, are the entire removal of the lower stage of Norman windows in the aisles, these were replaced by wide windows of five lights each; the addition of a parapet to the apse; the erection of piscinas and other accompaniments to side altars, at the east ends of the choir aisles.
It is certain that this monastery, which had a grand air, both as a church and as a seignory; that abbatial palace, where the bishops of Paris counted themselves happy if they could pass the night; that refectory, upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the beauty, and the rose window of a cathedral; that elegant chapel of the Virgin; that monumental dormitory; those vast gardens; that portcullis; that drawbridge; that envelope of battlements which notched to the eye the verdure of the surrounding meadows; those courtyards, where gleamed men at arms, intermingled with golden copes; the whole grouped and clustered about three lofty spires, with round arches, well planted upon a Gothic apse, made a magnificent figure against the horizon.
The square termination of the crypt is in favour of a square presbytery; while his Roman proclivities are perhaps slightly in favour of an apse, and of aisles. Surtees Soc., vol. lxxiv. p. 83. They may, however, mark the site of the domestic buildings and not of the church. Or they may be relics of the Roman Occupation. By Walbran in Proceedings Archæol.
"They jumped at the first man they could get to take her, for fear of the scandal of the Apse Family not being able to find a skipper. He was a festive soul, I believe, but he stuck to her grim and hard. Wilmot was his second mate. A harum-scarum fellow, and pretending to a great scorn for all the girls. The fact is he was really timid.
Word Of The Day