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He strengthened himself with the Church by the deceitful appearance of a well-feigned piety: he accompanied his wife to mass; he gave money for the convents of the town; he assisted the congregation of the Sacre-Coeur; he took sides with the clergy on all occasions when the clergy came into collision with the town, the department, or the State.
Again the light of inspiration, the curious illumination was apparent in his face. "This is most wonderful!" he said. "Most wonderful! It is here that I shall live. Here here with Paris at my feet." Blake laughed laughed good-humoredly at the finality, the artless arrogance of the tone. "It may not be so easy to find a dwelling in the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur."
There was nothing beautiful in the plantation of the Sacré-Coeur; the shrubs, for all their valor of green, were slight things if one thought of forest trees, the grass was a mere pretence of grass. But the human mind is a great magician, weaving glories from within, and neither Blake nor Max had will for anything but the moment set precisely as it was.
High above them, white against the winter sky, glimmered the domes of the Sacré-Coeur, looking down in symbolic silence upon the restless city; to the left stretched the rue Ronsard, with its deserted market and lonely pavement; to the right, the Escalier de Sainte-Marie, picturesque as its name, wound its precipitous way apparently to the very stars, while at their feet, creeping upward to the threshold of the church, was the plantation of rocks, trees, and holly bushes that in the mysterious darkness seemed aquiver with a thousand whispered secrets.
"Why should only he come back out of all those we left dead at La Pelerine?" said the second. "Why indeed?" replied the third. "Why do the Sacre-Coeur men have the preference? Well, at any rate, I'd rather die without confession than wander about as he does, without eating or drinking, and no blood in his body or flesh on his bones." "Ah!"
They ran down the long, smooth staircase, and, stepping into the quiet, starlit rue Müller, linked arms and began their descent upon Paris with as much ease, as nice a familiarity as though life for both of them had been passed in the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur.
She was one of the vieille noblesse and had a charming house in Passy, and was as interesting to listen to as a book. She asked me one day if I would care to go with her to a Memorial Service at the Sacré-Coeur. Looking out of her windows we could see the church dominating Paris from the heights of Montmartre, the mosque-like appearance of its architecture gleaming white against the sky.
Are you working hard, Amedee? What do you say? He was first and assisted at the feast of St. Charlemagne! So much the better! Jules, did you send the six chandeliers and the plated pyx and the Stations of the Cross, Number Two, to the Dames du Sacre-Coeur d'Alencons? What, not yet? But the order came three days ago! You must hurry, I tell you!
When Blake overtook him he had passed up the rue Müller, and was leaning over the wooden paling that fronts the Sacré-Coeur, his elbows resting upon it, his face between his hands, his eyes held by the glitter of Paris lying below him. Blake came quietly up behind him. "I thought you had given me the slip." He turned.
His taste for history was not pronounced, even when treated with the scholarly fidelity and harmonious style of the Duc de Broglie, nor was his penchant for the social and religious questions, even when broached by Henry Cochin, who revealed his true self in a letter where he gave a stirring account of the taking of the veil at the Sacre-Coeur.
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