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She had set down her lamp upon the broad, polished shelf which ran all round the place, forming the top of a continuous series of cupboards, as in most sacristies, used for the vestments of the church. At the back of these high presses rose half way to the spring of the vault. The nun seemed a little nervous and her voice quavered oddly as she spoke.
In short, this Church, which is continually speaking of its poverty, draws from the State and the country more than three hundred million pesetas annually nearly double what the army costs; although they are always complaining in the sacristies of these modern times, saying that everything is devoured by the military, and that the fault of everything that has happened is theirs, as they threw themselves on to the side of that cursed liberty.
The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than usually recherché work of art, one is presently dominated by their reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the ecclesiastical life.
At the end possibly lie imprisonment, fine, disgrace, ruin. How jubilantly some are already rubbing their hands in the bishops' palaces, the parsonages, the sacristies of France! Ah! no stone will be kept unturned to secure a conviction! But Emile Zola does not waver.
From time to time staccato notes of delight added a distinct jubilant quality to this symphony, heralding the arrival of some group of Church dignitaries from one or other of the seven principal parishes of Venice, gorgeous in robes of high festival and displaying the choicest of treasures from sacristies munificently endowed, as was meet for an ecclesiastical body to whom belonged one half of the area of Venice, with wealth proportionate.
Quite an underhand evolution was beginning in the sacristies, orders from Rome flitted hither and thither; it was a question of accepting the new form of government, and absorbing it by dint of invasion. France was still the Eldest Daughter of the Church, the only great nation which had sufficient health and strength to place the Pope in possession of his temporal power once more.
Besides, an astonishing piece of news, that fell on the Cathedral like a thunderbolt, soon caused the young priest to be forgotten, throwing all the gentlemen of the choir, all the smaller folk in the sacristies, and the whole population of the upper cloister into the greatest commotion. As the canons entered the choir they walked with bent heads, looking ashamed and frightened.
Whether it was that his damp clothes exhaled a fetid odor, or that he had in his normal condition the "poor smell" which belongs to Parisian tenements, just as offices, sacristies, and hospitals have their own peculiar and rancid fetidness, of which no words can give the least idea, or whether some other reason affected them, those in the vicinity of this man immediately moved away and left him alone.
But you love your work better than your friends, and in that you are inferior to the real Cruchard, who at least adored our holy religion. By the way, I think that we shall have Henry V. They tell me that I am seeing the dark side of things; I don't see anything, but I perceive the odor of sacristies that increases.
He had long outlived the spontaneity of youthful ardour. His experience through half a century in the planning of monuments, the painting of the Sistine vault, the designing of façades and sacristies and libraries, had developed the architectonic sense which was always powerful in his conceptive faculty.