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Updated: June 8, 2025
Theophile Goujart took him to the concerts of a Society dedicated to the national art. There the new glories of French music were elaborated and carefully hatched. It was a club, a little church, with several side-chapels. Each chapel had its saint, each saint his devotees, who blackguarded the saint in the next chapel.
Thence we descended to the second church, in whose darkness our vision groped, half blind from the sudden change; but gradually through the dusk we began to discern low vaults stretching heavily across pillars which look like stunted giants, so short are they and so tremendously thick-set, the high altar enclosed by an elaborate grating, the little side-chapels like so many black cells, and through the gloom a twinkle and glimmer of gold and color and motes floating in furtive sunbeams that had strayed in through the superb stained glass of the infrequent windows.
The banners, in particular, abounded, as innumerable as the leaves of trees. Some thirty hung from the vaulted roof, whilst others were suspended, like pictures, between the little columns around the triforium. And others, again, displayed themselves on the walls, waved in the depths of the side-chapels, and encompassed the choir with a heaven of silk, satin, and velvet.
In the Basilica of San Spirito my mother came upon several visible lovelinesses of elaborate devotion, which with her limpid purity of justice she enthusiastically notes down. She entered the church one day for coolness and rest, and, recognizing its "noble" beauties, she described, in her journal already printed, "a function going on before one of the side-chapels the burial service of a child.
I was assured by the priest who exhibited him to me at the church, that, on one occasion, having been stolen by some irreverent hand from his ordinary abiding-place in one of the side-chapels, he returned alone, by himself, at night, to console his guardians and to resume his functions. Great honors are paid to him.
The exterior of the cathedral is one of the finest specimens of architecture in the kingdom, its porches, side-chapels, decorated doorways, sculptured capitals, windows, cloisters, and towers admirably illustrating every portion of the history of English architecture.
Outside, a tender twilight mellowed the atmosphere and gave brightness to approaching evening; inside, the long shadows, gathering heavily in the aisles and richly sculptured hollows of the side-chapels, brought night before its time.
Over the lateral altars are similar works of art. Sometimes one of these side-chapels is at the same time the tomb of a noble family, which assumes the duty of keeping it in order.
There are a nave and two aisles: four noble transversal columns sustaining the choir-vault adorn the walls. The pulpit and high altar are admirable as the choir; the only eyesores are the diminutive organ and the eleven side-chapels with their caricatures of high art.
So, indeed, it was a cathedral after a fashion; and, having in mind the carven pillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and side-chapels, the shining white walls, and the dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerful lamps, I venture to question whether man has ever lifted up his heart in a grander one.
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