Gaston de Latour | Page 2

most exact--a memory, touched so solemnly with a conscience of the intimacies of life, its significant events, its contacts and partings, that to themselves it was like a second sacred history.
It was a great day, amid all their quiet days, for the people of Deux-manoirs--one of the later days of August. The event, which would mark it always in the life of one of them, called into play all that was most expressive in that well-defined family character: it was at once the recognition of what they valued most in past years, and an assertion of will, or hope, for the [5] future, accordant thereto. Far away in Paris the young King Charles the Ninth, in his fourteenth year, had been just declared of age. Here, in the church of Saint Hubert, church of their parish, and of their immemorial patronage, though it lay at a considerable distance from their abode, the chiefs of the house of Latour, attended by many of its dependents and less important members, were standing ready, around the last hope of their old age--the grandparents, their aged brothers and sisters, certain aged ecclesiastics of their kindred, wont to be called to the family councils.
They had set out on foot, after a votive mass said early in the old chapel of the manor, to assist at the ceremony of the day. Distinguishable from afar by unusual height in proportion to its breadth within, the church of Saint Hubert had an atmosphere, a daylight, to itself. Its stained glass, work of the same hands that had wrought for the cathedral of Chartres, admitted only an almost angry ray of purple or crimson, here or there, across the dark, roomy spaces. The heart, the heart of youth at least, sank, as one entered, stepping warily out of the sunshine over the sepulchral stones which formed the entire pavement of the church, a great blazonry of family history from age to age for indefatigable eyes. An abundance of almost life-sized sculpture clung to the pillars, lurked in the angles, seemed, with those symbolical gestures, and mystic faces [6] ready to speak their parts, to be almost in motion through the gloom. Many years after, Gaston de Latour, an enemy of all Gothic darkness or heaviness, returning to his home full of a later taste, changed all that. A thicket of airy spires rose above the sanctuary; the blind triforium broke into one continuous window; the heavy masses of stone were pared down with wonderful dexterity of hand, till not a hand's-breadth remained uncovered by delicate tracery, as from the fair white roof, touched sparingly with gold, down to the subterranean chapel of Saint Taurin, where the peasants of La Beauce came to pray for rain, not a space was left unsearched by cheerful daylight, refined, but hardly dimmed at all, by painted glass mimicking the clearness of the open sky. In the sombre old church all was in stately order now: the dusky, jewelled reliquaries, the ancient devotional ornaments from the manor--much-prized family possessions, sufficient to furnish the whole array of a great ecclesiastical function like this--the lights burning, flowers everywhere, gathered amid the last handfuls of the harvest by the peasant-women, who came to present their children for the happy chance of an episcopal blessing.
And the almost exclusively aged people, in all their old personal adornments, which now so rarely saw the light, forming the central group, expectant around the young seigneur they had conducted hither, seemed of one piece with [7] those mystic figures, the old, armour- clad monumental effigies, the carved and painted imageries which ran round the outer circuit of the choir--a version of the biblical history, for the reading of those who loitered on their way from chapel to chapel. There was Joseph's dream, with the tall sheaves of the elder brethren bowing to Joseph's sheaf, like these aged heads around the youthful aspirant of to-day. There was Jacob going on his mysterious way, met by, conversing with, wrestling with, the Angels of God--rescuing the promise of his race from the "profane" Esau. There was the mother of Samuel, and, in long white ephod, the much- desired, early-consecrated child, who had inherited her religious capacity; and David, with something of his extraordinary genius for divine things written on his countenance; onward, to the sacred persons of the Annunciation, with the golden lily in the silver cup, only lately set in its place. With dress, expression, nay! the very incidents themselves innocently adapted to the actual habits and associations of the age which had produced them, these figures of the old Jewish history seemed about to take their places, for the imparting of a divine sanction, among the living actors of the day. One and all spoke of ready concurrence with religious motions, a ready