t, charmed with its nudity, its stupendous candour, its
chasteness recalling that of a virgin child, for there was not a piece of
sculpture, not an ornament that would have uselessly loaded it. The roofs
of the nave, transept, and apse were of equal height above the
entablature, which was decorated with simple mouldings. In the same way
the apertures in the aisles and nave had no other adornments than
archivaults with mouldings, rising above the piers. He stopped in thought
before the great coloured glass windows of the transept, whose roses were
sparkling; and passing round the building he skirted the semicircular
apse against which stood the vestry building with its two rows of little
windows; and then he returned, never tiring of his contemplation of that
regal ordonnance, those great lines standing out against the blue sky,
those superposed roofs, that enormous mass of stone, whose solidity
promised to defy centuries. But, when he closed his eyes he, above all
else, conjured up, with rapturous pride, a vision of the facade and
steeple; down below, the three portals, the roofs of the two lateral ones
forming terraces, while from the central one, in the very middle of the
facade, the steeple boldly sprang. Here again columns resting on piers
supported archivaults with simple mouldings. Against the gable, at a
point where there was a pinnacle, and between the two lofty windows
lighting the nave, was a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes under a canopy. Up
above, were other bays with freshly painted luffer-boards. Buttresses
started from the ground at the four corners of the steeple-base, becoming
less and less massive from storey to storey, till they reached the spire,
a bold, tapering spire in stone, flanked by four turrets and adorned with
pinnacles, and soaring upward till it vanished in the sky. And to the
parish priest of Lourdes it seemed as if it were his own fervent soul
which had grown and flown aloft with this spire, to testify to his faith
throughout the ages, there on high, quite close to God.

At other times another vision delighted him still more. He thought he
could see the inside of his church on the day of the first solemn mass he
would perform there. The coloured windows threw flashes of fire brilliant
like precious stones; the twelve chapels, the aisles, were beaming with
lighted candles. And he was at the high altar of marble and gold; and the
fourteen columns of the nave in single blocks of Pyrenean marble