heliotropes--came over the lofty courtyard wall. In the chapel relatives
were waiting in their best attire, so deeply moved that the women sobbed
behind their veils. Next came the procession--the deacons about to
receive their priesthood in golden chasubles, the sub-deacons in
dalmatics, those in minor orders and the tonsured with their surplices
floating on their shoulders and their black birettas in their hands. The
organ rolled diffusing the flutelike notes of a canticle of joy. At the
altar, the bishop officiated, staff in hand, assisted by two canons. All
the Chapter were there, the priests of all the parishes thronged thick
amid a dazzling wealth of apparel, a flaring of gold beneath a broad
ray of sunlight falling from a window in the nave. The epistle over, the
ordination began.

At this very hour Abbe Mouret could remember the chill of the scissors
when he was marked with the tonsure at the beginning of his first year
of theology. It had made him shudder slightly. But the tonsure had then
been very small, hardly larger than a penny. Later, with each fresh
order conferred on him, it had grown and grown until it crowned him with
a white spot as large as a big Host. The organ's hum grew softer, and
the censers swung with a silvery tinkling of their slender chains,
releasing a cloudlet of white smoke, which unrolled in lacelike folds.
He could see himself, a tonsured youth in a surplice, led to the altar
by the master of ceremonies; there he knelt and bowed his head down low,
while the bishop with golden scissors snipped off three locks--one over
his forehead, and the other two near his ears. Yet another twelvemonth,
and he could again see himself in the chapel amid the incense, receiving
the four minor orders. Led by an archdeacon, he went to the main
doorway, closed the door with a bang, and opened it again, to show that
to him was entrusted the care of churches; next he rang a small bell
with his right hand, in token that it was his duty to call the faithful
to the divine offices; then he returned to the altar, where fresh
privileges were conferred upon him by the bishop--those of singing the
lessons, of blessing the bread, of catechising children, of exorcising
evil spirits, of serving the deacons, of lighting and extinguishing the
candles of the altars.

Next came back the memory of the ensuing ordination, more solemn and
more dread, amid the same organ strains which sounded now like God's own
thunder: this t