assumption
of life, had gone out to meet the Bishop, as far as to the Rue Saint
Michel. There, on the open square, a gymnastic apparatus had been
erected, the swing bars and rings having been removed, and the poles
garnished with pine branches and gilt paper rosettes, and surmounted by
a trophy of tricolour flags arranged in a fan behind a painted cardboard
shield. This was an arch of triumph, and under this the Brethren of the
Christian Schools were to escort the canopy.

The procession, which had gone forth to fetch the Bishop from the
Hospice of Saint Brice, where, in obedience to time-honoured custom, he
had slept the night before entering his See, had made its way thither
under a fine rain of chanted canticles, broken by heavier showers of
brass sounding a pious flourish of trumpets. Slowly, with measured
steps, the train wound along between two hedges of people crowded on the
sidewalks, and all the way the windows, hung with drapery, displayed
bunches of faces and leaning bodies, cut across the middle by the
balcony bar.

At the head of the procession, behind the gaudy uniforms of the
ponderous beadles, came the girls of the Congregational Schools, dressed
in crude blue with white veils, in two ranks, filling up the roadway;
then followed delegates of nuns from every Order that has a House in the
diocese; Sisters of the Visitation from Dreux, Ladies of the Sacred
Heart from Chateaudun, Sisters of the Immaculate Conception from Nogent
le Rotrou, the uncloistered Sisters of the Cloistered Orders of
Chartres, Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul and Poor Clares, whose dresses
of blueish grey and peat-brown contrasted with the black robes of the
others.

What was most odd was the various shapes of their coifs. Some had soft
flapping blinkers, others wore them goffered and stiffened with starch;
these hid their face at the bottom of a deep white tunnel; others, on
the contrary, showed their countenance set in an oval frame of pleated
cambric, prolonged behind into conical wings of starched linen lustrous
from heavy irons. As he looked over this expanse of caps, Durtal was
reminded of the Paris landscape of roofs, in shapes resembling the
funnels worn by these nuns and the cocked hats of the beadles.

Then, behind these long files of sober-coloured garments, the scarlet
vestments of the choirs came like the blare of trumpets. The little ones
marched with downcast eyes, their arms crossed under their red capes
edged with