They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University, and admired
the Le Brun, and the other paintings of less merit, but equal interest
through their suggestion of a whole dim religious world of paintings; and
then they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so much in looking at
the Crucifixion by Vandyck which is there, as in reveling amid the
familiar rococo splendors of the temple. Every swaggering statue of a
saint, every rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that on the carven
and gilded clouds above the high altar float--
"Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,"--
was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the sacred properties with a
feather brush, and giving each shrine a business-like nod as he passed,
was as a long-lost brother; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness for
the young girls and old women who stepped in for a half-hour's devotion,
and for the men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a moment from
affairs and crops, and gave it to the saints. There was nothing in the
place that need remind them of America, and its taste was exactly that of
a thousand other churches of the eighteenth century. They could easily
have believed themselves in the farthest Catholic South, but for the two
great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave near the
entrance, and that too vividly reminded them of the possibility of cold.
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