I can't guess what the poor lad has written to Susan or how she is going to take it. But love and hate, even the loves and hates of poor and simple people, come home to me so vividly here at Sainte Véronique, that I can't help feeling miserable over Gibson's trouble. With the undimmed sun shining down from a cloudless heaven on the endless waters and the immeasurable uplands, such elemental verities as love and life and death seem to be at home.
It was to Bérigny that I went for Mass. The curé spoke to me afterwards, as I was sitting under the shadow of the Calvary. He is a simple soul; but he talked with spirit and intelligence about his Church and his country. I found him still smarting under the well-meant fussiness of two old maids from Bournemouth who were at the Hôtel du Dauphin last month. It appears that they distributed Evangelical tracts in French, wherein the present troubles of the Church in France were explained as a divinely appointed punishment of Popery and as a divine call to the French people to embrace Scriptural truth. The curé spoke with fine scorn of that British sectarian animosity which hates the Pope ten times worse than the Devil. And he confirmed what I had learned from the more blatant Paris journals--that the so-called campaign against clericalism is at heart a campaign against Christianity, and not only against Christian dogma, but even against many ancient precepts of Christian morals. More. He confirmed what I have myself read in the speeches of deputies and even of Ministers--that the attack is not merely against Christianity, but against the whole idea of supernatural religion, and that it is avowedly an attempt to establish a lay state, a purely secular community trained from childhood to believe that all religion is superstition and that human science alone can teach men how to live and die.
After the curé went home to break his fast, I still lingered in the churchyard. A new plank-monument had been raised during the week over a new tomb; and its jet-black letters on a snow-white ground reminded me of the resolve I had made to offer a De Profundis for the faithful dead.
I found the place in my _paroissien_, and said the opening words aloud. The sound of my own voice in that sunny field of death frightened me, and I stopped. I began again, reading to myself. But it was of no use. I couldn't go on.