The people
of La Beauce were proud, and would talk often of its rich store of
sacred furniture, the wonder-working relics of "Our Lady under the
Earth," and her sacred veil or shift, which kings and princes came to
visit, returning with a likeness thereof, replete in miraculous
virtue, for their own wearing. The busy fancy of Gaston, multiplying
this chance hearsay, had set the whole interior in array--a dim,
spacious, fragrant place, afloat with golden lights. Lit up over the
autumn fields at evening, the distant spires suggested the splendour
within, with so strong an imaginative effect, that he seemed scarcely
to know whether it was through the mental or bodily eye that he
beheld. When he came [27] thither at last, like many another well-
born youth, to join the episcopal household as a kind of half-
clerical page, he found (as happens in the actual testing of our
ideals) at once more and less than he had supposed; and his earlier
vision was a thing he could never precisely recover, or disentangle
from the supervening reality. What he saw, certainly, was greater
far in mere physical proportion, and incommensurable at first by
anything he knew--the volume of the wrought detail, the mass of the
component members, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry,
contrary to the usual Gothic manner, and as if in reminiscence of
those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been
adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed
of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for her.
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