It was on such an occasion, then,--on a Whitsunday afternoon, amid
the gaudy red hues of the season, that Gaston listened to one, who,
as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event then
commemorated, had a great [138] deal to say concerning the Spirit;
above all, of the freedom, the indifference, of its operations; and
who would give a strangely altered colour, for a long time to come,
to the thoughts, to the very words, associated with the celebration
of Pentecost. The speaker, though understood to be a brother of the
Order of Saint Dominic, had not been present at the mass--the daily
University red mass, De Spiritu Sancto, but said to-day according to
the proper course of the season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, with
much pomp, by the Italian Bishop of Paris. It was the reign of the
Italians just then, a doubly refined, somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-
coloured, Italy in France, more Italian still. What our Elisabethan
poets imagined about Italian culture--forcing all they knew of Italy
to an ideal of dainty sin such as had never actually existed there,--
that the court of Henry, so far as in it lay, realised in fact.
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