He ceases.  The echo of the great magnificent words floats in the silence.  Everybody does not understand all that has just been said; but all have a deep impression that the text is one of simplicity, of moderation, of obedience, and foreheads move altogether in the breath of the phrases like a field in the breeze.

“Yes,” says Crillon, pensively, “he speaks to confection, that gentleman.  All that one thinks about, you can see it come out of his mouth.  Common sense and reverence, we’re attached to ’em by something.”

“We are attached to them by orderliness,” says Joseph Boneas.

“The proof that it’s the truth,” Crillon urges, “is that it’s in the dissertions of everybody.”

“To be sure!” says Benoit, going a bit farther, “since everybody says it, and it’s become a general repetition!”

The good old priest, in the center of an attentive circle, is unstringing a few observations.  “Er, hem,” he says, “one should not blaspheme.  Ah, if there were not a good God, there would be many things to say; but so long as there is a good God, all that happens is adorable, as Monseigneur said.  We shall make things better, certainly.  Poverty and public calamities and war, we shall change all that, we shall set those things to rights, er, hem!  But let us alone, above all, and don’t concern yourselves with it—­you would spoil everything, my children. We shall do all that, but not immediately.”

“Quite so, quite so,” we say in chorus.

“Can we be happy all at once,” the old man goes on; “change misery into joy, and poverty into riches?  Come now, it’s not possible, and I’ll tell you why; if it had been as easy as all that, it would have been done already, wouldn’t it?”

The bells begin to ring.  The four strokes of the hour are just falling from the steeple which the rising mists touch already, though the evening makes use of it last of all; and just then one would say that the church is beginning to talk even while it is singing.

The important people get onto their horses or into their carriages and go away—­a cavalcade where uniforms gleam and gold glitters.  We can see the procession of the potentates of the day outlined on the crest of the hill which is full of our dead.  They climb and disappear, one by one. Our way is downward; but we form—­they above and we below—­one and the same mass, all visible together.

“It’s fine!” says Marie, “it looks as if they were galloping over us!”

They are the shining vanguard that protects us, the great eternal framework which upholds our country, the forces of the mighty past which illuminate it and protect it against enemies and revolutions.

And we, we are all alike, in spite of our different minds; alike in the greatness of our common interests and even in the littleness of our personal aims.  I have become increasingly conscious of this close concord of the masses beneath a huge and respect-inspiring hierarchy.  It permits a sort of lofty consolation and is exactly adapted to a life like mine.  This evening, by the light of the setting sun, I see it and read it and admire it.