made of the guns of Sebastopol, and the Savoyarde up on Montmartre, a new bell much larger than the rest.  This morning the air was full of them.  They came up to the height on which the traveller lay listening; they came clear and innumerable over the distant surge of the streets; he spent an hour wondering at such an unusual Parliament and General Council of Bells.  Then he said to himself:  “It must be some great feast of the Church.”  He was in a world he had never known before.  He was like a man who gets into a strange country in a dream and follows his own imagination instead of suffering the pressure of outer things; or like a boy who wanders by a known river till he comes to unknown gardens.

So anxious was he to take possession at once of this discovery of his that he went off hurriedly without eating or drinking, thinking only of what he might find.  He desired to embrace at one sight all that Paris was doing on a day which was full of St. Louis and of resurrection.  The thoughts upon thoughts that flow into the mind from its impression, as water creams up out of a stone fountain at a river head, disturbed him, swelling beyond the possibility of fulfilment.  He wished to see at once the fashionables in St. Clotilde and the Greek Uniates at St. Julien, and the empty Sorbonne and the great crowd of boys at Stanislas; but what he was going to see never occurred to him, for he thought he knew Paris too well to approach the cathedral.

Notre Dame is jealously set apart for special and well-advertised official things.  If you know the official world you know the great church, and unless some great man had died, or some victory had been won, you would never go there to see how Paris took its religion.  No midnight Mass is said in it; for the lovely carols of the Middle Ages you must go to St. Gervais, and for the pomp of the Counter-Reformation to the Madeleine, for soldiers to St. Augustin, for pilgrims to St. Etienne.  Therefore no one would, ever have thought of going to the cathedral on this day, when an instinct and revelation of Paris at prayer filled the mind.  Nevertheless, the traveller’s feet went, of their own accord, towards the seven bridges, because the Island draws all Paris to it, and was drawing him along with the rest.  He had meant perhaps to go the way that all the world has gone since men began to live on this river, and to follow up the Roman way across the Seine—­a vague intention of getting a Mass at St. Merry or St. Laurent.  But he was going as a dream sent him, without purpose or direction.

The sun was already very hot and the Parvis was blinding with light when he crossed the little bridge.  Then he noticed that the open place had dotted about it little groups of people making eastward.  The Parvis is so large that you could have a multitude scattered in it and only notice that the square was not deserted.  There were no more than a thousand, perhaps, going separately to Notre Dame, and a thousand made no show in such a square.  But when he went in through the doors he saw there something he had never seen before, and that he thought did not exist.  It was as though the vague interior visions of which the morning had been so full had taken on reality.