“If Carhaix could hear you!  But, my friend, in the Middle Ages bell-ringers were high officials.  True, the craft has declined considerably in modern times.  I couldn’t tell you myself how Carhaix became hipped on the subject of bells.  All I know is that he studied at a seminary in Brittany, that he had scruples of conscience and considered himself unworthy to enter the priesthood, that he came to Paris and apprenticed himself to a very intellectual master bell-ringer, Pere Gilbert, who had in his cell at Notre Dame some ancient and of course unique plans of Paris that would make your mouth water.  Gilbert wasn’t a ‘labourer,’ either.  He was an enthusiastic collector of documents relating to old Paris.  From Notre Dame Carhaix came to Saint Sulpice, fifteen years ago, and has been there ever since.”

“How did you happen to make his acquaintance?”

“First he was my patient, then my friend.  I’ve known him ten years.”

“Funny.  He doesn’t look like a seminary product.  Most of them have the shuffling gait and sheepish air of an old gardener.”

“Carhaix will be all right for a few more years,” said Des Hermies, as if to himself, “and then let us mercifully wish him a speedy death.  The Church, which has begun by sanctioning the introduction of gas into the chapels, will end by installing mechanical chimes instead of bells.  That will be charming.  The machinery will be run by electricity and we shall have real up-to-date, timbreless, Protestant peals.”

“Then Carhaix’s wife will have a chance to go back to Finistere.”

“No, they are too poor, and then too Carhaix would be broken-hearted if he lost his bells.  Curious, a man’s affection for the object that he manipulates.  The mechanic’s love for his machine.  The thing that one tends, and that obeys one, becomes personalized, and one ends by falling in love with it.  And the bell is an instrument in a class of its own.  It is baptized like a Christian, anointed with sacramental oil, and according to the pontifical rubric it is also to be sanctified, in the interior of its chalice, by a bishop, in seven cruciform unctions with the oil of the infirm that it may send to the dying the message which shall sustain them in their last agonies.

“It is the herald of the Church, the voice from without as the priest is the voice from within.  So you see it isn’t a mere piece of bronze, a reversed mortar to be swung at a rope’s end.  Add that bells, like fine wines, ripen with age, that their tone becomes more ample and mellow, that they lose their sharp bouquet, their raw flavour.  That will explain—­imperfectly—­how one can become attached to them.”

“Why, you seem to be an enthusiast yourself.”

“Oh, I don’t know anything about it.  I am simply repeating what I have heard Carhaix say.  If the subject interests you, he will be only too glad to teach you the symbolism of bells.  He is inexhaustible.  The man is a monomaniac.”