The procession, which had gone forth to fetch the Bishop from the Hospice of Saint Brice, where, in obedience to time-honoured custom, he had slept the night before entering his See, had made its way thither under a fine rain of chanted canticles, broken by heavier showers of brass sounding a pious flourish of trumpets.  Slowly, with measured steps, the train wound along between two hedges of people crowded on the sidewalks, and all the way the windows, hung with drapery, displayed bunches of faces and leaning bodies, cut across the middle by the balcony bar.

At the head of the procession, behind the gaudy uniforms of the ponderous beadles, came the girls of the Congregational Schools, dressed in crude blue with white veils, in two ranks, filling up the roadway; then followed delegates of nuns from every Order that has a House in the diocese; Sisters of the Visitation from Dreux, Ladies of the Sacred Heart from Chateaudun, Sisters of the Immaculate Conception from Nogent le Rotrou, the uncloistered Sisters of the Cloistered Orders of Chartres, Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul and Poor Clares, whose dresses of blueish grey and peat-brown contrasted with the black robes of the others.

What was most odd was the various shapes of their coifs.  Some had soft flapping blinkers, others wore them goffered and stiffened with starch; these hid their face at the bottom of a deep white tunnel; others, on the contrary, showed their countenance set in an oval frame of pleated cambric, prolonged behind into conical wings of starched linen lustrous from heavy irons.  As he looked over this expanse of caps, Durtal was reminded of the Paris landscape of roofs, in shapes resembling the funnels worn by these nuns and the cocked hats of the beadles.

Then, behind these long files of sober-coloured garments, the scarlet vestments of the choirs came like the blare of trumpets.  The little ones marched with downcast eyes, their arms crossed under their red capes edged with ermine, and behind them, a little in advance of the next group, walked two white cowls, that of a Brother of Picpus, and that of a Trappist who represented the Trappist Sisterhood of La Cour Peytral, to which he was chaplain.

Finally the Seminarists came on in a black crowd; those of the Great Seminary of Chartres and of the Little Seminary of Saint Cheron preceding the priests, and behind them, under a purple velvet canopy embroidered in gold with wheat ears and grapes, and decorated at each corner with bunches of snow-white feathers, with his mitre on his head and holding his crozier, came Monseigneur Le Tilloy des Mofflaines.

As he passed, in the act of blessing the street, many an unknown Lazarus rose up, the forgotten dead come back to life; His Reverence seemed to multiply the Miracles of the Lord.  Effete old men, huddled in their chairs in the doorways or at the windows, revived for a second, and found strength enough to cross themselves.  Persons who had been supposed dead for years managed almost to smile.  The vacant eyes of old, old children gazed at the violet cross outlined in the air by the Prelate’s gloved hand.  Chartres, that city of the dead, had changed to a vast nursery; in the extravagance of its joy the town was in its second childhood.