“By adding to this my own studies of the religious paintings removed now from the sanctuaries and collected in museums, and supplementing them by my remarks on the various cathedrals I may explore, I shall have travelled round the whole cycle of mysticism, have extracted the essence of the Middle Ages, have combined in a sort of sheaf these separate branches, scattered now for so many centuries, and have investigated more thoroughly one especially—­Symbolism namely, of which certain elements are almost lost from sheer neglect.

“Yes.  Symbolism has lent the principal charm to my life at Chartres; it occupied and comforted me when I was suffering from finding my soul so importunate and yet so low.”

And he tried to recapitulate the science, to view it as a whole.

He saw it as a thickly branched tree, the root deep set in the very soil of the Bible; from thence, in fact, it drew its substance and its nourishment:  the trunk was the Symbolism of the Scriptures, the Old Testament prefiguring the Gospels; the branches were the allegorical purport of architecture, of colours, gems, flowers, and animals; the hieroglyphics of numbers; the emblematical meaning of the vessels and vestments of Church use.  A small bough represented Liturgical perfumes, and a mere twig, dried up from the first and almost dead, represented dancing.

“For religious dancing once existed,” Durtal went on.  “In ancient times it was a recognized offering of adoration, a tithe of light-heartedness.  David leaping before the Ark shows this.

“And in the earliest Christian times the faithful and the priesthood shook themselves in honour of the Redeemer, and fancied that by choric motion they were imitating the joy of the Blessed, the glee of the Angels described by Saint Basil as executing figures in the radiant assemblies of Heaven.

“One is soon accustomed to endure Masses of the kind called at Toledo Mussarabes, during which the congregation dance and gambol in the cathedral; but these capers presently lose the pious character that they are supposed to bear; they become an incentive to the revelry of the senses, and several Councils have prohibited them.

“In the seventeenth century sacred dances still survived in some provinces; we hear of them at Limoges, where the Cure of St. Leonard and his parishioners pirouetted in the choir of the church.  In the eighteenth century their traces are found in Roussillon, and at the present day religious dancing still survives; but the tradition of this saintly frisking is chiefly preserved in Spain.

“Not long since, on the day of Corpus Christi at Compostella, the procession was led through the streets by a tall man who danced carrying another on his shoulders.  And to this day, at Seville, on the festival of the Holy Sacrament, the choir-children turn in a sort of slow waltz as they sing hymns before the high altar of the cathedral.  In other towns, on the festivals of the Virgin, a saraband is slowly danced round Her statue, with striking of sticks, and the rattle of castanets; and to close the ceremony by way of Amen the people fire off squibs.