I give it with the
same respect with which you would quote some holy writer. Ah! my
dear Arribas! not all the saints have received canonization."
It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes
back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have
something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those
solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of
M. Alphonse Legros. The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium
perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those spacious
sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than
usually recherche work of art, one is presently dominated by their
reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at
least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without
touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the
most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the
ecclesiastical life. Just such interiors we seem to visit under the
magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen. He has a real power of taking
one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very
different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in
fiction an escape.
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