Mineral Point tribune. (Mineral Point, Wis.) 1869-1938, 1896-09-10
NoTRE DAME.
A Tiny French Church and the Ser
vices Held There.

A favorite haunt of mine on Sunday
evenings was the tiny French churcn
of Notre Dame in tiny street off
Leicester square. How many London
ers have ever suspected that in that
nest OF foreign birds of prey, suspected
by Mrs. Grundy and by the police
within stones throw of where the
ladies of the ballet pirouette in the
celestial armament of the Alhambra,
and of the back street where, for all we
know, the next valiant or Caserio may
be constructing the next nitro glycerine
bomb--they could behold scene of
Catholic piety as beautiful and as true
Oh May Sunday morning? 1t was i'm
possible, even in Ireland, 10 witness a
finer scene Of supplemented devotion
than in that tiny oratory of Notre
Dame at vesper hour. One of the
charms of the place was the delicious
French vesper canticles; another was,
perhaps (all earthly motives are so
mixed, to improve ones French by
listening to the French serInon. | was
there again during my late visit TO
England. In a London that changed
so much. here was the only true un-
changeable-th ministry that never
goes out, the sanctuary lamp that has
{. way of going on burning through the
ages after the statesmen and the scien
fists, the poets and the conquerors,
have all in their little hour flickered
out into the night There were the
mites Of French boys in their scarlet
soutanes, cherub-like as so many heads
by Sir joshua; there was the procession
of young girls in their first communion
dress, with their white chaplet cf
flowers and the long wells breathing
piety as pure as if we stood not within
hail of Piccaiiilly but on the sands of
Paimpol with NJ Pierre Lott, seeing
Corpus Christi procession go by, or
with NJ Ferdinand Fabre at some
nut-shaded mountain fetc in the
Ceyennes. Governments rise and fall,
but there from the choir rises the ever
lasting address to the throne: "in TIE,
Domino, speraavle: nong confongdarr
In acternoomr and there in the same
two front rows of chairs before the
altar sit the nuns Of the hospitalas on
a front treasury bench df one may,
without irreverence, use the simile),
from which no fckleness of popular
passion will ever dislodge them until
they are raised TO an Upper House, in
which there viii be moth and rust no
more, Then the charming prayer Of
the congregation for the church, for
France, for the conversion OF England.
for the sick In the hospital; and-oh!
so touching and so French-for the in
tentions Of mother gfavement
soucieuse pour son seul fills. What a
picture it conJures up Of some black
eyed. brown-cheeked boy lost in some
den Of perhaps a young an.
archist, living as Valiant lived to die
as valiant ded-and the heavy aeart-
ed mother and sister exiles to pray
with her to Notre Dame Of her old
Breton village to save him! 1t was all as
of old; and as went out into the night
air penetrated with the something d.
vine that always perfumes the mind in
such a place, X reemed strange not 10
find Leicester square illuminated with
a brightness beyond the brightness of
all the electric lights Of the Alhambra
facade. London "reminiscences Of Will
liam O'Brien in the Contemporary Re
view.