Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1896-09-10
NOTRE DAME.
4 Tin! French Church and the Ser
vices Held There.

A favoTite haunt of mine on Sunday
evenings was the tiny French church
OF Notre Dame in a 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 a 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 lycerine
bomb-they could behold a scene of
Catholic piety as beautiful and as true
as ever TRANSPORTED a Breton village
on May Sunday morning? 1t was i'm
possible, even in Ireland, TO witness
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 sermon. | was
there again during my late visit TO
England. In a London that changed
so much. here was the only true IN
geable-the ministry that never
goes out, the sanctuary lamp that has
6 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 f1ickered
out into the night. There We're the
mites of French boys in their scarlat
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 Of
flowers and the long wells, breathing a
piety as pure as if we stood not within
hail of Piccadilly, but OIL tie sands of
Paimpol with NJ. Pierre Lott, seeing a
Corpus Christi procession go by, or
with M. 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: Gin Te
Domino, speraavle: nong confongdarr
in aetern0Om!' and there in the same
two front rows Of chairs before the
altar sit the nuns of the hospital--as on
a front treasury bench Gf one may,
without irreverence, use the simile),
from which no fickleness of popular
passion will ever dislodge them until
they are raised to an Upper House, in
which there will 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 III the hospital; and--oh!
so touching and SO French-for the in
tentiOns of a mother gravemant
sOucieuse pour son saul fills. What a
picture it conjures up of some black
eyed, brown-cheelled boy lost in some
den of LondOn-perhaps a young an
archist, living as Valiant lived, to die
as Valiant dled-and the heavy leart-
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 Ill
vine that always perfumes the mind in
such a place, il seemed strange not TO
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.