Afterward went to church at Notre Dame, and, sitting there, drew my first quiet breath in Châlons, out of the hot streets. Beautiful music rolling through the gray, antique vaulting. A white bier near the altar; some beloved child was being laid away from sight and hearing and touch and earthly hope. As I looked about the lovely gray spaces I remembered how in _La Cathédrale_ Huysmans says the length symbolizes the patience of the Church during trials and persecutions; the width, that love which dilates the heart; and the height, our aspirations and our hopes—and some speechless gratitude overflowed my soul because of being one of the enduring community to whom, through the gorgeous, terrible ages, nothing human is foreign. I had a strange, complete sensation of brotherhood and I saw us all of the great laughing, weeping caravan, winding through the desert, and the Church compassionate the spot of living waters. And how “men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.” ... On the same site had once been a pagan temple, and on its altar was the figure of a Virgin, and at her feet were graven the words, “_Virgini Parituri_” (“to the Virgin who shall bring forth”). And it had come to pass. The most precious of the old windows have lately been put out of harm’s way, but the ogival tops remain with their jewels of medieval reds and blues; and on each side, as one looks through the lovely gray vaulting, are delicate windows of a later epoch, with designs in fawn and green and yellow. As I came out behind the mourners following the little white bier, I noticed again with a sinking of the heart the revolutionary defacement of the splendid portals. Men in all ages have had seasons of madness, wherein they destroyed whatever mute and unresisting beauty was within their reach. Again through the hot streets—an epic in themselves of war, dust, sun, blue-clad men, blue-gray automobiles, gallooned officers, and I realized among other things that without uniforms war would be impossible.