In this way a fine philosophic equality establishes itself with the utmost perfection at the steps of the altar, far more successfully than in any palace; all cliquishness even disappears; a woman who has toiled all the week at her spinning-wheel displays her charms by the side of the lady of rank, moved by the same sentiment of elegance, idleness, and art. For anyone with the least spark of sensibility or love of the beautiful, church becomes the land of dreams, the starting-point for every elevating influence. The Gothic church, with its lofty, light, graceful columns, lifts the soul into a sort of mystic accord; there is something warmer, more human, more genuinely intimate about the Italian church; women high or humble experience there a sensation of unmixed delight. They contemplate with tender trustfulness the imperturbable Madonna who has already seen the passage of many generations, and who continues to regard them from her nook in the wall with her woman’s smile—that smile of infinite sweetness, of lingering and universal pity, directed towards the children and the dead, towards all who suffer and love, weep and laugh, a smile like a sweet-savoured incense of purification and grace. The Italians loved the magnificence of their temples—the marbles bathed in sunlight, the shadowy arches where the soul could unbosom itself without blasphemy, and all those little secluded chapels in which every man found his own saint, and came to offer up his poor, trembling, fainting heart as the whole _ex-voto_ of life. In these hidden splendours, in the charm of mystic music soaring amidst paintings and sculptures, gilded ornaments and exquisite perfumes, midway between the past and the future, there is a wonderfully soft and voluptuous pleasure. It is with profound philosophy that Caviceo lays the scene of the first interview between his hero and heroine in the shade of an altar; assuredly, in wrapping itself with this veil of refinement and modesty, love puts on a sacred character. So the church becomes, in its wealth of compassion, the haven of refuge for pure and sensitive souls, and even for some others. Anne of Rohan gave tryst to her lover in the chapel of Amboise;[207] a young girl of Orleans with Machiavelian cunning made a Franciscan friar her catspaw to attract the student she loved.[208] Pontanus depicts the prolonged meditations of the Neapolitan ladies, long after the last of the candles had been extinguished in the dusky nave.[209] A thousand incidents of this sort might be cited: Francis I. in the church of Amboise pursuing a charming girl with his devotion;[210] Panurge, whom Rabelais sets to dog the footsteps of a noble lady, piously offering her holy water, slipping inflammatory love-letters into her hand during mass, and playing the most impudent tricks to attract her attention; the poet Crétin, furious because at Lyons the church services are turned to account almost exclusively by young fops and paunchy bankers.