against type, they brought with them, on the one hand, the very
presence and perfume of Paris, the centre of courtly propriety and
fashion; on the other hand, with faces which seemed to belong to
another age, curiosities of existence from remote provinces of
France, or Europe, from distant, half-fabulous lands, remoter still.
Jules Damville, who would have liked best to be a sailor, [44] to
command, not in any spiritual ark, but in the French fleet--should
half-ruined France ever come to have one--led his companions one
evening to inspect a strange maritime personage, stout and square,
returned, contrary to all expectation, after ten years' captivity
among the savages of Florida, kneeling among the lights at the
shrine, with the frankness of a good child, his hair like a mat, his
hands tattooed, his mahogany face seamed with a thousand weather-
wrinklings, his outlandish offerings lying displayed around him.

Looking, listening, as they served them in the episcopal guest-
chamber, those young clerks made wonderful leaps, from time to time,
in manly knowledge. With what eager shrewdness they noted,
discussed, reproduced, the manners and attire of their pilgrim
guests, sporting what was to their liking therein in the streets of
Chartres. The more cynical or supercilious pilgrim would sometimes
present himself--a personage oftenest of high ecclesiastical station,
like the eminent translator of Plutarch, Amyot, afterwards Bishop of
Auxerre, who seemed to care little for shrine or relic, but lingered
long over certain dim manuscripts in the canonical library, where our
scholarly Gaston was of service, helping him directly to what he
desired to see. And one morning early, visible at a distance to all
the world, risen betimes to gaze, the Queen-mother and her three sons
were [45] kneeling there--yearning, greedy, as ever, for a hundred
diverse, perhaps incompatible, things. It was at the beginning of