About them was a garden of masses
of green plants and of living blossoms, where were in flower great tufts
of white azaleas, of white camellias, and of lilacs. Away to the back
of the apse sparkled bits of gold and silver, half-seen skirts of velvet
and of silk, a distant dazzling of the tabernacle among the sombre
surroundings of green verdure. Above all this burning the nave sprang
out, and the four enormous pillars of the transept mounted upward to
support the arched vaulting, in the trembling movement of these myriads
of little flames, which almost seemed to pale at times in the full
daylight which entered by the high Gothic windows.
Angelique had wished to be married by the good Abbe Cornille, and when
she saw him come forward in his surplice, and with the white stole,
followed by two clerks, she smiled. This was at last the triumphant
realisation of her dream--she was wedding fortune, beauty, and power far
beyond her wildest hopes. The church itself was singing by the organs,
radiant with its wax-tapers, and alive with the crowd of believers and
priests, whom she knew to be around her on every side. Never had the old
building been more brilliant or filled with a more regal pomp, enlarged
as it were in its holy, sacred luxury, by an expansion of happiness.
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