THE RELICS OF NOTRE DAME.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 151, 24 March 1876, Page 14

THE RELICS OF NOTRE DAME.

++ Mb. Henry Bedford of All Hallows College, Dublin, makes the following note for the London ' Month ' of his visit to the cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris : It is an abrupt transition to pass from the Opera House to the Cathedral, from those snowy saloons to the blood-stained relics of which we wish to say a word ; but travellers have to hurry from point to point, and to master incongruities as great as these. And perhaps if we were to look deeper below the surface than suits our present purposes, we might find some dark connecting link which ties together these bloody vestiges of the work '.of the Commune and the lavish expenditure of which this Opera House is a significant symbol. Nor will it surprise the student of history to see that the innocent have paid the penalty of the guilty. " In the sacristy of the Cathedral are many rich reliquaries, upon which, as works of art, the guardian does not fail to discourse learnedly ; there are also saintly treasures, of which less is said., as doubtless the official has learned prudence and does not care to ' cast pearls before swine.' But throughout are the memorials of recent times which tell their own tale and speak plainly to all men alike. How nobly and with what simple charity have these Archbishops of Paris fallen one after the other, a chain of martyrs, in their Master's cause ! and how carefully, we might almost say morbidly, have the tokens been treasured up ! Here amid chalices, crucifixes, and vestments— each one with its interesting historylies the bullet which pierced Mgr. Affre when he fell at the barricade, and died with that noble prayer on his lips — ' May my blood be the last shed. And here beside it, pierced by an arrow to which the fatal bullet is fixed, are the two adjacent portions of the spine through which it carried its message of death. It was a holy thought which brought hither the crucifix he carried in his hands to that his last mission of charity. " In another room is preserved and shown the soutane stained with blood in which the Archbishop fell, and beside it hang the two dresses in which his successors perished. One is the vestment through which the assassin's dagger passed into the heart of Mgr. Sibour at St. Etienne dv Mont, guided by the hand which he in the dischai'ge of his high duty, suspended from touching sacred things. The other and last in this strange collection is the soutane of Mgr. Darboy, pierced, not with a dagger stroke or a single shot, but torn and mangled by seven bullets and stained with his own blood and the dirt of the foul wall against which the Communists placed him as their target, and with the earth on which he breathed out his righteous soul. If ' Caesar's vestment wounded ' stirred up the hearts of Romans against his butchers, surely this bloodstained, muddy soutane will be at once a warning and an segis for the people of Paris against the designs of those who wrought so foul a deed.