"Death Comes For the Archbishop"

[fiefoe]

Among the things I love about the book are: the friendship between Father Latour and Father Joseph, descriptions of their beloved New Mexico landscape, and all those interesting historical tidbits.

• The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust.
• At one moment the whole flock of doves caught the light in such a way that they all became invisible at once, dissolved in light and disappeared as salt dissolves in water.
• His great diocese was still a heathen country.  The Indians travelled their old road of fear and darkness, battling with evil omens and ancient shadows. The Mexicans were children who played with their religion.
• Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.  Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer. Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from; that was for the murderer on the scaffold, as it was for the dying soldier or the martyr on the rack.
• coral--Mediterranean coral, that had been left in the Navajo country by Coronado's captains when they passed through it on their way to discover the Hopi villages and the Grand Canyon.
• his house was so frail a shelter that one seemed to be sitting in the heart of a world made of dusty earth and moving air.
• there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world.  The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it.  Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.  The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!
• Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air.
• They coursed over the sand with the fleetness of young antelope, their bodies disappearing and reappearing among the sand dunes, like the shadows that eagles cast in their strong, unhurried flight.
• I shall certainly never lift my hand to build a clumsy affair of red brick, like an English coach-house.  Our own Midi Romanesque is the right style for this country."
• Father Vaillant had first heard of (Colorado gold rush) through a letter from France.  Word of it had reached the Atlantic coast, crossed to Europe, and come from there back to the Southwest, more quickly than it could filter down through the few hundred miles of unexplored mountains and gorges between Cherry Creek and Santa Fé.
• All the bedding and clothing was packed in great sacks of dressed calfskin, which Sabino procured from old Mexican settlers.  These were already going out of fashion, but in the early days they were the poor man's trunk.
• Long before Her years on earth, in the long twilight between the Fall and the Redemption, the pagan sculptors were always trying to achieve the image of a goddess who should yet be a woman.
• Nobody in Colorado planted gardens, Father Vaillant related; nobody would stick a shovel into the earth for anything less than gold.
• If hereafter we have stars in our crowns, yours will be a constellation.  Give me your blessing."
• Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers.  He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.
• He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico.  It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple--the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.
• The old man smiled.  "I shall not die of a cold, my son.  I shall die of having lived."
• those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again.  He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests.  Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert. <> That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day.  He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it.  Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!
• The old countries were worn to the shape of human life, made into an investiture, a sort of second body, for man.
• recalling that St. Francis Xavier, when he set forth as missionary to India, had stolen away like this; had "passed the dwelling of his parents without saluting them" as they had learned at school; terrible words to a French boy.
• He formed a land company, went abroad and floated bonds in France to raise money, and dishonest brokers brought reproach upon his name.  When he was nearly seventy, with one leg four inches shorter than the other, Father Vaillant, then first Bishop of Colorado, was summoned to Rome to explain his complicated finance before the Papal court,--and he had very hard work to satisfy the Cardinals.
• More and more life seemed to him an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself.  This conviction, he believed, was something apart from his religious life; it was an enlightenment that came to him as a man, a human creature.
• For many years Father Latour used to wonder if there would ever be an end to the Indian wars while there was one Navajo or Apache left alive.  Too many traders and manufacturers made a rich profit out of that warfare; a political machine and immense capital were employed to keep it going.
• It was his own misguided friend, Kit Carson, who finally subdued the last unconquered remnant of that people;
• The two Frenchmen went as far as the Canyon de Chelly to behold the strange cliff ruins; once more crops were growing down at the bottom of the world between the towering sandstone walls; sheep were grazing under the magnificent cottonwoods and drinking at the streams of sweet water; it was like an Indian Garden of Eden.