Samara’s Reviews > Death Comes for the Archbishop > Status Update

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 knelt, and Father Vaillant, having blessed him, knelt and was blessed in turn. They embraced each other for the past - for the future.

We have done the things we used to plan to do, long ago, when we were Seminarians - at least some of them. To fulfil the dreams of one's youth - that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.

As a Bishop, he could only approve Father Vaillant's eagerness to be gone, and the enthusiasm with which he turned to hardships of a new kind. But as a man, he was a little hurt that his old comrade should leave him without one regret.

Wherever he went, he soon made friends that took the place of country and family.
But Jean, who was at ease in any society and always the flower of courtesy, could not form new ties. It had always been so. He was like that even as a boy: gracious to everyone, but known to a very few.

The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated 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!

During their Seminary years he had easily surpassed his friend in scholarship, but he always realized that Joseph excelled him in the fervour of his faith.