Lent

Lent is presented as a liturgical season whose public rituals provide the setting for a crisis of religious composure. In the Church of St. Barnabé, its lectures, vespers, preaching, prayer, and gestures of devotion form an ordered sacred world, yet that order cannot prevent the narrator’s mind from turning toward mockery, fear, and supernatural possibility.

Liturgical Setting

Vespers at the Church of St. Barnabé have ended when the clergy leave the altar and the choir-boys settle into the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform proceeds down the south aisle, striking the pavement with his staff at every fourth step, and Monseigneur C—— follows him toward the pulpit. The congregation resettles itself between altar and pulpit while the preacher climbs the stairs and the organ voluntary comes to an end. This carefully staged sequence makes Lent visible as a collective discipline: movement, sound, rank, and bodily placement all return the congregation to ceremonial order.

The preacher’s authority is reinforced by his manner. After making the sign of the cross, Monseigneur C—— commands silence and delivers his text in a calm voice, looking quietly over the congregation. The sermon belongs to the season’s cycle of religious instruction; the narrator’s irreverent mental refrain refers to the preacher’s six Lent lectures and depicts them as increasingly unctuous. Lent therefore carries both institutional gravity and the narrator’s private resistance to that gravity.

A Season Disturbed

The narrator enters the church seeking relief after three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble. His body is exhausted, while his mind is simultaneously benumbed and acutely sensitive. He has been reading The King in Yellow, and the expectation that the church will heal or steady him gives the religious setting an urgent personal significance. Lent is not merely background chronology: it is the season in which he attempts to place mental disorder beneath the forms of Christian worship.

That attempt fails almost immediately. The organ music, which the narrator normally finds learned, scientific, controlled, and characteristically French in its taste, seems to become a pursuit. The pedals appear to chase someone while the manuals offer approval, creating the impression that a fugitive has little hope of escape. The music’s disciplined structure is thus transformed into menace. While the nuns remain placid and devout, and the fashionable woman beside him looks expectantly toward Monseigneur C——, the narrator alone experiences the organ as an intolerable disturbance.

Ritual and Irreverence

The contrast between the congregation’s visible devotion and the narrator’s inward agitation defines Lent’s dramatic function. The kneeling nuns do not appear disturbed; the organ might, from their expressions, be singing an Ave Maria. Their composure makes the narrator’s perception more isolated rather than less intense. Sacred ritual continues normally around him, but it no longer guarantees a shared reality.

As the sermon begins, the narrator cannot hear a word because a jingling refrain occupies his ears: "The skirts of St. Paul has reached. Having preached us those six Lent lectures, More unctuous than ever he preached,". The lines turn the season’s preaching into a comic and irreverent parody. His devoutness has fled, and he feels an unprecedented desire to mock the preacher, the church, and everyone within it. Lent’s language of penitence and instruction is therefore displaced by an involuntary rhythm that converts religious authority into ridicule.

The narrator finally abandons the service, fully aware that leaving is rude but unable to remain in what he calls a hateful mood. The departure marks the season’s immediate consequence for him: instead of producing repentance or consolation, the ritual intensifies his alienation. The church’s disciplined surface remains intact, while his experience crosses from religious observance into psychological and imaginative crisis.

Sacred Time and Supernatural Thresholds

Elsewhere in the narrative, religious signs and gestures continue to organize encounters with the past, danger, and death. In a vision of Château d'Ys, a girl welcomes the narrator across a bridge into a walled court; later, after Jeanne d'Ys disappears and the castle is revealed as crumbling ruins, he falls on his knees before a shrine carved for Our Mother of Sorrows. The Christian image of the Virgin, cross, and thorns becomes the final frame for the vanished beloved, linking sacred space with grief and temporal dislocation.

A separate vision begins with a field of flowers whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold. From far away, a woman cries that she has killed the man she loved and pours blood over the flowers from a jar bearing a thousand names. The imagery turns sacrifice into a disturbing counterpart to Christian ritual: blood, devotion, guilt, and the transformation of a sacredly charged scene are present, but the moral order is fractured. Against these episodes, the Church of St. Barnabé represents an established religious form whose ceremonies seek to contain human fear; Lent’s significance lies in the uneasy gap between that containment and the narrator’s experience of forces that ritual cannot master.

Cultural Echoes of Lent

Lent also appears in a brief wartime exchange that places religious language beside national loyalty. When an American attempts to pass a child, she identifies herself as a Bretonne and warns that her father, stationed above with the marine cannon, will shoot a spy. The man kisses her and asks her to pray for France; she answers, "For France and you, beau Monsieur." Though the scene is not set in the Church of St. Barnabé, it preserves the season’s association with prayer, sacrifice, and moral appeal while transferring those meanings into a crisis of war.

Taken together, these references make Lent a recurring temporal and symbolic structure rather than a simple date. It governs formal worship, exposes the narrator’s collapse of reverence, accompanies visions in which Christian images confront vanished time and death, and lends spiritual language to an appeal for France. Its decisive irony is that the season’s ordered rituals remain legible even when the characters’ worlds—and the narrator’s mind—no longer remain securely ordered.