By the standards of cathedrals, Glandèves cathedral is very small; but that should not surprise. It is in Entrevaux, a walled town of narrow off-true alleys, as constricted and picturesque as the contents of a snow globe.
The cathedral is dark when you go in, and it’s hard to make out too much of the big paintings or the star-painted ceiling or the columns that look oddly as though they’re swathed in red velvet. Then a man in a clerical collar passes you with a small acknowledgement and goes to the back of the church. The meditative silence for which you stepped inside is broken by workmanlike bangs, the clangor of metal on metal. The meditative dimness is, a moment later, broken also: lights come on one by one in answer to the bangs, showing up the gilded excesses in full electric-lamp glory, more than you wanted to see. The baroque was in good taste only in the age of candlelight, if then.
The paintings are of no special distinction. You think that, on the whole, you’d like to leave again, but it isn’t quite clear whether the clerical-collar man went to all that bother to turn on the lights for you, so that you could see the paintings, gildings, Corinthian columns, moldings, roundels, etc., in their full glory, and it would be rude to leave after–
Mercifully the lights snap back off. You stand, and walk purposefully toward the back.
The man in the clerical collar bangs and bangs again and from what little you can hear of his muttering he may be using words not entirely suited to the ecclesiastical environment. He barely acknowledges your going out. He is still struggling to enlighten the place.
