From The French.

In the Beaujolais, the country par excellence of beautiful women and beautiful vines, a little village lies hidden among luxuriant arbors. Each house is clothed in green leaves, and the wine, though rare, is not so wonderful as the immense tuns that hold it. Yet Coigny, with its nectar, its beautiful sky, its coquettish habitations its robust sons and attractive daughters, had not a habitable church. Still it dreamed of one, and four worthy priests worked hard and hopefully for the realization of the dream. One of them climbed well his ladder of orders, and has since become Bishop of Coutances; and if, as it is said, the zeal, piety, and legitimate influence of four ecclesiastics will finish the Cathedral of Cologne, notwithstanding the devil's theft of the plan, what might not be hoped for Coigny?

So nothing more need be told than that, from amidst the lovely, smiling verdure of the little town, there sprang an exquisite white marble church, a temptation to pray in as well as to see, and the admiration of the entire province.

Madame la Marquise de —— gave all her inimitable guipures to ornament the high altar, and Monsieur le Comte de ——, a great amateur in pictures, placed a true Mignard—a Madonna with a lovely smile—upon the walls, even before they dried.

So each and all offered homage in the new house of God.

Still the beautiful little church lacked a patron, a saint under whose invocation it might be placed, and the blessed one must be represented by his own venerable ashes, a relic of the past, a protection for the future.

The village of Coigny, therefore, spared neither pains nor expense to be satisfied in this regard, and the Holy Father was applied to to select the patron. The dear old man replied favorably to the little town he could scarcely find on the map, and which was more noted for bearing the cross than ringing the bell; and a curious and grave ceremony took place.

They opened the Roman Catacombs, and they descended into the vaults of the cemetery of S. Cyriac, and there they chose the mortal remains of a Christian martyr buried for many centuries.

The stone that closed the cell bore a palm branch and the inscription,

and indicated he had died for the faith in the early ages of Christianity. His bones and the size of his head denoted only the adolescent, scarcely more than a child; while the whole expressed the courage of the man united to the grace of the angel.

The account from which this is taken adds, this young soldier of Christ was found sleeping peacefully at his post, extended on his granite bier, with his forehead cleft asunder, his neck cut open, of which the little bottle by his side held the precious blood. The figure of the young martyr had been covered with virgin wax, carefully enclosing the sacred bones, and, attired in silk and embroidery, he is holding the palm branch in his hand. The wounded head inclines [pg 138] as if bending to his murderers, his throat lies open in its deep sword-wound, his hands and feet have bled, and the purple tide gushes from his wounds and trickles over his limbs; but his lips are shut with love, and his eyes are fixed, regarding with S. Stephen the heavens opening to receive him.

So this child of eighteen hundred years ago, this soldier of the faith, taken from the Roman Catacombs, was sent by the Pope to Coigny.

Can we not imagine his reception? Did not the village ring out its festal bells, and scatter flowers on his path, and with thousands of candles in the nave, and incense mounting far above the high altar, did not the little church welcome this contemporary of Nero, who had travelled surrounded by glorious palms in his own carriage over the line from Italy?

He has come, and twenty priests bear him on their shoulders, and his final resting-place is under the high altar.

Coigny, the coquette, crowned by its green vine branches, bacchante-like, the pious Coigny, has its martyr in the vaults of its own dear church, no more nor less than if it were a basilica.

True, he was an almost forgotten saint, and anonymously canonized, but the Scriptures told us long ago, “God knows how to recompense his own.”