Review: Ghost Story: "The Mass of Shadows" by Anatole France

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As they sit sharing a bottle of wine in an arbor at a tavern, the sacristan of the church of St. Eulalie of Neuville d’Aumont relates this tale to our narrator. The sacristan is the son of a gravedigger and accustomed to the habits of the dead. If he sees a ghost in a graveyard, he says, he’ll let him go about his business as he’s going about his own. And there’s simply a lot he won’t tell. But he has one story his father used to tell, that is, the one of the old maid Catherine Fontaine. She was poor but of excellent reputation and supported herself making lace. She lived alone in a tiny apartment in a turret which had once been part of a convent of Ursuline nuns and faced what was left of their garden. Just barely legible letters on the turret spelled out in Latin: “Love is stronger than death.” No one knew anything of her family or relatives. It was rumored that she had once been secretly engaged to the young Chevalier d’Aumont-Cléry, but decent folk didn’t pay attention to any of that. One night she heard the church bells ringing for the first Mass and, pious woman that she was, she got up and headed toward the church. She didn’t meet a soul on her way. When she got there, she noticed that no one was making a sound, no one was speaking. This is a sweet, sad old-fashioned ghost story. It does beg a couple of questions. How did the sacristan’s father come to know this story, for one? Author Anatole France was a member of the Académie française and won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1922, his entire body of work was put on the Prohibited Books Index of the Roman Catholic Church. (In this respect, he was in good company. Galileo’s works were also on the list and were Kepler’s for a while.) The Index was abolished in 1966. This story is available from Project Gutenberg: _____ Title: “The Mass of Shadows” Author: Anatole France (born François-Anatole Thibault) (1844-1924) First published: ” first published as “La messe des ombres” in “L'étui de nacre” (“The Pearl Case”) 1892 First English publication “The Mass of Shades” in Tales from the Mother-of-Pearl Casket 1896 Source: ISFDB *An earlier version of this review appeared on another site. It has been removed from that site, updated and expanded for its inclusion on myLot.*