The good Abbot of San Lucas, clad in his pontifical robes, with his jeweled mitre, his surplice and his golden crozier reclined, king of the choir, in a large armchair, amid all his clergy, who were impassive men with silver hair, and who surrounded him like the confessing saints whom the painters group round the Lord.

Closer and closer pressed on the slowly-moving phalanx, and the uplifted croziers threatened soon to put their sentence into execution.