Hat

Sooner than the world expected (TIME, Dec. 28), on a bleak December day within a fortnight of his elevation, His Eminence Bonaventura Cardinal Cerretti, papal nuncio at Paris, got his red hat, his galerum rubrum, got it without the fanfare and spectacle so influential on the French.

In the courtyard of the grey Palais de 1'Elysee shuffled the famed Garde Republicaine band; within the huge pile fidgeted Gaston Doumergue, Protestant President of France, Aristide Briand, anticlerical Premier, lesser officials. They were trapped out in state uniforms, ribbons across chests, decorations pendent. They spoke little. Premier Briand was thinking of his successful 1905 fight to oust the Church from its French properties, of his long struggle to keep separate Church and State in France. President Doumergue thought of his Huguenot ancestors buried in Provence. Here he was, a Protestant, about to lend his office to the robing of a Catholic prelate. Yet his countrymen are mostly Catholics, although by no means altogether dutifully so, and it would be politic to ignore last spring's imbroglio with the Vatican (see TIME, Feb. 9 et seq.) which has gradually faded.

Attention! The band fell into place; gendarmes along the rue de Faubourg St.-Honore stood stark, forcibly restraining Parisians crowded against the cordons in hopes that there would fall upon them in blessing the bright eyes of Cardinal Cerretti as he sat beside His Eminence Louis-Ernest Cardinal Dubois, Archbishop of Paris, as they were trundled along in the state coach, accompanied by two squadrons of cuirassiers, to the crowning.

Within the palace the laity and clergy greeted each other amiably. Cardinal Cerretti seated himself; watched President Doumergue hand the red hat to Cardinal Dubois; received from Cardinal Dubois the red hat (which the Papal ablegate, Roman Prince Monte Leon, had rushed with the Papal decree of creation from Rome); knelt on a coronation cushion the Republique has frugally preserved from monarchial times; felt the soft folds of the cappa magna fall over his shoulders from the hands of his brother cardinal; passed into a makeshift vestry; donned in privacy the complete cardinalitial regalia; stepped out a prince of the Church; accepted felicitations. The band blared to perfection the Marseillaise.