Death Comes for the Archbishop: Book 9: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

After lunch, Latour pretends to sleep. In reality, though, he is reflecting on his time with Vaillant; he recalls the way they escaped their parents to come to Ohio, modeling their own behavior after St. Francis Xavier. This betrayal had felt particularly hard for Vaillant, who hated to leave his widower father. The day before they left, Latour had calmed Vaillant—a gesture that Vaillant later credited as the sole reason he had been brave enough to come to America.

Though Latour was stronger and seemed smarter, Vaillant was a better missionary, much to everyone’s surprise. And while Latour often said, “that his diocese changed little except in boundaries,” Vaillant had been thrust into the center of industrial ambition, moving from one mining town to the next. More than that, Vaillant had also bought up lots of land for the church, forming a land company and getting caught up with dishonest brokers. When Vaillant, then first bishop of Colorado, was summoned to Rome, it was hard for him to explain his financial plans to the papal court.

As soon as Latour learned of Vaillant’s death, he had hopped on the first train to Denver. But though Latour attended the funeral, he still always pictured Vaillant as a young man, on the first day of their arrival to Santa Fé. The funeral was packed; one old priest had even left the hospital where he himself was dying in a mad rush, just to pay his respects to Vaillant. To onlookers, this commitment was “one more instance of the extraordinary personal devotion that Father Joseph had aroused and retained” in men of all races.