Summary
Jean Marie Latour—Vicar Apostolic of New Mexico and Bishop of Agathonica, whom we first meet traveling on horse and struggling with thirst in the New Mexico desert—has traveled down the Mississippi from Cincinnati to New Orleans, from New Orleans to Galveston, across Texas to San Antonio, and then into New Mexico towards Santa Fe. Along the way, he ran into two great misfortunes when his steamer sank at Galveston and he injured his leg jumping out of a wagon on his way to San Antonio. Father Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, his boyhood friend and fellow priest, eventually arrive at Santa Fe, but the people there tell him that they have no news of his coming and consider themselves to be under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Durango.
On their way to meet this bishop, Latour and Vaillant come across a secluded Mexican settlement called Agua Secreta and spend the night there, performing sacraments for the villagers. Latour obtains his papers at Durango and settles into his position as bishop in Santa Fe. He writes letters to his family and friends back in France. While speaking with Father Vaillant on Christmas Day, Father Latour recounts the story of Our Lady of Guadaloupe.
Analysis
In direct contrast to the domestic scene of the prologue, which takes place in the old heart of civilization, our first encounter with Father Jean Marie Latour finds him in the middle of highly alienating wilderness:
He had lost his way, and was trying to get back to the trail, with only his compass and his sense of direction for guides. The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless — or rather, that it was crowded with features, all exactly alike. As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks (14).
This contrast between old European civilized society at the frontier life and landscape, as of yet incomprehensible to the young French priest, should remind us of his former Bishop's, Father Ferrand's, feelings of an opposite alienation from the cardinals in Rome: "He asked himself whether he had been on the frontier so long that he had quite lost his taste for the talk of clever men" (12). It is only because Father Latour makes his long journey to New Mexico and confronts a natural and human world he knows very little about -- other than the Spanish language and the Catholic religion, which are his two entry points and missions -- that he is eventually, over the course of the novel, able to attain a kind of harmony, both as a priest with the local culture of his diocese and as a man among friends. Thus, the novel can be considered a kind of bildungsroman, but not so much in the sense of the protagonist's maturation in himself or his acculturation to a society he already belongs to; rather, it concerns the gradual familiarization of a missionary to a foreign land and foreign peoples.
