Summary
In 1888, Father Vaillant dies. Around this time, Bishop Latour retires to a country estate near Santa Fe where he tends to a garden and trains new missionary priests from France, including his successor, Archbishop S--, and Bernard Ducrot, and Bernard Ducrot, a young seminarian who comes, inspired by stories of Latour, to serve him. Sensing that he will die soon, Father Latour asks Bernard to bring him back to Santa Fe; along the way, they watch the sunset and see the cathedral Father Latour had built.
After retiring, Father Latour returned to France but then felt that the depth of memories in his home made him feel too old; in New Mexico, in contrast, he felt that he always woke up as a young man. He enjoys the company of the priests there, telling them stories of his experiences traveling around as a missionary in New Mexico. He also recalls on his own important events of his past, such as the time when he helped give his friend Joseph Vaillant the courage to run away from his family so that the two of them could become missionary priests.
In the middle years of Bishop Latour's life, his Navajo friend convinced him to meet with Manuelito, the leader of the persecuted Navajos. Though he is not able to intercede with the American government, as Manuelito hoped he could, he is happy to see the government allow the Indian tribe to return to their land in later years.
Finally, as he dies, surrounded by his household, he sees himself back in the scene of convincing Father Vaillant to come away to become priests. His funeral is celebrated in the cathedral he built.
Analysis
Though Cather uses flashbacks and other devices of temporal distortion in previous chapters, it is this final chapter most of all that confuses the chronology of events, jumping from one frame to another and often returning to events from previous chapters while also projecting is own memory into an imagined future.
Of particular importance is the role played by the young seminarian Bernard Ducrot, who takes the place of the recently deceased Father Vaillant as the unmarried Father Latour's companion and who, as a character that knows much of Father Latour's past, serves as a preserver of his memory. We see his active sharing and recognition of the old Bishop's memory on a trip in which Bernard does not have to be told to understand the deeper significances and associated memories of the places and times that the Bishop revisits:
Bernard understood. He knew that once, long ago, at that hour of the day, a young Bishop had ridden along the Albuquerque road and seen Santa Fe for the first time. . . And often, when they were driving into town together, the Bishop had paused with Bernard on that hill-top from which Father Vaillant had looked back on Santa Fe, when he went away to Colorado to begin the work that had taken the rest of his life and made him, too, a Bishop in the end (271).
Latour has essentially come back to his original position when he first came to his new diocese in Santa Fe, not only in the sense of his solitude but also in the way that he shares the spiritual experience with a companion.
The inclusion of Latour and Vaillant's pivotal moment in their youth, along with frequent references to the now-dead Vaillant, cement the importance of the latter in the former's life. We hear, for example, the extraordinary association that "the Cathedral that had taken Father Vaillant’s place in his life after that remarkable man went away" (271), which demonstrates the magnitude of the friend's place in Father Latour's spiritual life. Moreover, the repetition of, or return to, the scene of the Latour and Vaillant's mutual trial of faith just as Latour is crossing into death shows that, if death is a circle in which one returns to what is most important in one's life, then that must be the companionship of Vaillant and their mutual support in their personal spiritual lives and broader missionary vocation.
