the father of George Sand. Adrienne Lecouvreur died on the 20th of March 1730. She was denied the last rites of the Church, and her remains were refused burial in consecrated ground. Voltaire, in a fine poem on her death, expressed his indignation at the barbarous treatment accorded to the woman whose “friend, admirer, lover” he was.
Her life formed the subject of the well-known tragedy (1849), by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé.
LE CREUSOT, a town of east-central France in the department
of Saône-et-Loire, 55 m. S.W. of Dijon on the Paris-Lyon
railway. Pop. (1906), town, 22,535; commune, 33,437. Situated
at the foot of lofty hills in a district rich in coal and iron, it has
the most extensive iron works in France. The coal bed of
Le Creusot was discovered in the 13th century; but it was not
till 1774 that the first workshops were founded there. The royal
crystal works were transferred from Sèvres to Le Creusot in
1787, but this industry came to an end in 1831. Meanwhile
two or three enterprises for the manufacture of metal had ended
in failure, and it was only in 1836 that the foundation of iron
works by Adolphe and Eugène Schneider definitely inaugurated
the industrial prosperity of the place. The works supplied large
quantities of war material to the French armies during the
Crimean and Franco-German wars. Since that time they have
continuously enlarged the scope of their operations, which now
embrace the manufacture of steel, armour-plate, guns, ordnance-stores,
locomotives, electrical machinery and engineering material
of every description. A network of railways about 37 m. in
length connects the various branches of the works with each
other and with the neighbouring Canal du Centre. Special
attention is paid to the welfare of the workers who, not including
the miners, number about 12,000, and good schools have been
established. In 1897 the ordnance-manufacture of the Société
des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée at Havre was acquired
by the Company, which also has important branches at Chalon-sur-Saône,
where ship-building and bridge-construction is carried
on, and at Cette (Hérault).
LECTERN (through O. Fr. leitrun, from Late Lat. lectrum, or
lectrinum, legere, to read; the French equivalent is lutrin;
Ital. leggio; Ger. Lesepult), in the furniture of certain Christian
churches, a reading-desk, used more especially for the reading
of the lessons and in the Anglican Church practically confined
to that purpose. In the early Christian Church this was done
from the ambo (q.v.), but in the 15th century, when the books
were often of great size, it became necessary to provide a lectern
to hold them. These were either in wood or metal, and many
fine examples still exist; one at Detling in wood, in which there
are shelves on all four sides to hold books, is perhaps the most
elaborate. Brass lecterns, as in the colleges of Oxford and
Cambridge, are common; in the usual type the book is supported
on the outspread wings of an eagle or pelican, which is raised
on a moulded stem, carried on three projecting ledges or feet
with lions on them. In the example in Norwich cathedral,
the pelican supporting the book stands on a rock enclosed with
a rich cresting of Gothic tabernacle work; the central stem or
pillar, on which this rests, is supported by miniature projecting
buttresses, standing on a moulded base with lions on it.
LECTION, LECTIONARY. The custom of reading the books
of Moses in the synagogues on the Sabbath day was a very ancient
one in the Jewish Church. The addition of lections (i.e. readings)
from the prophetic books had been made afterwards and was in
existence in our Lord’s time, as may be gathered from such
passages as St Luke iv. 16-20, xvi. 29. This element in
synagogue worship was taken over with others into the Christian
divine service, additions being made to it from the writings
of the apostles and evangelists. We find traces of such additions
within the New Testament itself in such directions as are contained
in Col. iv. 16; 1 Thess. v. 27.
From the 2nd century onwards references multiply, though the earlier references do not prove the existence of a fixed lectionary or order of lessons, but rather point the other way. Justin Martyr, describing divine worship in the middle of the 2nd century says: “On the day called Sunday all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the Apostles, or the writings of the Prophets are read as long as time permits” (Apol. i. cap. 67). Tertullian about half a century later makes frequent reference to the reading of Holy Scripture in public worship (Apol. 39; De praescript. 36; De amina, 9).
In the canons of Hippolytus in the first half of the 3rd century we find this direction: “Let presbyters, subdeacons and readers, and all the people assemble daily in the church at time of cock-crow, and betake themselves to prayers, to psalms and to the reading of the Scriptures, according to the command of the Apostles, until I come attend to reading” (canon xxi.).
But there are traces of fixed lessons coming into existence in the course of this century; Origen refers to the book of Job being read in Holy Week (Commentaries on Job, lib. i.). Allusions of a similar kind in the 4th century are frequent. John Cassian (c. 380) tells us that throughout Egypt the Psalms were divided into groups of twelve, and that after each group there followed two lessons, one from the Old, one from the New Testament (De caenob. inst. ii. 4), implying but not absolutely stating that there was a fixed order of such lessons just as there was of the Psalms. St Basil the Great mentions fixed lessons on certain occasions taken from Isaiah, Proverbs, St Matthew and Acts (Hom. xiii. De bapt.). From Chrysostom (Hom. lxiii in Act. &c.), and Augustine (Tract. vi. in Joann. &c.) we learn that Genesis was read in Lent, Job and Jonah in Passion Week, the Acts of the Apostles in Eastertide, lessons on the Passion on Good Friday and on the Resurrection on Easter Day. In the Apostolical Constitutions (ii. 57) the following service is described and enjoined. First come two lessons from the Old Testament by a reader, the whole of the Old Testament being made use of except the books of the Apocrypha. The Psalms of David are then to be sung. Next the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul are to be read, and finally the four Gospels by a deacon or a priest. Whether the selections were ad libitum or according to a fixed table of lessons we are not informed. Nothing in the shape of a lectionary is extant older than the 8th century, though there is evidence that Claudianus Mamercus made one for the church at Vienne in 450, and that Musaeus made one for the church at Marseilles c. 458. The Liber comitis formerly attributed to St Jerome must be three, or nearly three, centuries later than that saint, and the Luxeuil lectionary, or Lectionarium Gallicanum, which Mabillon attributed to the 7th, cannot be earlier than the 8th century; yet the oldest MSS. of the Gospels have marginal marks, and sometimes actual interpolations, which can only be accounted for as indicating the beginnings and endings of liturgical lessons. The third council of Carthage in 397 forbade anything but Holy Scripture to be read in church; this rule has been adhered to so far as the liturgical epistle and gospel, and occasional additional lessons in the Roman missal are concerned, but in the divine office, on feasts when nine lessons are read at matins, only the first three lessons are taken from Holy Scripture, the next three being taken from the sermons of ecclesiastical writers, and the last three from expositions of the day’s gospel; but sometimes the lives or Passions of the saints, or of some particular saints, were substituted for any or all of these breviary lessons. (F. E. W.)
LECTISTERNIUM (from Lat. lectum sternere, “to spread a
couch”; στρωμναί in Dion. Halic. xii. 9), in ancient Rome,
a propitiatory ceremony, consisting of a meal offered to gods
and goddesses, represented by their busts or statues, or by
portable figures of wood, with heads of bronze, wax or marble,
and covered with drapery. Another suggestion is that the
symbols of the gods consisted of bundles of sacred herbs, tied
together in the form of a head, covered by a waxen mask so as
to resemble a kind of bust (cf. the straw puppets called Argei).
These symbols were laid upon a couch (lectus), the left arm
resting on a cushion (pulvinus, whence the couch itself was often
called pulvinar) in the attitude of reclining. In front of the
couch, which was placed in the open street, a meal was set out
on a table. It is definitely stated by Livy (v. 13) that the
ceremony took place “for the first time” in Rome in the year
