"My good man," resumed Gaudry addressing the Councilman, "you must have ransomed your wife from the right of the first night at the time when the canon of Amaury was charged with its supervision?"
"Yes, seigneur," answered the baker, while his wife, casting down her eyes, blushed with shame at hearing the bishop refer to that infamous right of the bishop of Laon, who, before the establishment of the Commune had the right to demand "first wedding night of the bride"—a galling shame, that, occasionally, the husband managed to redeem with a money payment.
"That miserable beggar of old Amaury!" exclaimed the prelate with a cynical outburst of laughter. "It was all in vain for me to tell him: 'When a bride and bridegroom come to announce at church their approaching wedding, inscribe on a separate roll the names of the brides that are comely enough to induce me to exact from them the amorous tax of nature.' But there were none of these according to Amaury; and yet I have before my eyes a striking proof of his fraudulence or his blindness. Almost all the brides were homely, according to him!"
"Happily, seigneur bishop, those evil days are gone by," answered Ancel, hardly able to restrain his indignation. "Those days will never return when the honor of husbands and wives was at the mercy of bishops and seigneurs!"
"Brother," put in the archdeacon, painfully affected by the words of the bishop, and addressing Ancel, "believe me, the Church herself blushes at that monstrous right, that prelates enjoy when they are at once temporal seigneurs."
"What I do know, Father Anselm," the baker answered with judicial deliberateness and raising his head, "is that the Church does not forbid the ecclesiastics to use that monstrous right, we see them using it and deflowering young brides."
"By the blood of Christ!" cried out the bishop, while the archdeacon remained silent, unable to gainsay the baker; "that right proves better than any argument how absolutely the body of the serf, the villein or the non-noble vassal is the absolute and undisputed property of the lay or ecclesiastical seigneur. Accordingly, so far from blushing at that right, the Church claims it back for its own seigneurs, and excommunicates those who dare contest it."
The archdeacon, not daring to contradict the bishop, seeing the bishop spoke the truth, lowered his head in mute pain. The Councilman resumed with a mixture of sly good nature and firmness: "I am, seigneur bishop, too ignorant in matters of theology to discuss the orthodoxy of a right that honorable folks speak of only with indignation in their hearts and shame on their brows. But, thanks be to God, since Laon has become an enfranchised Commune, that abominable right has been abolished, along with many others. Among the latter is the right of demanding goods without money, and of taking some one else's horse without paying for it. This, seigneur bishop, leads me to the matter that has brought me here."
"You, then, mean to start a process against me?"
"I am fulfilling my functions. An hour ago, Peter the Fox, tenant farmer of Colombaik the Tanner, deposed before the Mayor and Councilmen assembled at the Town Hall that you, Bishop of Laon, kept, against all right, a horse belonging to the said Colombaik, and that you refuse to pay the price demanded by the owner."