'Adieu, you who tendered me a hand when I had fallen into contempt; your remembrance will be always present to Magdalen in her future solitude.'
'Of what solitude do you speak?' said Jane, surprised: 'where are you going, then, Mary Magdalen?'
'To the desert!' replied the penitent, stretching her arms towards the summit of the arid mountains beyond which extend the desolate solitudes of the dead sea:
'I go to the desert to weep for my sins, bearing in my heart a treasure of hope! Blessed be the son of Mary, to whom I am indebted for this divine treasure!'
The crowd, opening respectfully before this great repentant, she slowly retired towards the mountains. Scarcely had Magdalen disappeared, when Jane, leading her friend almost in spite of herself, advanced towards the cavaliers through the people, irritated at the coarse words of the escort.
They abhorred Herod, the prince of Judea, who would have been driven from the throne but for the protection of the Romans. He was cruel, dissolute, and crushed the Jewish people with taxes; thus, when they learnt that one of the cavaliers was the Seigneur Chusa, steward of this execrated prince, the hatred they felt for the master was visited on the steward as also on his companion, the Seigneur Gremion, who in the name of the Roman tax-gatherer, gleaned where Herod had reaped. Thus, whilst Jane, Aurelia, and the slave Genevieve painfully traversed the crowd to reach the two cavaliers, hootings burst from all sides against Chusa and Gremion, and they listened, trembling with rage, to words such as the following, the faint echo of the anathemas of the young master against the wicked:
'Woe to you, Herod's steward! who crush us with taxes, and eat up the house of the widow and the orphan!
'Woe to you, too, Roman! who also come to take a part in robbing us!'
Banaias, with one hand waiving his cutlass in a threatening and ferocious manner, approached the two seigneurs, and, showing his fist to them, exclaimed:
'The fox is cowardly and cruel! but he has called to his aid the wolf, whose teeth are longer, and whose strength is greater! The fox, cowardly and cruel, is your master Herod, Seigneur Chusa! and the ferocious wolf, is Tiberius, your own master, Roman! who helps the fox in hunting the game!'