Close de piex et de serciaus
Comme une viez souz a porciaus.
Roof of hoops, and wall of logs,
Like a wretched stye for hogs.
There the beggar lay, already insensible or at the last gasp, on coarse thatch, on the ground, covered by an old hempen sack. The picture represented the extremest poverty of the thirteenth century; a hovel without even a feather bed or bedstead, as Aucassins' ploughman described his mother's want; and the old woman alone, dying, as the clerk appeared at the opening:—
Li clers qui fu moult bien apris
Le cors Nostre Seigneur a pris
A l'ostel a la povre fame
S'en vient touz seus mes n'i treuve ame.
Si grant clarte y a veue
Que grant peeur en a eue.
Ou povre lit a la vieillete
Qui couvers iert d'une nateite
Assises voit XII puceles
Si avenans et si tres beles
N'est nus tant penser i seust
Qui raconter le vout peust.
A coutee voist Nostre Dame
Sus le chevez la povre fame
Qui por la mort sue et travaille.
La Mere Dieu d'une tovaille
Qui blanche est plus que fleur de lis
La grant sueur d'entor le vis
A ses blanches mains li essuie.
The clerk, well in these duties taught,
The body of our Saviour brought
Where she lay upon her bed
Without a soul to give her aid.
But such brightness there he saw
As filled his mind with fear and awe.
Covered with a mat of straw
The woman lay; but round and near
A dozen maidens sat, so fair
No mortal man could dream such light,
No mortal tongue describe the sight.
Then he saw that next the bed,
By the poor old woman's head,
As she gasped and strained for breath
In the agony of death,
Sat Our Lady,—bending low,—
While, with napkin white as snow,
She dried the death-sweat on the brow.
The clerk, in terror, hesitated whether to turn and run away, but Our Lady beckoned him to the bed, while all rose and kneeled devoutly to the sacrament. Then she said to the trembling clerk:—
"Friend, be not afraid!
But seat yourself, to give us aid,
Beside these maidens, on the bed."
And when the clerk had obeyed, she continued—