'Ay,' replied the 'Golden Canon' with a responsive twinkle in his eye, '"merchet of women" also, but as an antiquary I must tell ye that it's not what you two young men would wish it to be——'
He glanced at the blushing face of the Minor Canon, and the eager visage of the undergraduate, and bade them fill their glasses yet again, while they had the chance, for the Chapter's binn of Laffite was now running very low in its deep cellar.
'No,' he went on regretfully, ''twas not the Droit de Seigneur which we have all read of, and perhaps envied, but a fine upon marriage—a feudal due exercised over women, as over all property on the feudal lord's manor. Not but that I take it occasionally the Prince Bishop may have indulged himself in what Richelieu styled "the honest man's recreation," yet the jus primae noctis, of which also you will have heard, was not the privilege of the seigneurial bishops, but the fine or compensation paid to the Church by the impatient bridegroom, who in early days of clerical discipline was enjoined to mortification of the flesh for the first three nights of marriage.
'A lawsuit 'twixt the mayor and corporation of Amiens and the bishop before the Parliament of Paris in the fifteenth century is still on record, and proves this clearly.'
'St. Cuthbert, sir,' interposed the blushing but now emboldened Minor Canon, 'would have severely reprehended Cardinal Richelieu in that event, for 'tis said that the saint had a perfect horror of women; we know of the line drawn beside the cathedral beyond which no woman was allowed to pass.'
'Ay,' responded his host, 'St. Cuthbert was a great saint doubtless, but an extremely ungallant man. He would allow no cow upon Holy Island, for where there was a cow there was a woman, and where there was a woman there was the Devil.'
'Luther and the Reformation changed all that,' said the young American, with a laugh.
'"Who loves not woman, wine and song,
He is a fool his whole life long."
'Which of the two is in the right?'
'Luther!' replied the Minor Canon, somewhat unexpectedly, flushed with vol-au-vent and generous claret, who was now beginning to look upon himself as a gay Lothario. 'Asceticism for its own sake is mere vanity.'