"My heavenly Saviour!" sighed the bell-ringer's wife, "what a lot of filth."
"But," said Durtal, "in the Middle Ages the mass was celebrated in a different fashion. The altar then was the
naked buttocks of a woman; in the seventeenth century it was the abdomen, and now?"
"Nowadays a woman is hardly ever used for an altar, but let us not anticipate. In the eighteenth century we shall again find abbés—among how many other monsters—who defile holy objects. One Canon Duer occupied himself specially with black magic and the evocation of the devil. He was finally executed as a sorcerer in the year of grace 1718. There was another who believed in the Incarnation of the Holy Ghost as the Paraclete, and who, in Lombary, which he stirred up to a feverish pitch of excitement, ordained twelve apostles and twelve apostolines to preach his gospel. This man, abbé Beccarelli, like all the other priests of his ilk, abused both sexes, and he said mass without confessing himself of his lecheries. As his cult grew he began to celebrate travestied offices in which he distributed to his congregation aphrodisiac pills presenting this peculiarity, that after having swallowed them the men believed themselves changed into women and the women into men.
"The recipe for these hippomanes is lost," continued Des Hermies with almost a sad smile. "To make a long story short, Beccarelli met with a very miserable end. He was prosecuted for sacrilege and sentenced, in 1708, to row in the galleys for seven years."
"These frightful stories seem to have taken away your appetite," said Mme. Carhaix. "Come, Monsieur des Hermies, a little more salad?"
"No, thanks. But now we've come to the cheese, I think it's time to open the wine," and he uncapped one of the bottles which Durtal had brought.
"It's a light Chinon wine, but not too weak. I discovered it in a little shop down by the quay," said Durtal.
"I see," he went on after a silence, "that the tradition of unspeakable crimes has been maintained by worthy successors of Gilles de Rais. I see that in all centuries there have been fallen priests who have dared commit sins against the Holy Ghost. But at the present time it all seems incredible.
Surely nobody is cutting children's throats as in the days of Bluebeard and of abbé Guibourg."