Are we to suppose that the great and fearful risings of the twelfth century had no influence on these mysteries, on this night-life of the wolf, the game bird, the wild quarry. The great sacraments of rebellion among the serfs, when they drank of each other’s blood, or ate of the ground by way of solemn pledge,[53] may have been celebrated at the Sabbaths. The “Marseillaise” of that time, sung by night rather than day, was perhaps a Sabbatic chant:—
“Nous sommes hommes commes ils sont!
Tout aussi grand cœur nous avons!
Tout autant souffrir nous pouvons!”[54]
But the tombstone falls again in 1200. Seated thereon the Pope and the King, with their enormous weight, have sealed up man. Has he now his old life by night? More than ever. The old pagan dances must by this time have waxed furious. Our negroes of the Antilles, after a dreadful day of heat and hard work, would go and dance away some four leagues off. So it was with the serf too. But with his dances there must have mingled a merriment born of revenge, satiric farces, burlesques and caricatures of the baron and the priest: a whole literature of the night indeed, that knew not one word of the literature of the day, that knew little even of the burgher Fabliaux.
Of such a nature were the Sabbaths before 1300. Before they could take the startling form of open warfare against the God of those days, much more was needed still, and especially these two things: not only a descending into the very depths of despair, but also an utter losing of respect for anything.
To this pass they do not come until the fourteenth century, under the Avignon popes, and during the Great Schism; when the Church with two heads seems no longer a church; when the king and all his nobles, being in shameful captivity to the English, are extorting the means of ransom from their oppressed and outraged people. Then do the Sabbaths take the grand and horrible form of the Black Mass, of a ritual upside down, in which Jesus is defied and bidden to thunder on the people if He can. In the thirteenth century this devilish drama was still impossible, through the horror it would have caused. And later again, in the fifteenth, when everything, even suffering itself, had become exhausted, so fierce an outburst could not have issued forth; so monstrous an invention no one would have essayed. It could only have belonged to the age of Dante.
It took place, I fancy, at one gush; an explosion as it were of genius raving, bringing impiety up to the height of a great popular passion-fit. To understand the nature of these bursts of rage, we must remember that, far from imagining the fixedness of God’s laws, a people brought up by their own clergy to believe and depend on miracles, had for ages past been hoping and waiting for nothing else than a miracle which never came. In vain they demanded one in the desperate hour of their last worst strait. Heaven thenceforth appeared to them as the ally of their savage tormentors, nay, as itself a tormentor too.
Thereon began the Black Mass and the Jacquerie.[55]