Can we not imagine his reception? Did not the village ring out its festal bells, and scatter flowers on his path, and with thousands of candles in the nave, and incense mounting far above the high altar, did not the little church welcome this contemporary of Nero, who had travelled surrounded by glorious palms in his own carriage over the line from Italy?
He has come, and twenty priests bear him on their shoulders, and his final resting-place is under the high altar.
Coigny, the coquette, crowned by its green vine branches, bacchante-like, the pious Coigny, has its martyr in the vaults of its own dear church, no more nor less than if it were a basilica.
True, he was an almost forgotten saint, and anonymously canonized, but the Scriptures told us long ago, “God knows how to recompense his own.”
Odd Stories: III. Peter The Powerful.
Long and loud was the flourish of trumpets that greeted the day on which Philip the Mighty was born to his father's dukedom; so rare was the promise of a babe. Need it be said that, nurtured under the eye of his stern sire, he grew in the strength of justice? To such a degree had he inherited the zeal of his ancestors, that while yet in his cradle he strangled a wretched nurse for stealing his spoon; whereat there was another flourish of trumpets. Subsequent reflections upon the loss of so useful a servant taught him to restrain the exercise of his just powers; and hence, when his tutors failed to instruct him within a given time in the arts, sciences, languages, and literatures, he merely broke their heads. We live to learn; and so it proved even to a prince as well endowed as Philip the Mighty. In these early acts we can see the foundations of that character which was afterwards so great a monument among men.
During the famous period in which our prince served his sire in the administration of justice, the dungeons were never empty of thieves and wranglers, nor the axe long idle for want of miscreant heads. To a peasant who once stole an apple, he said, “How now, varlet, dost confess?” Answered the trembling churl: “Nay, most puissant lord, I stole not the fruit.” Then spoke Philip: [pg 139] “By my halidom, I'll mend thine honesty”; whereupon the fellow was put on the rack till he broke a blood-vessel, still not confessing, for it was death to steal an apple out of the duke's garden. At night the peasant died in his bed of a hemorrhage, piously acknowledging in his last moments that he had committed the theft; whereat was another flourish of trumpets. Life is a great lesson, however, and it must not be supposed that our powerful hero could content himself with a few exploits at court when he felt that he had a mission to reform the world.
Therefore it was that Philip the Mighty set out upon a knight's errand to slay all the witches, devils, malefactors, giants, goblins, and monsters that came in his path. But one squire rode with him, bearing a golden trumpet, which, when Peter had done to death a sour-faced hag who shrieked at him on the mountain-side, he blew right merrily. Now, the old witch had asked the valiant knight for justice against her lord at court. Life is a science not to be mastered without blows; and Philip learned to slay and fear not in such stout earnest that soon he won the renown of being, as in fact he was called, the Champion Wrong-killer of the age.
When a foul, black-hearted necromancer was tracked to his hiding-place, what else should our good knight do but put him to the sword? When a five-eyed dwarf was accused of deviltry, who else should carve him for the crows but our duke's son? When a grim ogre, breathing death and fury, beset him whose arm was so mighty, when malefactors pestered the land, when monsters of all kind raged on every hand, who dealt them such lightning doom as the champion wrong-killer? On every occasion did his trusty squire blow the trumpet of gold right lustily, to the wonder of lords and people. Now, it was whispered that the slain sorcerers had helped husbandmen and artisans with their strange inventions; that the malefactors were slaughtered outright for the crimes of their fellows; that the giants were amiable men, sometimes, but provoked beyond endurance; that dwarfs and witches were poor old people, seldom as bad as they seemed to be. Nevertheless, the real monsters of the land increased day by day, in spite of the champion killer's sword and his squire's golden trumpet.