While this young monk was saying mass, there comes to him a white pigeon and tells him what was taking place in his father’s house, and that the pigeon will assume the form of the monk, “and you shall go off in my shape.” The monk willingly does what he tells him, and arrives when they are leading his father to execution. He was being followed by the judges and by a crowd of people. He asks what he has done. They tell him that he has killed a man. He asks if they would do him a favour before they put him to death—if they would accompany him to the grave of the man whom he has killed. They tell him, “Yes.”
They all go off then. The monk has the grave opened, restores him to life, and asks him, pointing to his father:
“Is this the man who has killed you?”
The dead man says to him, “No!”
After having said that he dies again. The monk did not wish to know who had killed him; he knew all he wanted with that. The father wished to take the monk home with him to dinner, but he would not go that day. He said to him:
“I will come on such a day.”
As you may fancy they made a splendid dinner; nothing was wanting there. They invited all their friends and acquaintances to rejoice with them. When the monk arrives, the lady, before sitting down to table, wished to show him her child, how she had suckled him with her own milk eighteen years, and that he did not grow at all, but was always just as he was when he was born. The monk betook himself to prayer, and he saw that which they believed to be a child fly away under the shape of a devil in fire and flame, and he carried off with him part of the house. He told his mother not to vex herself because she had had the devil there, and that she would be happier without such a child.
All the world was astonished at the power of this monk; but the mother was still grieved. The monk, to console her, told her his history; how he was her true child; how the devil had taken him and carried him to the roadside; how he had been found and brought up by a coachman; and that it was he himself who had been made priest, and her son. All were astounded at his words. After they had well dined, the monk went back into his convent, and the father and mother lived honourably, as they did before; and as they lived well, they died well too.