the ancient abuses of despotic monarchy.
For with the name of St. Romain, who enlarged St. Mellon's primitive
"cathedral" even more than St. Victrice had done, is connected one of
the most extraordinary privileges that any ecclesiastical body ever
possessed. The Chapter of the Cathedral of Rouen every Ascension Day
were allowed by the "Privilege de Saint Romain" to release a prisoner
condemned to death, who was then made to carry the holy relics of the
saint upon his shoulders in a great procession. The list of the
prisoners who bore the "Fierte Saint Romain"[7] extends from 1210 to
1790, the chapel where the ceremony was performed still stands in the
Place de la Haute Vieille Tour, and the manuscripts in which the
released prisoners' names with their accomplices and crimes are
recorded, furnish some of the most interesting and practically
unknown details of the intimate life of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. I shall have occasion to refer to them so fully later on
that I must for the present confine myself merely to abolishing a
myth, and laying some slight foundation for the facts that are to
follow--facts so astonishing and so authentic that they need no aid
from legend or romance.

[Footnote 7: Evidently "feretrum," _cf._ "La fiertre de Saint Thomas,"
Froissart, xii. 9.]

Yet the miracle that is related to-day about St. Romain is so
persistent and so widely spread, that it must be told, if only to
explain the many allusions contained in picture, in carving, and in
song,[8] throughout the tale of Rouen, and in the very stones and
windows of her most sacred buildings. The story is but another variant
of our own St. George, of St. Martha and the Tarasque in Provence, of
many others in almost every country. It is but one more
personification of that struggle of Good against Evil, Light against
Darkness, Truth against Error, Civilisation against Barbarism, which
is as old as the book of Genesis and as the history of the world. It
has been represented by Apollo and the python, by Anubis and the
serpent, by the Grand'gueule of Poitiers, by the dragons of Louvain
and of St. Marcel. The general truth was appropriated by each
particular locality until every church and town had its peculiar
monster slain by its especial saint. Thus at Bordeaux there was St.
Martial, thus Metz had St. Clement, Asti and Venice had their guardian
saints, Bayeux had St. Vigor, Rouen had St. Romain. The emblem of
eternal strife had becom