feet, and wearing for their only
clothing a sheet that scarcely concealed their forms, passed through the
streets of the towns, or wearily trudged from village to village,
responsively singing the litanies of the Virgin or the saints, and
loudly repeating the refrain, _Ora pro nobis_.[117] Often shameful
indecency and a reckless disregard of human life were displayed. In one
of the villages of Champagne, during the protracted drought of 1556, the
sacred scenes of the Passion were publicly enacted in the streets. The
person of our Lord was represented by a young man in a state of entire
nudity and bound with cords, who at every step was scourged by his
companions, personating the Roman soldiers. The picture was true to
life, and the blows so far from unreal that the prime actor in the
scandalous performance fell a victim to the inhuman treatment and died
within a few days. The fruits of practices so coarse and debasing were
such as may easily be conceived.[118]

[Sidenote: The monastic orders incur contempt.]

It was a lamentable but notorious fact that, as a consequence of the
unnatural divorce of religion and morality, the clergy, both secular and
regular, by their excesses had incurred the contempt of the laity. If
the Franciscan monks enjoyed an unenviable pre-eminence in this respect,
so as to have come to constitute one of the stock characters in the
"Heptameron" and similar works, scarcely less constant than the
prodigals or parasites of the New Comedy, the other orders were but
little behind them. And so Louise de Savoie made this significant entry
in her diary: "In the year 1522, in December, my son and I, by the grace
of the Holy Ghost, began to understand the hypocrites, white, black,
gray, smoky, and of all colors; from whom may God, by his clemency and
infinite goodness, be pleased to preserve and defend us. For, if Jesus
Christ be not a liar, there is no more dangerous generation in all human
kind."[119] Bishops and cardinals won little more respect than the
monks; for was it not the most prominent of the wearers of the purple
who, as Chancellor of France, introduced venality into the most sacred
offices of state,[120] while by his quarrelsome and unscrupulous
diplomacy he richly merited the _bon mot_ of the Emperor Charles the
Fifth, that he was more inclined to make _four wars than, one
peace_?[121]

[Sidenote: Abortive efforts at reform.]

It does not enter into the province of this history to discus