ou shall go down into an _In
pace_, or build your hut in the desert. You must live with the
handbell in your hand, that all may flee before you. "No human being
must see you: no consolation may be yours. If you come near, 'tis
death."

* * * * *

Leprosy is the last stage, the _apogee_ of this scourge; but a
thousand other ills, less hideous but still cruel, raged everywhere.
The purest and the most fair were stricken with sad eruptions, which
men regarded as sin made visible, or the chastisement of God. Then
people did what the love of life had never made them do: they forsook
the old sacred medicine, the bootless holy water, and went off to the
Witch. From habit and fear as well, they still repaired to church; but
thenceforth their true church was with her, on the moor, in the
forest, in the desert. To her they carried their vows.

Prayers for healing, prayers for pleasure. On the first effervescing
of their heated blood, folk went to the Sibyl, in great secrecy, at
uncertain hours. "What shall I do? and what is this I feel within me?
I burn: give me some lenitive. I burn: grant me that which causes my
intolerable desire."

A bold, a blamable journey, for which they reproach themselves at
night. Let this new fatality be never so urgent, this fire be never so
torturing, the Saints themselves never so powerless; still, have not
the indictment of the Templars and the proceedings of Pope Boniface
unveiled the Sodom lying hid beneath the altar? But a wizard Pope, a
friend of the Devil, who also carried him away, effects a change in
all their ideas. Was it not with the Demon's help that John XXII., the
son of a shoemaker, a Pope no more of Rome, succeeded in amassing in
his town of Avignon more gold than the Emperor and all the kings? As
the Pope is, so is the bishop. Did not Guichard, Bishop of Troyes,
procure from the Devil the death of the King's daughters? No death we
ask for--we; but pleasant things--for life, for health, for beauty,
and for pleasure: the things of God which God refuses. What shall we
do? Might we but win them through the grace of the _Prince of this
World_!

* * * * *

When the great and mighty doctor of the Renaissance, Paracelsus, cast
all the wise books of ancient medicine into the fire, Latin, and
Jewish, and Arabic, all at once, he declared that he had learned none
but the popular medicine, that of the _good women_,[41] the
_s