d legends, their daily life was not to them uninteresting.
Their nightly Sabbaths were only a slight relic of paganism. They
held in fear and honour the Moon, so powerful over the good things of
earth. Her chief worshippers, the old women, burn small candles to
_Dianom_--the Diana of yore, whose other names were Luna and Hecate.
The Lupercal (or wolf-man) is always following the women and children,
disguised indeed under the dark face of ghost Hallequin (Harlequin).
The Vigil of Venus was kept as a holiday precisely on the first of
May. On Midsummer Day they kept the Sabaza by sacrificing the he-goat
of Bacchus Sabasius. In all this there was no mockery; nothing but a
harmless carnival of serfs.

But about the year 1000 the church is well-nigh shut against the
peasant through the difference between his language and hers. By 1100
her services became quite unintelligible. Of the mysteries played at
the church-doors, he has retained chiefly the comic side, the ox and
the ass, &c. On these he makes Christmas carols, which grow ever more
and more burlesque, forming a true Sabbatic literature.

* * * * *

Are we to suppose that the great and fearful risings of the twelfth
century had no influence on these mysteries, on this night-life of the
_wolf_, the _game bird_, the _wild quarry_. The great sacraments of
rebellion among the serfs, when they drank of each other's blood, or
ate of the ground by way of solemn pledge,[53] may have been
celebrated at the Sabbaths. The "Marseillaise" of that time, sung by
night rather than day, was perhaps a Sabbatic chant:--

"Nous sommes hommes commes ils sont!
Tout aussi grand coeur nous avons!
Tout autant souffrir nous pouvons!"[54]

[53] At the battle of Courtray. See also Grimm and my
_Origines_.

[54]

"We are fashioned of one clay:
Big as theirs our hearts are aye:
We can bear as much as they."--TRANS.

But the tombstone falls again in 1200. Seated thereon the Pope and the
King, with their enormous weight, have sealed up man. Has he now his
old life by night? More than ever. The old pagan dances must by this
time have waxed furious. Our negroes of the Antilles, after a dreadful
day of heat and hard work, would go and dance away some four leagues
off. So it was with the serf too. But with his dances there must have
mingled a merriment born of revenge, satiric farces, burlesques and
caricatures of the baron and