the priest: a whole literature of the
night indeed, that knew not one word of the literature of the day,
that knew little even of the burgher Fabliaux.

* * * * *

Of such a nature were the Sabbaths before 1300. Before they could take
the startling form of open warfare against the God of those days, much
more was needed still, and especially these two things: not only a
descending into the very depths of despair, but also _an utter losing
of respect for anything_.

To this pass they do not come until the fourteenth century, under the
Avignon popes, and during the Great Schism; when the Church with two
heads seems no longer a church; when the king and all his nobles,
being in shameful captivity to the English, are extorting the means of
ransom from their oppressed and outraged people. Then do the Sabbaths
take the grand and horrible form of the _Black Mass_, of a ritual
upside down, in which Jesus is defied and bidden to thunder on the
people if He can. In the thirteenth century this devilish drama was
still impossible, through the horror it would have caused. And later
again, in the fifteenth, when everything, even suffering itself, had
become exhausted, so fierce an outburst could not have issued forth;
so monstrous an invention no one would have essayed. It could only
have belonged to the age of Dante.

* * * * *

It took place, I fancy, at one gush; an explosion as it were of genius
raving, bringing impiety up to the height of a great popular
passion-fit. To understand the nature of these bursts of rage, we must
remember that, far from imagining the fixedness of God's laws, a
people brought up by their own clergy to believe and depend on
miracles, had for ages past been hoping and waiting for nothing else
than a miracle which never came. In vain they demanded one in the
desperate hour of their last worst strait. Heaven thenceforth appeared
to them as the ally of their savage tormentors, nay, as itself a
tormentor too.

Thereon began the _Black Mass_ and the _Jacquerie_.[55]

[55] The Peasants' war which raged in France in 1364.

In the elastic shell of the Black Mass, a thousand variations of
detail may afterwards have been inserted; but the shell itself was
strongly made and, in my opinion, all of one piece.

This drama I succeeded in reproducing in my "History of France," in
the year 1857. There was small difficulty in casting it anew in