Holy Week a strange multitude thronged
the hilly streets of Le Puy,--pedlars from Languedoc and Provence and
Catalonia, leading their mules laded with leather goods, oil, wool, webs
of cloth, or wines of Spain in goat-skins; lords a-horseback and ladies
in wains, artisans and traders pacing on their mules, with wife or
daughter perched behind, Then came the poor pilgrim folk, limping along,
halting and hobbling, stick in hand and bag on back, panting up the
stiff climb. Last were the flocks of oxen and sheep being driven to the
slaughterhouses.

Now, leant against the wall of the Bishop's palace, stood Florent
Guillaume, looking as long and dry and black as an espalier vine in
winter, and devoured pilgrims and cattle with his eyes.

"Look," he called to Marguerite the lace-maker, "look at yonder fine
heads of bestial."

And Marguerite, squatted beside her bobbins, called back:

"Yea, fine beasts, and fat withal!"

Both the twain were very bare and scant of the goods of this world, and
even then were feeling bitterly the pinch of hunger. And folk said
it came of their own fault. At that very moment Pierre Grandmange the
tripe-seller was saying as much, where he stood in his tripe-shop,
pointing a finger at them. "'T would be sinful," he was crying, "to give
an alms to such good-for-nothing varlets." The tripe-seller would fain
have been very charitable, but he feared to lose his soul by giving to
evil-livers, and all the fat citizens of Le Puy had the selfsame
scruples.

To say truth, we must needs allow that, in the heyday of her hot youth,
Marguerite the lace-maker had not matched St. Lucy in purity, St. Agatha
in constancy, and St. Catherine in staidness. As for Florent Guillaume,
he had been the best scrivener in the city. For years he had not had his
equal for engrossing the Hours of Our Lady of Le Puy. But he had been
over fond of merrymakings and junketings. Now his hand had lost its
cunning, and his eye its clearness; he could no more trace the letters
on the parchment with the needful steadiness of touch. Even so, he might
have won his livelihood by teaching apprentices in his shop at the
sign of the Image of Our Lady, under the choir buttresses of _The
Annunciation_, for he was a fellow of good counsel and experience. But
having had the ill fortune to borrow of Maitre Jacquet Coquedouille the
sum of six livres ten sous, and having paid him back at divers terms
eighty livres two sous, he had found himsel