aterial of the
Sacrament."

"What a horrible priest!" cried Mme. Carhaix, indignant.

"Yes, he celebrated another kind of mass, too, that abbe did. It was
called--hang it--it's unpleasant to say--"

"Say it, Monsieur des Hermies. When people have as great a hatred for
that sort of thing as we here, they need not blink any fact. It isn't
that kind of thing which is going to take me away from my prayers."

"Nor me," added her husband.

"Well, this sacrifice was called the Spermatic Mass."

"Oh!"

"Guibourg, wearing the alb, the stole, and the maniple, celebrated this
mass with the sole object of making pastes to conjure with. The archives
of the Bastille inform us that he acted thus at the request of a lady
named Des Oeillettes:

"This woman, who was indisposed, gave some of her blood; the man who
accompanied her stood patiently beside the bed where the scene took
place, and Guibourg gathered up some of his semen into the chalice, then
added powdered blood and some flour, and after sacrilegious ceremonies
the Des Oeillettes woman departed bearing her paste."

"My heavenly Saviour!" sighed the bell-ringer's wife, "what a lot of
filth."

"But," said Durtal, "in the Middle Ages the mass was celebrated in a
different fashion. The altar then was the naked buttocks of a woman; in
the seventeenth century it was the abdomen, and now?"

"Nowadays a woman is hardly ever used for an altar, but let us not
anticipate. In the eighteenth century we shall again find abbes--among
how many other monsters--who defile holy objects. One Canon Duer
occupied himself specially with black magic and the evocation of the
devil. He was finally executed as a sorcerer in the year of grace 1718.
There was another who believed in the Incarnation of the Holy Ghost as
the Paraclete, and who, in Lombary, which he stirred up to a feverish
pitch of excitement, ordained twelve apostles and twelve apostolines to
preach his gospel. This man, abbe Beccarelli, like all the other priests
of his ilk, abused both sexes, and he said mass without confessing
himself of his lecheries. As his cult grew he began to celebrate
travestied offices in which he distributed to his congregation
aphrodisiac pills presenting this peculiarity, that after having
swallowed them the men believed themselves changed into women and the
women into men.

"The recipe for these hippomanes is lost," continued Des Hermies with
almost a sad smile. "To make a long story short, Bec