Bruyn had arranged this hypocrisy and the part to play, “if I had not the chills of a hundred winters upon this unthatched head, I should not dare to listen to your sins, but say on; if you enter paradise, it will be through me.”
Then the seneschal’s wife set forth the small fry of her stock in hand, and when she was purged of her little iniquities, she came to the postscript of her confession.
“Ah! my father!” said she, “I must confess to you that I am daily exercised by the desire to have a child. Is it wrong?”
“No,” said the abbot.
But she went on, “It is by nature commanded to my husband not to draw from his wealth to bring about his poverty, as the old women say by the way.”
“Then,” replied the priest, “you must live virtuously and abstain from all thoughts of this kind.”
“But I have heard it professed by the Lady of Jallanges, that it was not a sin when from it one derived neither profit nor pleasure.”
“There always is pleasure,” said the abbot, “but don’t count upon the child as a profit. Now fix this in your understanding, that it will always be a mortal sin before God and a crime before men to bring forth a child through the embraces of a man to whom one is not ecclesiastically married. Thus those women who offend against the holy laws of marriage, suffer great penalties in the other world, are in the power of horrible monsters with sharp and tearing claws, who thrust them into flaming furnaces in remembrance of the fact that here below they have warmed their hearts a little more than was lawful.”
Thereupon Blanche scratched her ear, and having thought to herself for a little while, she said to the priest, “How then did the Virgin Mary?”
“Ah!” replied abbot, “that it is a mystery.”
“And what is a mystery?”
“A thing that cannot be explained, and which one ought to believe without enquiring into it.”
“Well then,” said she, “cannot I perform a mystery?”
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