The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  For he could well perceive the value of human faith now that he had lost it. He spoke everywhere of God’s love for all men and of how gloriously Heaven was to be won through repentance and a putting away of disreputable habits. He inflicted few tortures nowadays, because in Abbot Odo had awakened the fervor of the elect artist who respects the medium of his craft. . . . Dear Gui had been an artist of sorts, the Abbot would reflect, in the great-hearted poor fellow’s limited field, with his peculiarly small audience of one. Yes, Gui de Puysange had created wholly creditable saints, who were finished to the last detail. . . . But the art of a self-respecting clergyman was more general and more noble in its scope, for it appealed to the dull-witted and the unhappy everywhere.

  With gaping hundreds to attend him, Abbot Odo swayed the minds of his congregation at will, and he awakened joy and faith, not with the tricks of black magic, not any longer with heated irons and tweezers, but with very lovely words. Since he knew there was no Hell, he hardly ever threatened people with Hell’s pains: instead, he turned from realism to romance, and he improvised brilliantly as to the unfathomable love and the eternal bliss of Heaven, which was the heritage of mankind and awaited every communicant just beyond the tomb. His talking aroused his auditors to the best and purest emotions.

  His fame spread. He was summoned to court. The King was greatly moved by the Abbot’s fine sermons, and swore by the belly of St. Gris that this holy man had fire in his belly. The ladies of the court did not approve of this metaphor, but they all found the Abbot of St. Hoprig adorable.

  “Especially,” said one of them, “when one’s husband, alas—!”

  “But, darling,” cried her friend, “do you mean that you also—?”

  “I mean only that if only other men—”

  “Yet only a clergyman, my pet, can give you absolution—”

  “—Like a digestant tablet—”

  “Ah, but one dines so heartily with the dear Abbot—”

  Thus did these ladies chatter under their little ermine bonnets and their three-cornered lattice caps and their glittering cauls of silver net wire. So the Abbot of St. Hoprig was a vast social success; he had the entree everywhere; and he made converts right and left.

  The Queen herself confessed to him: and after he had gone thoroughly into the personal affairs of this daughter of the Medici and had lovingly absolved her, she saw to it forthwith that this wonderful man was appointed Bishop of Valneres.

8. OF THE KINDLY IMPULSES OF HIS PIETY

  In the episcopal palace the blessed Odo lived at his ease very happily. He did not miss the company of his saints now that so many of the parish needed to be consoled and comforted by a bishop who, after all, was aging; and the loss of his own faith was a great aid to him now that it was his métier to awaken faith in so many others. It was a loss which made for unfailing tact without dogmatism. It was a loss which had ridded him forever of those doubts which sometimes trouble the clergy.

  For Odo of Valneres lived as an artist. His contentment was here, rather than in any perhaps unattainable places or in any contingently oncoming times. And he made sure of it by creating contentment in every person about him.

  Throughout all Naimousin and Piemontais he cherished his little flock as the father cherishes his children, and the artist his audience. He saw to their bodily comforts, he saw above all to their faith. For the plight of the lower orders of mankind, he knew, demanded just this faith which was, for a being of a peasant’s or a shopkeeper’s far from admirable nature, at once a narcotic and a beneficial restraint.

  An altruist would dissuade therefore the evilly inclined from all incivic vices like murder and rape and theft and arson which, even when practised upon an international scale and under the direct patronage of the Church, tended always to upset the comfort of society. An altruist would endeavor, to the untrammeled extent of his imaginative gifts, to sustain the cowardly and the feeble-minded, and the aged and the ill and the poverty-stricken, and all other persons who were unbearably afflicted by the normal workings of the laws of life and of human polity. An altruist would hearten all these luckless beings with the appropriate kind of romances about an oncoming heritage which made the dear poor wretches’ present transitory discomforts—from any really considerate point of view—quite unimportant.