After this examination made by great “solemnity of lights,” the doctors declared themselves for the authenticity of the miracle;[450] which was not in reality more surprising than that at the cathedral at Naples, where the blood of the patron saint of the town may still be seen to liquify several times a year, and for several days each time. In every country of Europe the pardoners enjoyed, not to say endured, the same reputation and acted in the same manner. Be it France, Germany, Italy, or Spain, they were found living, so long as there remained any, as Chaucer’s pardoner did. In France, Rabelais has the cheaters cheated by his beloved Panurge. The clever _vaurien_ used to place his penny in their plate so skilfully that it seemed to be a silver piece: for which he made bold to take change, leaving only a farthing. “‘And I did the same,’ said he, ‘in all the churches where we have been.’—‘Yea, but,’ said I, ‘you . . . are a thief, and commit sacrilege.’—‘True,’ said he, ‘as it seems to you; but it does not seem so to me. For the pardoners give it me as a gift when they say, in offering me the relics to kiss: _Centuplum accipies_—that is, that for one penny I take a hundred; for _accipies_ is spoken by them according to the manner of the Hebrews, who use the future tense instead of the imperative, as you have in the book, _Diliges Dominum, id est, dilige_.’”[451] {331} Pardoners, of course, never appear on the boards of the old French theatre, but to be derided: “_Pardoner_: I mean to show you the comb of the cock that crowed at Pilate’s, and half a plank of Noah’s great ark. . . . Look, gentlemen, here is a feather of one of the seraphs near God. Don’t think it is a joke; here it is for you to see. “_Triacleur_: Gogsblood! ’tis the quill from a goose he has eaten at his dinner!” and so on.[452] The same in Spain. Lazarillo de Tormes, the page of many masters, happens, at one time, to be in the service of a pardoner: the very same individual Chaucer had described two hundred years before. He, too, knows how to use Latin when profitable: “Hee woulde alwayes bee informed before he came, which were learned and which not. When he came to those which he understood were learned, he woulde be sure never to speake worde of Latin, for feare of stumbling: but used in suche places a gentle kind of Castilian Spanish, his tong alwayes at libertie. And contrariwise whensoever hee was informed of the reverend _Domines_ (I meane such as are made priestes more for money than for learning and good behaviour), to hear him speake amongs suche men you would saye it were St. Thomas: for hee woulde then two houres together talke Latin, at lest which seemed to bee, though it was not.”[453] A trick which, as is well known, Sganarelle, many years after, did not disdain to use when put upon his last shifts as the “Médecin malgré lui.”