Pardoners lived merrily; certain it is that after a busy day they must have been cheerful companions at the inn. The thought of the multitude of sins they had pardoned, of excommunications they had removed, {332} of penalties they had remitted—themselves mere vagabonds threatened with the jail or gallows—the knowledge of their impunity, the strangeness of their existence, the triumphant success of the mad harangues in which they attributed to themselves the keys of heaven, must have made their hearts swell with uncontrollable merriment. Their heads were filled with anecdotes, sacred or profane; native coarseness and assumed devotion, the real and the artificial man, jostled each other to the sound of jugs and vessels clattering on the table. See in the margin of an old psalter the lean figure of Master Reynard[454]: a crozier between his paws, a mitre on his head, he is preaching a sermon to the wondering crowd of ducks and geese of the poultry yard. The gesture is full of unction, but the eye shaded by the tawny hair has a cruel glitter, which ought to give warning of the peroration. But no, the poultry yard clucks devoutly and fears nothing; woe to the ducks when the mitre has fallen: “And Thou, Lord, shalt laugh at them,” says the psalmist on the same page. A singular knowledge of the human heart those individuals must have had, going through such strange experiences day by day. Never were more unworthy beings supposedly clothed with greater supernatural powers. The deformed monster squatting on the apse of the cathedral laughs and grimaces hideously on his airy pedestal. And up to the clouds rise the fretted spires; the chiselled pinnacles detach themselves like lace upon the sky; the saints pray their eternal prayer under the porch; the bells send forth their peals into space, and souls are seized with a thrill, with that mysterious awe caused by the sublime. The monster laughs; hearts believe themselves purified, but he has seen their ugly sores, a sinister hand will touch them and prevent their cure; the edge {333} of the roof reaches the clouds; but his look goes through the dormer window, he detects a cracking beam, worm-eaten boards giving way, and a host of obscure creatures slowly pursuing under the wooden shafts their secular labour of destruction: he laughs and grimaces hideously.