As night is coming, the three, finding themselves near the house of Primaut the Wolf, enter without ceremony and make themselves at home, while the owner of the place is away. They find there “salted meat, cheese, and eggs . . . and good ale. Belin drinks so much that he loses his head, and then begins to sing, and the arch-priest to organ-bray, and Master Reynard sings in falsetto.” But their merriment is soon at an end. The alarm has been given; Ysengrin, Hersent, and a number of other wolves, relations, friends, compeers of Primaut, who all of them owe grudges to Reynard, come round and besiege the pilgrims. They escape with great difficulty. Ill-pleased with these grievous adventures, they agree not to go to Rome at all, and Reynard, to whom, rather against likelihood, the author here lends his own thoughts, winds up the enterprise with a speech: “‘My lords,’ says he, ‘by my head, this wandering is loathsome and tiring. There is in the world many a good man that has never been to Rome; such an one has come back from the Seven Saints who is worse than he ever was. I mean to take my way home, and I shall live by my labour and seek honest earnings; I shall be charitable to poor people.’ Then they cried, ‘Be it so, {362} be it so,’ and they betook themselves homewards,” converts to better lives, for a time.[504] The same mode of reasoning was used later on, at the time of the Renaissance, by no less a man than Erasmus, who has described in his most satirical vein the vanities of pilgrims and pilgrimages. He supposes a meeting of two friends, Menedemus and Ogygyus, the latter just back from Compostela, and, what is more interesting for us, from Walsingham, “the most holy name in all England. . . . The towne is almost susteynyd by the resort of pylgrymes.” The faithful believer Ogygyus goes on describing the wonders of the place, the gold and silver and precious stones offered to the miraculous statue of our Lady, the marvels worked at the holy wells, the miracle of the knight towards whom the portal of the church stretched out, the beautiful relics, and especially the crystal phial containing the Virgin’s milk. “Whan ye sexten sawe us, he dyd runne to the aultre, and put apon hym his surplese and his stole about his nekke, knelyd downe relygyously and worshipyd it, and streghtforthe dyd offre the mylke to us to kysse.” The same ceremony with surplice and kneeling, though it has disappeared at Walsingham with the phial itself, may still be seen elsewhere any day, in Milan, for example, at the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo. Ogygyus and his friends make their offerings, not without remarking that some unscrupulous visitors, by a clever trick, pick money out of the plate instead of leaving in it any of their own: a trick which, as we have seen, was used by Panurge on a certain day when he was somewhat “escorné et taciturne” for lack of pence. Erasmus ends his dialogue in the same strain as the author of “Reynard”: {363}