The most popular of all the wanderers were naturally the most cheerful, or those held to be the most beneficent. These latter were the folks with a universal panacea, very numerous in the Middle Ages; they went about the world selling health. They established themselves in the village green, or the market place, on holidays, spreading a carpet or a piece of cloth on the ground; they displayed their drugs, and began to harangue the people. Their numbers go diminishing nowadays, for the laws are more and more unkind to them, but they have not yet entirely disappeared, so natural to man {184} are credulity and the longing for health. One may still hear at the present day discourses not very different from those they spoke in the fourteenth century in England, France, or Italy; their profession is one that has changed less than any. In the thirteenth century the herbalist of Rutebeuf spoke like Ben Jonson’s mountebank of the seventeenth, like the charlatan who yesterday a few steps from our door attracted the crowd to his trestle, limiting however his sales, on account of the churlishness of the legislator, to tonics, tooth pastes and the like. Big words, marvellous tales, praise of their noble and distant origin, enumeration of the extraordinary cures they have made, ostentatious display of an unbounded devotion to the public good, and of entire pecuniary disinterestedness: all this is found, and always will be found, in the talk of these insinuating itinerants, as it is also found to-day in the advertisements, on walls or in newspapers, of wondrous cures discovered by a priest, by a convent, by a gentleman of worth and disinterestedness; which advertisements have, to some extent, replaced the itinerant healer of olden times. “Good people,” said Rutebeuf’s medicinal herb-seller six hundred years ago, “I am not one of those poor preachers, nor one of those poor herbalists who stand in front of churches with their miserable ill-sown cloak, who carry boxes and sachets and spread out a carpet. Know that I am not one of these; but I belong to a lady whose name is Madame Trote de Salerno, who makes a kerchief of her ears, and whose eyebrows hang down as silver chains behind her shoulders: know that she is the wisest lady that is in all the four parts of the world. My lady sends us into different lands and countries, into Apulia, Calabria, Burgundy, into the forest of Ardennes to kill wild beasts in order to extract good ointments from them, and give medicine to those who are ill in body. . . . And because she made me swear by the saints when I {185} parted from her, I will teach you the proper cure for worms, if you will listen. Will you listen?