A poor woman set out on the journey, when a goose, filled with I do not know what instructions, clearly exceeding the laws of her own dull nature, followed her. Lo, rumor, flying on Pegasean wings, filled the castles and cities with the news that even geese had been sent by God to liberate Jerusalem. Not only did they deny that this wretched woman was leading the goose, but they said that the goose led her. At Cambrai they assert that, with people standing on all sides, the woman walked through the middle of the church to the altar, and the goose followed behind, in her footsteps, with no one urging it on. Soon after, we have learned, the goose died in Lorraine; she certainly would have gone more directly to Jerusalem if, the day before she set out, she had made of herself a holiday meal for her mistress. Poor people, however, are not merely comic, but dangerous, to themselves, as Guibert's version of the story of Peter the Hermit indicates, and to others, as Guibert's version of the death of Peter Bartholomew emphasizes.[33] The story of the goose, however, is a comic reflection of a persistently urgent problem on the First Crusade; Guibert addresses the problem of famine often, and expresses particularly warm sympathy towards aristocratic hunger: How many jaws and throats of noble men were eaten away by the roughness of this bread. How terribly were their fine stomachs revolted by the bitterness of the putrid liquid. Good God, we think that they must have suffered so, these men who remembered their high social position in their native land, where they had been accustomed to great ease and pleasure, and now could find no hope or solace in any external comfort, as they burned in the terrible heat. Here is what I and I alone think: never had so many noble men exposed their own bodies to so much suffering for a purely spiritual benefit. Furthermore, he bends over backwards to defend aristocrats towards whom other historians of the First Crusade were far less sympathetic. Guibert's description of the count of Normandy, for example, shows remarkable moral flexibility: It would hardly be right to remain silent about Robert, Count of Normandy, whose bodily indulgences, weakness of will, prodigality with money, gourmandising, indolence, and lechery were expiated by the perseverance and heroism that he vigorously displayed in the army of the Lord. His inborn compassion was naturally so great that he did not permit vengeance to be taken against those who had plotted to betray him and had been sentenced to death, and if something did happen to them, he wept for their misfortune. He was bold in battle, although adeptness at foul trickery, with which we know many men befouled themselves, should not be praised, unless provoked by unspeakable acts. For these and for similar things he should now be forgiven, since God has punished him in this world, where he now languishes in jail, deprived of all his honors.