The mass commenced; at the Offertory, the celebrant turned to me and read some prayers; after which my white clothes were taken off and hung as an _ex voto_ beneath a picture of the Virgin. They then dressed me in a violet-coloured frock. The Prior delivered a discourse upon the efficacy of vows; he recalled the history of the Baron of Chateaubriand who had gone to the East with St Louis; he told me that perhaps I, too, should go to Palestine and visit that Virgin of Nazareth to whom I owed my life, thanks to the prayers of the poor, which were always powerful with God. This monk, who told me the history of my family as Dante's grandfather told him the history of his ancestors, might also, like Cacciaguida, have added to it by predicting my exile[53]. Since the Benedictine's exhortation, I always dreamt of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and I ended by accomplishing it. I was consecrated to religion; the wardrobe of my innocence has lain upon its altars: it is not my garments that should today be hung within its temples, but my misfortunes. I was taken back to Saint-Malo. Saint-Malo is not the Aleth of the _Notitia Imperii_: Aleth was better placed by the Romans in what is now the suburb of Saint-Servan, in the military port known as Solidor, at the mouth of the Rance. Facing Aleth was a rock, _est in conspectu Tenedos_[54], not the refuge of the perfidious Greeks, but the retreat of Aaron the Hermit[55], who took up his abode on that island in 507, the date of the victory of Clovis over Alaric[56]: one founded a little convent, the other a great monarchy, two edifices both of which have perished. [Sidenote: Saint-Malo.] Malo, in Latin Maclovius, Macutus, or Machutes, became Bishop of Aleth in 541, and, attracted as he was by Aaron's fame, visited him. As chaplain of the hermit's oratory, after the saint's death he raised a cenobitical church, _in prædio Machutis._ Malo's name was given to the island, and subsequently to the town, Maclovium, Maclopolis. Between St. Malo, first Bishop of Aleth, and Blessed John surnamed "of the Gridiron," who was consecrated in 1140 and built the cathedral, came five-and-forty bishops. Aleth was already almost wholly abandoned, and John of the Gridiron transferred the episcopal see from the Roman to the Breton city which was spreading over Aaron's rock. Saint-Malo suffered greatly in the wars waged between the Kings of France and England. The Earl of Richmond, later Henry VII. of England, in whom ended the Wars of the Roses, was taken to Saint-Malo. He was handed over by the Duke of Brittany to the ambassadors of Richard, who carried him to London to be put to death. He escaped from his guards, and took refuge in the cathedral, _asylum quod in eâ urbe est inviolatissimum_: the right of sanctuary dated back to the Druids, the first priests of Aaron's isle.