The Miracle of the Great St. Nicolas: 1920France, Anatole
General
The Miracle of the Great St. Nicolas: 1920
France, Anatole
Bishops -- Fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English; Miracles -- Fiction
The Reverend Father Gilles Caquerole, a Dominican, inquisitor of
the faith in the city, university, and ecclesiastical province of
Trinqueballe, became uneasy concerning this novelty, and proceeded to
look into it minutely. In the most urgent fashion, by letters under his
seal, he invited the Bishop Nicolas, in co-operation with himself, to
arrest, imprison, interrogate, and sentence these enemies of God, and
especially their principal leaders, the Franciscan monk, Sulpice, and
a dissolute woman named Mirande. The great St. Nicolas burned with an
ardent zeal for the unity of the Church and the destruction of heresy,
but he dearly loved his niece. He hid her in the episcopal palace, and
refused to hand her over to the inquisitor Caquerole, who denounced him
to the Pope as an abettor of disorder and the propagator of a new and
very detestable heresy. The Pope enjoined Nicolas to no longer
withhold the guilty one from her legitimate judges. Nicolas eluded
the injunction, protested his obedience, and did not obey. The Pope
fulminated against him in the Bull _Maleficus pastor_, in which the
venerable pontiff was accused of being a disobedient member of the
Church, a heretic, or one smelling of heresy, a keeper of concubines,
a committer of incest, a corrupter of the people, an old woman and a
meddling old fool, and was passionately admonished.
In this way the Bishop did himself a great deal of harm without any
benefit to his beloved niece. King Berlu, having been threatened with
excommunication if he did not lend his secular arm to the Church in
pursuit of the Edenites, sent some men-at-arms to the episcopal palace
of Trinqueballe.
They tore Mirande from her asylum: she was brought before the inquisitor
Caquerole, thrown into a deep dungeon, and fed upon bread which the
jailers’ dogs had refused; but what afflicted her most was that she was
forcibly compelled to don an old frock and a hood, and that she could no
longer be certain of not sinning.
The monk Sulpice escaped the investigations of the Holy Office and
succeeded in reaching Mambournia, and found an asylum in a monastery of
that kingdom, where he established new sects even more pernicious than
the previous one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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