"The son of a female slave is born a slave and belongs to his mother's master. When the boy, whom your father named Loysik in remembrance of his Breton extraction, was four or five years old, the bishop of Tulle, who had noticed in the child certain precocious qualities, had him taken to the episcopal college, where he was brought up with several other young slaves who were all to become clerks of the Church. From time to time Karadeucq went at night to visit the mother of his son at Tulle. The boy being always notified in advance by his mother, always found some means of repairing to his mother's hut on such occasions. There the father and the son held long conversations concerning the men and things of the olden days of Gaul when the country was glorious and free. Your father preserved as a family tradition an ardent and sacred love for Gaul. He strove to cause his son's heart to beat proudly at the grand recollections of the past, to exasperate him against the Franks, and some day to take him along to run the Vagrery with him. But Loysik, who was of a quiet and rather retiring disposition, feared such an adventurous life. Years passed. Had your brother so desired, he could have won honors and riches, as so many others did, by consecrating himself to the Church. But shortly before being ordained a priest, he had the opportunity of gaining so close a view of the clerical hypocrisy, cupidity and profligacy, that he declined to enter priesthood and he cursed the sacrilegious alliance of the Gallic clergy with the conquerors. He left the episcopal house and went to the frontier of Provence, where he joined the hermit-laborers. He was previously acquainted with one of their set, who had stopped for several weeks at the episcopal alms-house for his cure." "Did the hermit-laborers establish a colony?" "Several of them gathered in a secluded spot to cultivate the lands that had been laid waste and were abandoned since the conquest. They were plain and good men, faithful to the recollections of old Gaul and to the precepts of the gospels. Those monks lived in celibacy, but took no vows. They remained lay, and had no clerical character. It is only since recent years that most of those monks have begun entering the Church. But having become priests, they are daily losing the popular esteem that they once enjoyed, and the independence of character that rendered them so redoubtable to the bishops. At the time that I am speaking of, the life of those hermit-laborers was peaceful and industrious. They lived like brothers, obedient to the precepts of Jesus; they cultivated their lands in common; and they jointly and forcibly defended them whenever some band of Franks, on the way from some burg to another, took it into their heads, out of sheer wantonness, to injure the fields or crops of the monks--"