“Little friar, what kind of relics did you carry on the second vicar’s donkey’s back in company with Sister Catherine? Was it your small clothes you gave the devotees to kiss, in the manner of some grey friars, of whom Henry Estienne has narrated the adventures?” “Ah! your reverence,” meekly said Friar Ange with the expression of a martyr suffering for truth, “it was not my small clothes, it was a foot of St Eustache.” “I should have taken my oath on it, if it would not be a sin to do so,” exclaimed the priest, brandishing the drumstick of a fowl. “Those Capuchins turn out saints utterly ignored by good authors, who work on ecclesiastical history. Neither Tillemont nor Fleury speak of that St Eustache to whom a church is consecrated, very wrongly, at Paris, when so many saints recognised by writers well deserving to be believed, are still waiting for a similar honour. The ‘Life of St Eustache’ is a tissue of ridiculous fables; the same is the case of that of St Catherine, who has never existed except in the imagination of some wicked Byzantine monk. But I do not want to attack her too hardly, as he is the patroness of men of letters, and serves as a signboard to the bookshop of that good M. Blaizot, which is the most delectable abode in this world.” “I also had,” continued quickly the little friar, “a rib of St Mary the Egyptian.” “Ah! Ah!’” shouted the priest, throwing the chicken bone across the room, “concerning this one, I do consider her to be very, very holy, as during her lifetime she gave a fine example of humility.” “You know, madam,” he said and took mother’s sleeve, “that St Mary the Egyptian, going on pilgrimage to the sepulchre of our Lord, was stopped by a deep flowing river, and not possessing a single farthing to pay for the passage on the ferry-boat she offered to the boatmen her own body as a payment. What do you say to that, my good mistress?” First of all my mother asked if the story was quite true. After she had been assured that the matter had been printed in a book and painted on a stained window in the Church of La Jussienne she believed it. “I think,” she said, “that one has to be as holy as she was to do the like without committing a sin. I must say that I should not like to do it.”