fears being indeed without as well as within, and the fightings
wheresoever there are fears. Nay, the persecution carried on by my
sons rages against me more perilously and continuously than that of
my open enemies, for my sons I have always with me, and I am ever
exposed to their treacheries. The violence of my enemies I see in
the danger to my body if I leave the cloister; but within it I am
compelled incessantly to endure the crafty machinations as well as
the open violence of those monks who are called my sons, and who
are entrusted to me as their abbot, which is to say their father.

Oh, how often have they tried to kill me with poison, even as the
monks sought to slay St. Benedict! Methinks the same reason which
led the saint to abandon his wicked sons might encourage me to
follow the example of so great a father, lest, in thus exposing
myself to certain peril, I might be deemed a rash tempter of God
rather than a lover of Him, nay, lest it might even be judged that
I had thereby taken my own life. When I had safeguarded myself to
the best of my ability, so far as my food and drink were concerned,
against their daily plottings, they sought to destroy me in the
very ceremony of the altar by putting poison in the chalice. One
day, when I had gone to Nantes to visit the count, who was then
sick, and while I was sojourning awhile in the house of one of my
brothers in the flesh, they arranged to poison me, with the
connivance of one of my attendants, believing that I would take no
precautions to escape such a plot. But divine providence so ordered
matters that I had no desire for the food which was set before me;
one of the monks whom I had brought with me ate thereof, not
knowing that which had been done, and straightway fell dead. As for
the attendant who had dared to undertake this crime, he fled in
terror alike of his own conscience and of the clear evidence of his