"My heavenly Saviour!" sighed the bell-ringer's wife, "what a lot of
filth."

"But," said Durtal, "in the Middle Ages the mass was celebrated in a
different fashion. The altar then was the naked buttocks of a woman; in
the seventeenth century it was the abdomen, and now?"

"Nowadays a woman is hardly ever used for an altar, but let us not
anticipate. In the eighteenth century we shall again find abbés--among
how many other monsters--who defile holy objects. One Canon Duer
occupied himself specially with black magic and the evocation of the
devil. He was finally executed as a sorcerer in the year of grace 1718.
There was another who believed in the Incarnation of the Holy Ghost as
the Paraclete, and who, in Lombary, which he stirred up to a feverish
pitch of excitement, ordained twelve apostles and twelve apostolines to
preach his gospel. This man, abbé Beccarelli, like all the other priests
of his ilk, abused both sexes, and he said mass without confessing
himself of his lecheries. As his cult grew he began to celebrate
travestied offices in which he distributed to his congregation
aphrodisiac pills presenting this peculiarity, that after having
swallowed them the men believed themselves changed into women and the
women into men.

"The recipe for these hippomanes is lost," continued Des Hermies with
almost a sad smile. "To make a long story short, Beccarelli met with a
very miserable end. He was prosecuted for sacrilege and sentenced, in
1708, to row in the galleys for seven years."

"These frightful stories seem to have taken away your appetite," said