led her. At Cambrai they assert that, with people standing on all
sides, the woman walked through the middle of the church to the altar,
and the goose followed behind, in her footsteps, with no one urging
it on. Soon after, we have learned, the goose died in Lorraine; she
certainly would have gone more directly to Jerusalem if, the day
before she set out, she had made of herself a holiday meal for her
mistress.

Poor people, however, are not merely comic, but dangerous, to
themselves, as Guibert's version of the story of Peter the Hermit
indicates, and to others, as Guibert's version of the death of Peter
Bartholomew emphasizes.[33]

The story of the goose, however, is a comic reflection of a
persistently urgent problem on the First Crusade; Guibert addresses
the problem of famine often, and expresses particularly warm sympathy
towards aristocratic hunger:

How many jaws and throats of noble men were eaten away by the
roughness of this bread. How terribly were their fine stomachs
revolted by the bitterness of the putrid liquid. Good God, we think
that they must have suffered so, these men who remembered their high
social position in their native land, where they had been accustomed
to great ease and pleasure, and now could find no hope or solace in
any external comfort, as they burned in the terrible heat. Here is
what I and I alone think: never had so many noble men exposed their
own bodies to so much suffering for a purely spiritual benefit.

Furthermore, he bends over backwards to defend aristocrats towards
whom other historians of the First Crusade were far less sympathetic.