Droll Stories — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 602 pages of information about Droll Stories — Complete.

Droll Stories — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 602 pages of information about Droll Stories — Complete.
times she would run about the cloisters like a goat broken loose from its fastening.  Finally, she had grown thin, lost much of the great beauty, and shrunk away to nothing.  While in this condition by us, the abbess her mother, was she placed in the sick-room, we daily expecting her to die.  One winter’s morning the said sister had fled, without leaving any trace of her steps, without breaking the door, forcing of locks, or opening of windows, nor any sign whatever of the manner of her passage; a frightful adventure which was believed to have taken place by the aid of the demon which has annoyed and tormented her.  For the rest it was settled by the authorities of the metropolitan church that the mission of this daughter of hell was to divert the nuns from their holy ways, and blinded by their perfect lives, she had returned through the air on the wings of the sorcerer, who had left her for mockery of our holy religion in the place of our Virgin Mary.”

The which having said, the lady abbess was, with great honour and according to the command of our lord the archbishop, accompanied as far as the convent of Carmel.

In the ninth place, before us has come, agreeably to the citation served upon him, Joseph, called Leschalopier, a money-changer, living on the bridge at the sign of the Besant d’Or, who, after having pledged his Catholic faith to say no other thing than the truth, and that known to him, touching the process before the ecclesiastical tribunal, has testified as follows:—­“I am a poor father, much afflicted by the sacred will of God.  Before the coming of the Succubus of the Rue Chaude, I had, for all good, a son as handsome as a noble, learned as a clerk, and having made more than a dozen voyages into foreign lands; for the rest a good Catholic; keeping himself on guard against the needles of love, because he avoided marriage, knowing himself to be the support of my old days, the love for my eyes, and the constant delight of my heart.  He was a son of whom the King of France might have been proud—­a good and courageous man, the light on my commerce, the joy of my roof, and, above all, an inestimable blessing, seeing that I am alone in the world, having had the misfortune to lose my wife, and being too old to take another.  Now, monseigneur, this treasure without equal has been taken from me, and cast into hell by the demon.  Yes, my lord judge, directly he beheld this mischievous jade, this she-devil, in whom it is a whole workshop of perdition, a conjunction of pleasure and delectation, and whom nothing can satiate, my poor child stuck himself fast into the gluepot of love, and afterwards lived only between the columns of Venus, and there did not live long, because in that place like so great a heat that nothing can satisfy the thirst of this gulf, not even should you plunge therein the germs of the entire world.  Alas! then, my poor boy —­his fortune, his generative hopes, his eternal future, his entire self, more than himself,

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Droll Stories — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.