Mary was rarely harsh to any suppliant or servant, and she took no special interest in humiliating the rich or the learned or the wise.  For them, law was made; by them, law was administered; and with their doings Mary never arbitrarily interfered; but occasionally she could not resist the temptation to intimate her opinion of the manner in which the Trinity allowed their—­the regular—­Church to be administered.  She was a queen, and never for an instant forgot it, but she took little thought about her divine rights, if she had any,—­and in fact Saint Bernard preferred her without them,—­while she was scandalized at the greed of officials in her Son’s Court.  One day a rich usurer and a very poor old woman happened to be dying in the same town.  Gaultier de Coincy did not say, as an accurate historian should, that he was present, nor did he mention names or dates, although it was one of his longest and best stories.  Mary never loved bankers, and had no reason for taking interest in this one, or for doing him injury; but it happened that the parish priest was summoned to both death-beds at the same time, and neglected the old pauper in the hope of securing a bequest for his church from the banker.  This was the sort of fault that most annoyed Mary in the Church of the Trinity, which, in her opinion, was not cared for as it should be, and she felt it her duty to intimate as much.

Although the priest refused to come at the old woman’s summons, his young clerk, who seems to have acted as vicar though not in orders, took pity on her, and went alone with the sacrament to her hut, which was the poorest of poor hovels even for that age:—­

Close de piex et de serciaus
 Comme une viez souz a porciaus.

Roof of hoops, and wall of logs,
 Like a wretched stye for hogs.

There the beggar lay, already insensible or at the last gasp, on coarse thatch, on the ground, covered by an old hempen sack.  The picture represented the extremest poverty of the thirteenth century; a hovel without even a feather bed or bedstead, as Aucassins’ ploughman described his mother’s want; and the old woman alone, dying, as the clerk appeared at the opening:—­

Li clers qui fu moult bien apris
 Le cors Nostre Seigneur a pris
 A l’ostel a la povre fame
 S’en vient touz seus mes n’i treuve ame. 
 Si grant clarte y a veue
 Que grant peeur en a eue. 
 Ou povre lit a la vieillete
 Qui couvers iert d’une nateite

Assises voit xii puceles
 Si avenans et si tres beles
 N’est nus tant penser i seust
 Qui raconter le vout peust. 
 A coutee voist Nostre Dame
 Sus le chevez la povre fame
 Qui por la mort sue et travaille. 
 La Mere Dieu d’une tovaille
 Qui blanche est plus que fleur de lis
 La grant sueur d’entor le vis
 A ses blanches mains li essuie.

The clerk, well in these duties taught,
 The body of our Saviour brought
 Where she lay upon her bed
 Without a soul to give her aid. 
 But such brightness there he saw
 As filled his mind with fear and awe. 
 Covered with a mat of straw
 The woman lay; but round and near