Part 19 (1/2)

Monsieur le cure would prove, with doc.u.ments to sustain him, that Mary Magdalen was not in the boat. She came to Provence by some other means, no one can say by what miracle.

With the exception of the two Maries and Sara, all the pa.s.sengers upon the miraculous craft dispersed in different directions, preaching and making converts.

The holy women did not leave Camargue, the island in the Rhone, divided at that time into a great number of small islands by the ponds--a veritable archipelago, called _Sticados_ and inhabited by heathens. In those days, all these small islands, formed by the swamps, were covered with forests and filled with wild beasts. And this delta of the Rhone was infested with crocodiles.

Now, a long, long time after the death of the holy women, a hunter, followed by his dogs, was pa.s.sing over the spot where they lay buried in unknown graves; he fell in with a hermit there, beside a spring.

”My lord,” said the hermit, ”I had a revelation in a dream last night.

In the sand beside this spring repose the bodies of three sainted women!”

The hunter was a Comte de Provence. His palace was at Arles, and the cure had every reason to believe that he was Guillaume I., son of Boson I., famous for his liberality to the church.

It was in 981. This Guillaume had overcome the Saracens, and Conrad I., King of Bourgogne, his suzerain, loved and respected him.

The prince, having listened to the hermit's tale, rode away musing deeply; not long after, he returned and caused a church in the form of a citadel to be built at that point of the coast, in the very centre of a s.p.a.cious enclosure surrounded by moats.

Then he made known throughout Provence that special privileges would be accorded to all those who should build houses between the church and the moat.

Thus was founded the Villa-de-la-Mar--which is in fact a town (_ville_), although it is too often spoken of as a village, under its other name of Saintes-Maries.

The Comtes de Provence have always granted special privileges to the town.

Under Queen Jeanne, a guard was stationed all the time at the top of the church-tower to watch the s.h.i.+ps and make signals. Sentinels were obliged to call to one another and answer every hour during the night.

The people of Saintes-Maries were also exempted by the queen from payment of tolls and the tax upon salt.

Monsieur le cure explains all these things in his book, which is very interesting. He also describes therein, ”as in duty bound,” the discovery of the sacred bones. In 1448, King Rene, being then at Aix, his capital, heard a preacher declare that Saintes Marie-Jacobe and Salome were certainly buried beneath the church of Villa-de-la-Mar.

Rene at once consulted his confessor, Pere Adhemar, and sent a messenger to the Pope, asking that he be authorized to make search underground in the church. The authorization was given in the month of June in the same year. The Archbishop of Aix, Robert Damiani, presided at the search.

They found the spring; near the spring was an earthen altar; at the foot of the altar a marble tablet with this inscription, upon which the good cure descants at great length:

D. M.

IOV. M. L. CORN. BALBUS P. ANATILIORUM AD RHODANI OSTIA SACR. ARAM V. S. L. M.

Lastly, they found the bones of the saints, perfectly recognizable, and, in addition, a head sealed up in a leaden box, which, according to the cure, was the head of Saint James the Less, brought from Jerusalem by Marie-Jacobe, his mother.

The bones, having been devoutly taken from their resting-place, were with great ceremony bestowed in shrines of cypress wood. The king was present with his court. The papal legate was also there, and an archbishop, ten or twelve bishops, a great number of ecclesiastical dignitaries, professors, and learned doctors. The chancellor of the University of Avignon, too, and--so the reports of the proceedings set forth--three prothonotaries of the Holy See and three notaries public.

And so nothing is more firmly established than the authenticity of the relics of the saints.

But various apocryphal legends had appeared to throw doubt upon the truth, and Monsieur le cure was at work upon the following pa.s.sage while Livette, with increasing uneasiness, was awaiting him in the parlor.

”Among the popular fallacies,” wrote the cure, ”which destroy pure tradition, we must stigmatize as one of the most deplorable, I may say one of the most pernicious, that one which insists that among the pa.s.sengers of the miraculous craft was a third Saint Marie, surnamed the Egyptian. It is downright heresy! How could it have taken root, and how far does it extend?”

Monsieur le cure proposed to retouch that last phrase forthwith, and for a very good reason.

”Without doubt,” he continued, ”the Egyptians, or Bohemians, or gipsies, by manifesting, from remote times, particular veneration for Saint Sara, who was, according to their ideas, an Egyptian and the wife of Pontius Pilate, have contributed to the formation of an absurd legend, but this one has its source, or its root, in something different; there is an episode of a boat in the life of the Egyptian, which a.s.sists the error by causing confusion.”

Monsieur le cure proposed to return to that paragraph also.

”Born in the outskirts of Alexandria, Marie the Egyptian left her family to lead the life of shame she had chosen, in the great city.

Coming to a river, she desired to cross it in a boat, and having not the wherewithal for her pa.s.sage, she paid the boatman in an impure manner.