Shortly after this, King Berlu defeated the Mambournians in a great battle.  He was, at first, unaware of the fact, for armed conflicts always present a great confusion, and during the last two hundred years the Vervignolians had lost the habit of victory.  But the precipitate and disordered flight of the Mambournians informed him of his advantage.  Instead of fighting a rear-guard action he pursued the enemy, and regained half his kingdom.  The victorious army entered the city of Trinqueballe, all beflagged and beflowered in its honour, and in that illustrious capital of Vervignole it committed a great number of rapes, thefts, murders, and other cruelties, burnt several houses, sacked the churches, and took from the cathedral all that the Jews had left there, which, truth to tell, was not much.

Maxime, who having become a knight and commander of eighty lances, had largely contributed to the victory, was one of the first to enter the city, and repaired straightway to the House of the Musicians, where dwelt the beautiful Mirande, whom he had not seen since his departure for the war.  He found her in her bower, plying her distaff, and fell upon her with such impetuosity that the young lady lost her innocence without, so to speak, realizing that she had done so.  And when, having recovered from her surprise, she exclaimed:  “Is it you, Seigneur Maxime?  What are you doing here?” and was preparing as in duty bound to resist her aggressor, he was quietly walking down the street, readjusting his armour and ogling the girls.

Possibly she would have entirely overlooked this offence, had it not been that some time later she found that she was about to become a mother.  Captain Maxime was then fighting in Mambournia.  All the town knew her shame:  she confided it to the great St. Nicolas, who, on learning this astonishing news, lifted his eyes to heaven, and said: 

“Lord, did you rescue this man from the salting-tub only as a ravening wolf to devour my sheep?  Your wisdom is adorable; but your ways are dark, and your designs mysterious.”

And in that same year, on the Sunday of Mid-Lent, Sulpice threw himself at the feet of the holy Bishop, saying: 

“From my earliest youth, my keenest wish has been to consecrate myself to the Lord.  Allow me, father, to embrace the monastic state, and to make my profession in the monastery of the mendicant friars of Trinqueballe.”

“My son,” answered the good St. Nikolas, “there is no worthier condition than that of the monk.  Happy is he who in the shade of the cloister takes shelter from the tempests of the age.  But of what avail to flee the storm if the storm is within oneself?  Of what avail to affect an outward show of humility, if one’s bosom contains a heart full of pride?  What shall you profit by donning the livery of obedience if your soul be in revolt?  I have seen you, my son, fall into more errors than Sabellius, Alius, Nestorius, Eutyches, Manes, Pelagius, and Pachosius combined, and revive, before your twentieth year, twelve centuries of peculiar opinions.  It is true that you have not been very obstinate in any of them, but your successive recantations appear to betray less submission to our Holy Mother the Church than eagerness to rush from one error to another, to leap from Manicheeism to Sabellianism, and from the crime of the Albigenses to the ignominies of the Vaudois.”

Sulpice listened to this discourse with a contrite heart, a simplicity of mind and submissiveness, that drew tears from the great St. Nicolas.

“I deplore, repudiate, condemn, reprove, detest, execrate, and abominate my errors, past, present, and future,” he said.  “I submit myself to the Church fully and entirely, totally and generally, purely and simply; and I have no belief but her belief, no faith but her faith, no knowledge but her knowledge:  I neither see, hear, nor feel, save only through her.  She might tell me that the fly which has but now settled on the nose of the Deacon Modernus was a camel, and I should incontinently, without dispute, contest, murmur, resistance, hesitation or doubt, believe, declare, proclaim, and confess, under torture and unto death, that it was a camel that settled on the nose of the Deacon Modernus.  For the Church is the Fountain of Truth, and I am nought by myself but a vile receptacle of Error.”

“Take care, my father,” said Modernus.  “Sulpice is capable of overdoing submission to the Church even to the point of Heresy.  Do you not see that he submits with frenzy, in transports and swooning?  Is wallowing in submission a good way of submitting?  He is annihilating himself; he is committing suicide.”

But the Bishop reprimanded his deacon for holding such ideas, which were contrary to charity, and sent the postulant to the noviciate of the mendicant friars of Trinqueballe.

Alas, at the end of a year those priests, till then so quiet and humble, were torn by frightful schisms, plunged into a thousand errors against the Catholic truth, their days filled with disorder, and their souls with sedition!  Sulpice inspired the brothers with this poison.  He sustained against his superiors that there was no longer any true Pope, since miracles no longer accompanied the elections of the Sovereign Pontiffs; nor, rightly speaking, any Church, since Christians had ceased to live the life of the apostles and the first of the faithful; that there was no purgatory; that it was not necessary to confess to a priest if one confessed to God; that men do wrong in making use of moneys of gold and silver, for they should share in common the fruits of the earth.  These abominable maxims, which he forcibly sustained, were combated by some, and adopted by others, causing horrible scandals.  A little later Sulpice taught the doctrine of perfect purity, which nothing can soil, and the good brothers’ monastery became like a cage of monkeys.  This pestilence did not remain confined within the walls of a monastery.  Sulpice went preaching through the city; his eloquence, the internal fire by which he was consumed, the simplicity of his life, and his unshakable courage touched all hearts.

On hearing the voice of the reformer, the ancient city, evangelized by St. Cromadaire, and enlightened by St. Gibbosine, fell into disorder and dissolution; every sort of extravagance and impiety was committed there, by day and by night.  In vain did the great St. Nicolas warn his flock by exhortations, threats, and fulminations.  The evil increased unchecked, and it was sad to see the contagion spreading itself among the well-to-do townsfolk, the lords, and the clergy, as much as and more than among the poor artisans and the small tradesfolk.

One day when the man of God was lamenting the deplorable state of the church of Vervignole in the cloister of the cathedral, his meditations were disturbed by strange shrieks, and he saw a woman, stark naked, walking on all fours, with a peacock’s feather for a tail.  As she came nearer, she barked, sniffed, and licked the ground.  Her fair head was covered with mud, and her whole body was a mass of filth.  In this unhappy creature the holy Bishop Nicolas recognized his niece Mirande.

“What do you there, my daughter?” he cried.  “Why are you naked, and wherefore do you walk on your hands and knees?  Have you no shame?”

“No, uncle, I am not ashamed,” sweetly replied Mirande.  “I should, on the contrary, be ashamed of any other gesture, or method of progression.  If one wishes to please God, it is thus that one should behave.  The holy Brother Sulpice taught me to conduct myself thus, in order to resemble the beasts, who are nearer to God than is Man, in that they have not sinned.  So long as I am in the state in which you see me, there will be no danger of my sinning.  I have come, uncle, to beg you in all love and charity to do likewise; for unless you do you cannot be saved.  Remove, I beg, your clothes, and adopt the posture of the animals, in whom God joyfully sees His image which has not been distorted by sin.  I give you this advice by order of the holy brother Sulpice, and consequently by order of God Himself, for the holy brother is in the Lord’s secrets.  Strip yourself naked, uncle, and come with me, so that we may show ourselves to the people for their edification.”

“Can I believe my eyes and ears?” gasped the holy Bishop, whose voice was stifled by sobs.  “I had a niece blooming in beauty, virtue, and piety; the three children whom I rescued from the salting-tub have reduced her to the miserable condition in which I now see her.  The first has despoiled her of all her property, an abundant source of alms, and the patrimony of the poor; the second has robbed her of her honour, and the third has turned her into a heretic.”

He threw himself on the flagstones, embracing his niece, begging her to renounce so evil a way of life, and adjuring her to reclothe herself, and walk on her feet like a human being, ransomed by the blood of Jesus Christ.

But she replied only by sharp yelps and lamentable shrieks.

Before long the town of Trinqueballe was filled with naked men and women, walking on all fours and barking; they called themselves the Edenites, and their ambition was to lead back the world to the times of perfect innocence, before the unfortunate creation of Adam and Eve.

The Reverend Father Gilles Caquerole, a Dominican, inquisitor of the faith in the city, university, and ecclesiastical province of Trinqueballe, became uneasy concerning this novelty, and proceeded to look into it minutely.  In the most urgent fashion, by letters under his seal, he invited the Bishop Nicolas, in co-operation with himself, to arrest, imprison, interrogate, and sentence these enemies of God, and especially their principal leaders, the Franciscan monk, Sulpice, and a dissolute woman named Mirande.  The great St. Nicolas burned with an ardent zeal for the unity of the Church and the destruction of heresy, but he dearly loved his niece.  He hid her in the episcopal palace, and refused to hand her over to the inquisitor Caquerole, who denounced him to the Pope as an abettor of disorder and the propagator of a new and very detestable heresy.  The Pope enjoined Nicolas to no longer withhold the guilty one from her legitimate judges.  Nicolas eluded the injunction, protested his obedience, and did not obey.  The Pope fulminated against him in the Bull Maleficus pastor, in which the venerable pontiff was accused of being a disobedient member of the Church, a heretic, or one smelling of heresy, a keeper of concubines, a committer of incest, a corrupter of the people, an old woman and a meddling old fool, and was passionately admonished.

In this way the Bishop did himself a great deal of harm without any benefit to his beloved niece.  King Berlu, having been threatened with excommunication if he did not lend his secular arm to the Church in pursuit of the Edenites, sent some men-at-arms to the episcopal palace of Trinqueballe.

They tore Mirande from her asylum:  she was brought before the inquisitor Caquerole, thrown into a deep dungeon, and fed upon bread which the jailers’ dogs had refused; but what afflicted her most was that she was forcibly compelled to don an old frock and a hood, and that she could no longer be certain of not sinning.

The monk Sulpice escaped the investigations of the Holy Office and succeeded in reaching Mambournia, and found an asylum in a monastery of that kingdom, where he established new sects even more pernicious than the previous one.

Nevertheless, heresy, fortified by persecution, and exulting in danger, now spread its ravages over the whole of Vervignole.  All over the kingdom there were seen in the fields thousands of naked men and women, nibbling the grass, bleating, lowing, roaring, neighing, and contending at night with sheep, cattle, and horses for the use of stable and manger.  The inquisitor informed the Holy Father of these horrible scandals, and warned him that so long as the Protector of the Edenites, the odious Nicolas, remained seated on the throne of St. Cromadaire, the evil could only continue to increase.  Conformably with this advice the Pope hurled against the Bishop, like a thunderbolt, the Bull Deterrima quondam, by which he deprived him of all his ecclesiastical functions, and cut him off from the communion of the faithful.