And therefore, of course, you must have a title in it. I
know that. I do not object to it. What I want to know is, why a
duchess?
AUCTOR. On account of the reduction of scale: the concentration of the
thing. You see in the full play there would have been a lord, two
baronets, and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable words
into their mouths. As it was I had to make absolutely sure of the
element of nobility without any help, and, as it were, in one
startling moment. Do you follow? Is it not art?
I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure so naturally full of
great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should breed such fantastic
nonsense as all this; but remember at least the little acolyte of
Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for religion, put him
into a cassock and designed him for the Church, whereupon the
youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting
beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and even
going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the rich
in loud whispers when they did not put in enough. So one way with
another they sent him home to his father; the archbishop thrusting him
out of the south porch with his own hands and giving him the Common or
Ferial Malediction, which is much the same as that used by carters to
stray dogs.
When his father saw him he fumed terribly, cursing like a pagan, and
asking whether his son were a roysterer fit for the gallows as well as
a fool fit for a cassock. On hearing which complaint the son very
humbly and contritely said -
'It is not my fault but the contact with the things of the Church that
makes me gambol and frisk, just as the Devil they say is a good enough
fellow left to himself and is only moderately heated, yet when you put
him into holy water all the world is witness how he hisses and boils.'
The boy then taking a little lamb which happened to be in the
drawing-room, said -
'Father, see this little lamb; how demure he is and how simple and
innocent, and how foolish and how tractable. Yet observe!' With that
he whipped the cassock from his arm where he was carrying it and threw
it all over the lamb, covering his head and body; and the lamb began
plunging and kicking and bucking and rolling and heaving and sliding
and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling with the clerical
and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and bleating all
the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world like the
great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on
All-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly plucked off the cassock
again, the lamb, after sneezing a little and finding his feet, became
quite gentle once more, and looked only a little confused and dazed.
