Of angelical intelligence.¹

Arbonne of Olay advanced and bowed to Lady Ouiser.

‘My lady,’ said she, ‘whereas those that have come before me have told of people who have used crude ingenuity to attain things they cannot have, I tell of two ladies who had enough to attain all they wished, but chose instead to dispose of it and their honor jointly to win nothing but scorn.’

‘Arbonne, tell us your tales,’ said Lady Ouiser.

The young lady then said, with a smile on her face:

These two stories happened in the year preceding at Amboise³. In that city, there are two convents: one dedicated to St Michael and the other dedicated to Our Lady. The first is rather large and well-founded; the other less so, but deeply popular among the laity for the liberal and welcoming atmosphere granted to persons beyond the enclosure⁴.

The prioress of Saint-Michel⁵ was a lady called Georgette de Blancmange. She is not from France but was born, I believe, in Lucca; she came to France before the accession of His Majesty⁶ to the throne, and came from a good yet not very well-known family.

She had attained in her green and young years⁷ a propensity for writing well on matters touching on vocation and spiritual science, such that laypeople were moved by the gravity and manner of her writings. In time, she became quite popular in the convent, and all thought her most talented.

In her fortieth year she wrote a very well-known book on the majesty of Our Lady’s nutrition of the Christ Child, called The Rational Mirror⁸. This book alleged that the Holy Virgin had locuted to her⁹ the manner in which Our Lord suckled at His holy mother’s breast, and the things that she kept in her heart, as the gospel of St Luke says¹⁰. The book was published by the mother house in Paris, and many church people and laypeople looked to it for comfort, especially as the late wars of religion abounded¹¹.

Yet, shortly after publication, many people began to compare this work with the works of the other doctors of the Church¹², and found incongruities, omissions and discrepancies that were too glaring to be mere paraphrase, summation or citation.

But Georgette said, ‘The Holy Mother has said these things to me privately, so that they must not be endorsed as factual¹³.’

Such a pronouncement, dear friends, might save one from the Inquisitor, but it does not save one from Enquiry¹⁴.

The book was sent to another prioress in Bordeaux and a confessor in Rome for review. The convent’s library was also consulted. Georgette’s book was torn page from page. The Bordeaux prioress and the Roman confessor found many citations that had been lifted from works of all kinds. Then it was found that Georgette had, prior to her election as Mother Prioress of Saint-Michel, been granted access to the convent’s library, and had spent much time there in solitude.

A year passed. Her own confessor, Fr Gare¹⁵, said she was of sound mind, not possessed, and lived an upright and holy life, and people believed her.

At last, Mother Georgette was summoned to respond to her work, and was found to have improperly cited holy scripture and the works of other writers, such that she commingled knowledge that was not truly hers with her own original thought to the point of indistinguishability. In the Church business, that sort of qualification is in and of itself highly unusual. And while Georgette’s work was beautifully written, and even consolatory to a degree¹⁶, the poor citation was such that it tarnished the limpid quality of the prose, much in the way that oil on a lady’s face induces the man looking on her to find her unappealing.

In the end, the lady was forced to relinquish her post as Prioress. I’m told the privileges granted to her included a year’s worth of beans, strolling privileges, freedom to gaze beyond the convent wall, and front-row seat priority in church. A month later, the Mother House wrote the new prioress at Saint-Michel to say that they could not determine with certainty if Mother Georgette had ever received divine locutions or not, but said that her notebook had included scholia and certain sigils¹⁷ of the angel of Wednesday¹⁸. This angel, as Doctor Scholl may duly explain, is said to have especial favor over things that are written.

Everyone looked to Dr Scholl, who had been eating a small biscuit. With crumbs on his beard, he said:

‘His name is so holy, and so powerful, that it must never be uttered by the ignorant. Suffice it to say, my lady Arbonne, that he must surely linger in the second sphere¹⁹ waiting for his divine syllables to be uttered.’

Lady Arbonne simply went on:

This now brings me to the convent of Our Lady and of the novice Marie of Bellourde²⁰. I confess this story, when I first heard it, thoroughly chilled me, dear friends—

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ the Abbot of Costello then said. ‘You never finished telling us of what happened to Georgette de Blancmange.’

Arbonne blinked.

‘I just told you that she was bereft of a year of beans²¹. That is punishment enough for a lady of her ilk, regardless of whether you think she truly called on the angel of Wednesday to help lift citations from holy authors to serve her work.’

‘Proceed, dear Arbonne,’ replied Lady Ouiser.

Marie was a beautiful, wide-eyed thing from a poor family. I am told the family she came from were bean farmers from La Rochelle. When she was sixteen she taught herself to read in church and began spinning wool for a certain Lord of Maine. There, she composed such terrifically arresting stories that she became popular with the hired help on the farm. Men all over the country dropped gifts ranging from small pies to offers for her hand. But she rejected them all, because she wished to serve the Lord in a convent in the city with a big library.

When she was nineteen, she said that Jesus himself had laid the ring of his manhood²² on her finger, in a dream. The parents immediately believed that Our Lord desired to marry Marie in holy orders.

The lord of the estate, who was a kind man, paid for her entry²³ to the convent of Our Lady, and bade the Prioress, Sœur Pauline²⁴, encourage her to become a learned nun. And as Sœur Pauline was herself well-read despite being from a poor family, the Mother Superior gave her a forgiving job and commanded her to write fifteen romances and send the first of them to the Mother Superior, who would proofread it.

Marie set to work and wrote every day for the next six months. And all the same she still appeared at all the canonical hours²⁵ in good spirits and ready to meet with the people now massing behind the grille of the convent to speak with her. One by one stories went out into the world.

One of these stories was published to great acclaim. Its name is Uriane. It involves a magical girl who transforms into a kind of flying pot that can cook anything.

At this, Persiflage leaned forward and squinted.

‘I must object on Father Bunion’s behalf, dear Arbonne. You have said that this girl received a vision of Our Lord placing the ring of very manhood on her finger. That is very clearly something that would induce one to believe such a vision is of diabolical origin.’

‘You must not jump to conclusions so quickly, young man,’ said Father Bunion. ‘St Catherine of Siena, the great mystic, wrote—and her confessor wisely suppressed the relation²⁶—of her vision of Our Redeemer laying the ring of his manhood on her finger. Moreover it had a distinct scent and smell. And St Catherine furthermore records seeing Our Lord in the manner of his bloodied and bruised appearance at Golgotha during the vision²⁷.’

‘I simply refuse to believe such a thing,’ Persiflage replied, sitting down in frank shock. But Lady Ouiser raised a hand and said:

‘Evidently, dear Arbonne, the gentlemen’s credibility is quite strained. Pray continue your relation²⁸ lest we lose their faith in your ability to relate it as well.’

Arbonne bowed and continued:

As I have said, the stories she wrote were so good and so interesting that everyone clamored for a copy of a bound tome. Marie finished writing this book of stories, which contained Uriane’s story, and furthered another story about a Black man and a Corsican woman said to resemble St Julia. The book, I am told, was quite long and very beautiful, and spoke of the courtly love between this Black man, who was a pagan, and this lady who suffers martyrdom as St Julia is said to²⁹. And when the story was printed and distributed to the other houses, it caused such a sensation among the nuns.

But similarly, the nuns of the convent were much disturbed by the quality and quantity of writing Marie produced, and wondered how a girl might have so much time and energy to devote to telling such stories. Even the best writers run out of ideas. So it’s easy to imagine that even Marie might wish to rest from conjuring up the wars, romances, loves and fights of the protagonists of her tales. But she continued to write in such a prolific way that soon enough many of the nuns and a few of the laity whispered: ‘No, something is funny about all of this.’

‘And was there indeed something funny about the writing, Arbonne?’ Boulevardier then said. ‘I mean, you have read these things, haven’t you?’

‘I read one story, and yes, it was very strange. In it, a woman and a man are in love, but she imagines she is a fox or a dog, and the man refers to her as his pet. But the whole story is meant to be an allegory of the soul, and there is no way that Our Lord, who loves us enough to die on the Cross, would ever think of us as a thing that should receive table scraps and needs to be let out to poop in the front yard twice a day.’

‘Only the Dominicans³⁰ refer to themselves thus—or so I have heard,’ Father Bunion replied.

‘Dante said in the Divine Comedy that we were referred to as “God’s Hounds”³¹, but I have yet to hear that distinctly applied to those of that order.’

‘—Within earshot anyway,’ Abraham of Babka then said.

Arbonne went on:

Let me finish my story, friends, for it comes to an end. One by one these objections became impossible to avoid, and people pressed Marie even at Mass to clarify her intended meaning in writing these stories. At first Marie said they were all her own, and some believed her. But then later, her Mother Superior read another romance in which Christ Crucified descends from the Cross without suffering or dying and imparts loving words to His holy Mother, and you all know that this is plainly heretical³², even to the most vile sinner.

The Mother Superior held a conference with her alone, and then with her sisters. Marie’s room was searched, whereupon a sigil of the same angel of Wednesday was found, scrawled on the floor under her cot. Marie had no choice but to confess.

The angel, she said, would take the offering of a single white rose at two in the afternoon with a crust of bread, and sitting in a chair opposite, would dictate to her whatever she wished to relate, no matter how ridiculous it sounded. And so that the angel was pacified, she promised to offer up prayers for whatever the people wished for, and he would take these to the Empyrean³³ to the Lord for Him to dispense with.

She blamed a distant childhood friend for the stories, saying that the friend had, at various times, assumed a role in a way that an unruly passenger commandeers a cart when the driver is going too slowly for his liking. But such a friend, either in Amboise or back at home, was never found. Another search produced a parchment in which the name of the angel had been written with names of persons envious of her she wished for him to silence, either in sickness or in some other unfortunate way.

The confessor and the exorcist were then called. Marie made a general confession³⁴, was reprimanded, and was forbidden to write thereafter. The books she had written were confiscated and prohibited by the Church on its index³⁵, while those that the public bought fetched high resale prices. Colporteurs have sold them under the rose³⁶ all over France ever since. I am told the hardest book to collect is called Of Shyness in Women, this relation containing the allegory of Our Lord and dogs that inspired the consternation to begin with.

All the gifts given to her, which included mementoes, holy images, religious books and the like, were all sold for charity³⁷, and Marie has been confined to the cloister ever since, with no one save her Mother Superior and her confessor to visit her.

As for the angel, I am told she had written love letters to him, and as Holy Scripture tells us that the Devil can assume the likeness of an angel of light³⁸, I conclude that she may have believed that a diabolical entity may have conjured up the vision of Our Lord to induce her to an evil and immoral purpose.

I forget to mention that one of the tales was clearly inspired by the exploits of Amadis of Gaul³⁹, and another by a book whose plot is so torturous and its characters so patently unbelievable that it is to me, dear friends, similarly poisoned by angelic interference. I believe the title of that book is The Game of Thrones. Why, even the name itself boasts of some angelic intelligence clearly beyond the base comprehension of our sin-wracked race.

The company was indeed astonished to hear of such chicanery⁴⁰ taking place even in the holy convents where women are supposed to contemplate the Lord and His goodness.

Arbonne bowed deeply and returned to her place, whereupon Figma arose, bowed to Lady Ouiser, and said:

‘My dear friends, our fair companion Arbonne has told us that even immortal beings can be conscripted into fraud. But what of works that are immortal of their own conceit, that mere association with them is damaging, as the thorn is to the hand that plucks the rose? Listen now to the story that I, Figma of Node, tell, of what befell a lady I once had the misfortune of knowing.’