men of law, who lived in sumptuous
houses and carved their coats of arms upon their massive sideboards,
who quoted Malherbe, and approved the early efforts of a young man
called Corneille, and prided themselves upon the delicacy and
scholarship of their speech. In St. Nicaise, on the contrary, you
heard little save the "purinique," or patois of the workmen; in
narrow, dark, and twisting streets the drapers and weavers and dyers
carried on their trades and earned their bread by the sweat of their
brow. Their children had to work early for their living, and helped
the business of their parents when still in the first years of their
youth. No wonder these who "scorned delights and lived laborious days"
laughed at the effeminacy of their neighbours, saying that

"Aux enfants de Saint Godard
L'esprit ne venait qu' a trente ans."

By 1632 this feeling of rivalry and mutual distrust had been sharpened
into positive hatred; for, of course, when the troubles of the Ligue
had come, and St. Godard had declared for its old kings and saints,
St. Nicaise had openly professed belief in Villars and Mayenne, and
almost raised a chapel to the memory of Jacques Clement the assassin;
and you may imagine the gibes of Royalist St. Godard when the tide of
fortune turned against the rebel parish. Athens and Sparta were not
more different, or more hostile. One day the smouldering fires broke
into flame. It was the day of a procession when, at the very meeting
line of the two parishes, the clergy of St. Godard, splendid in gold
and embroidery, with a cross of gold before them, and behind them a
line of ladies richly dressed and escorted by red-robed magistrates,
were moving in procession, with the banner at their head presented by
the Lady President of Gremonville, whereon the figure of the patron
saint was embroidered upon crimson velvet hung round with cloth of
gold. Consider the disdain of these fine ladies for the modest little
gathering that walked, across the way, beneath a little banner of
ordinary taffetas bearing a tiny effigy of St. Nicaise, worked in worn
colours of old faded pink, and followed by a crowd of workmen clad in
blouse and sabot and rough woollen caps. At a certain point the
contrast became unbearable. The workmen, with a shout of fury, made a
sudden rush upon that hateful new banner of St. Godard, tore it from
the standard-bearer's hands, and threw it in the muddy waters of the
boundary-stream. How the two pr