malicious intent.

* * * * *

Twenty years ago, the Norbertian monks, called the White Canons in
Provence, hit some really hard times. To see their living conditions at
that time was to feel their pain.

Their great wall and St. Pacome's tower were crumbling away. The
cloister was disappearing under the weeds, the columns were splitting,
and the stone saints were collapsing in their niches. There was no
stained glass window unbroken; nor door still on its hinges. Within the
chapels and the inner cloister, the Rhone wind entered, just like in
the Camargue, blowing out candles, bending the lead and breaking the
glass, and skimming the holy water from its font. Tellingly sadly, the
convent bell hung as silent as an empty dovecote, forcing the penniless
Fathers to call to matins with an almond wood clapper!...

Oh, the woeful White Canons. I can still see them in procession on
Corpus Christi day, sadly filing past in their patched capes--pale,
emaciated, as befitted their mainly watermelon diet--followed by his
grace the abbot, head lowered, shamed by his tarnished crosier, and his
eaten away, white, wool mitre. The lady followers of the brotherhood
were reduced to tears of pity in the procession, and the well-built
banner-carriers were tittering quietly amongst themselves as the poor
monks appeared,

--Those who dream together, starve together

The fact is that the unfortunate White Canons had come to the point
where they were wondering if they wouldn't be better off finding a
place in the real world with every man for himself.

One day when this grave matter was under discussion in the chapter, the
prior was informed that Brother Gaucher wanted to be heard in the
assembly.... Brother Gaucher was the monastery cowherd, which meant
that he spent his entire day wandering around the cloister, driving two
old, emaciated cows from one archway to another, to graze the grass in
the gaps in the paving. He had been looked after for twelve years by an
old woman from the Baux country, known as aunty Begon, before he was
taken in by the monks. The unfortunate cowherd had been unable to learn
anything but how to look after his cattle and to recite his Our Father;
and then only in the Provencal language, as he was too dull witted for
anything else, and about as sharp as a butter-knife. Otherwise, he was
a fervent Christian, although a touch extreme, at ease in a hair shirt
and doing self-chastisement with co