A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes Page B

to his spouse the Church, and being furthermore most regular and obedient in the payment of our tithes, do hereby on this twelfth day of August 1520 most pressingly and urgently petition the court to relieve and disburden us of the felonious intervention of those malefactors which have infested us already for many seasons, which have brought upon us God’s wrath and a shameful libel upon our habitation, and which threaten all of us, God-fearing and obedient in our duties to the Church as we are, with immediate and catastrophic death being flung down at us from above like clamorous thunder, which will surely come to pass unless the court in its solemn wisdom do not speedily and justly expel these malefactors from our village, conjuring them to depart, hateful and intolerable as they are, under pain of condemnation, anathema and excommunication from the Holy Church and the Dominion of God.
    Plaidoyer des habitans
    Gentlemen, these poor and humble petitioners, wretched and distressed, come before you as once did the inhabitants of the isles of Minorca and Majorca before the mighty Augustus Caesar, begging him in his justice and power to rid their islands of those rabbits which were destroying their crops and ruining their livelihood. If Augustus Caesar was able to help those dutiful subjects, how much more easily may this court lift the oppressive burden which lies upon the shoulders of your petitioners as heavily as when the great Aeneas did carry his father Anchises from the burning city of Troy. The old Anchises was blinded by a bolt of lightning, and these your petitioners areeven now as if blinded, cast into darkness out of the light of the Lord’s blessing, by the felonious behaviour of those who stand accused in this case, and yet who have not even appeared before the court to answer the charges, being contemptuous of this tribunal and blaspheming towards God, preferring instead to bury themselves in sinful darkness rather than face the truth of light.
    Know, gentlemen, what has already been put before you by witnesses of humble faith and unimpeachable honesty, simple petitioners too trepid of this court to let anything but the clear fountain of truth flow from their mouths. They have testified to the events of the twenty-second day of the month of April in this year of Our Lord, which being the day of the annual pilgrimage of Hugo, Bishop of Besançon, to the humble church of Saint-Michel in their village. They have described to you, in detail which burns in your memory like the fiery furnace from which Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego came unscathed, how as in every year they had adorned and beautified their church to make it worthy for the eye of the Bishop to behold, how they had caused flowers to be placed upon the altar and the door to be made freshly safe against the irruption of animals, but how, though they might bar the door to the pig and the cow, they were unable to bar the door to those diabolic bestioles which crawl through the smallest hole even as David found the chink in Goliath’s armour. They have told you how they lowered by rope from the rafters the Bishop’s throne, which is tethered there from one year’s end to the next and is descended only for the day of the Bishop’s pilgrimage, lest any child or stranger might by chance sit on it and thereby profane it, this being a humble and devout tradition, fully worthy of the praise of God and of this court. How the throne, being lowered, was placed before the altar as it has been every year since the oldest Methuselah in the habitation can remember, and how the prudent villagers set a guard upon it through the night before the arrival of the Bishop, so heedful were they that the throne be not defiled. And how the next day Hugo, Bishop of Besançon, did come in his annual pilgrimage, like Gracchus coming among his beloved people,to the humble church of Saint-Michel, and was pleased by their devotion and true faith. And how, having first as was his