Saint Guinefort
Although I am a holy man, my devotion was purified in the flames of heresy. Now, at the dusk of a life that bent to confession, younger priests all ask me to say what strange, ungodly things I saw. To answer them in their immaturity would only exalt the false beliefs I long ago put to an end. But my coldest silence has not kept them from hearing of the so-called Saint Guinefort. A trace of the story survives.
So I write truth here, that I may combat ridiculous legend.
It happened thirty winters ago. And while I wasn’t young then—in fact I was even then what the young call old—I’d yet to find my nose for demons. I went to Lyon, its confluent rivers the site of stirring martyrdom. Saint Blandina: a Christian slave whom the Romans tortured, burned and tied to a stake for the delectation of wild beasts. Miraculously, the animals refused to harm her. (And so the human torture resumed.)
My object in this countryside, other than preaching and tutoring, was to convert the Waldensians, that loathsome sect of dirty poor souls with a nearly pagan idea of the world. They rejected all to do with money, even the repair of clothes. Still more troubling, they were unconvinced of the authority of the Church: to them, holy water should slake thirst if not used in aspersion, and for Eucharist they took unconsecrated altar bread, and even fish.
It wasn’t good bread, either.
On the fringes of this cult did Guinefort operate. The peasants said he performed miracles. Ignorant rabble. Which of the saints wasn’t known to me, nor the vast Dominican Order? Therefore this Guinefort was no disciple, but an apostate, spreader of lies and superstition. A charlatan who, whatever his aims, had put the Church at hazard. Privately I judged his branch as needing cutting. He was doubtless a preacher of poverty. Possessions, while in excess unseemly, are vital to our cause.
As inquisitor I learned to balance perfection against the possible.
One autumn day, when the Lord had made His breeze to satisfy, and the fields were ripe with gold, I climbed the town’s eastern hill. From this modest altitude, beyond a great plain, one so blessed will see iced mountains floating above.
It was in these meadows, my wretched informant said, that a group of Waldensians mounted their school, shunning pompous conventions such as a roof, desks, chairs and masters. Compared to my course of study in Paris, it was the pedagogy of clowns, and I had no doubt their methods explained the aberrant faith now rooted in the region. Suffice it to say that Latin was of no consequence to them. And that was a threat, for in plain manner these heretics hoped to claim the young and dull-witted.
But on this overfine, sun-jeweled day, I saw no gullible congregation. Instead, as I rounded a slope of grass, there sat underneath a twisted olive tree a splendid greyhound, intelligent brow inclined in greeting. I looked about for the prince in whom this elegant creature bestowed command—and saw none.
“How has this noble dog arrived here on its own?”
“I go where I please,” the greyhound replied.
I froze like the mountains that lined the edge of the visible world. This was, I am convinced, my first recognition of a devil.
I might have known sooner. The dog sat uncommonly still, and its coat gave a menacing, pearly shine, grey as a stifling, rainy summer noon. Grey that shuddered with rolling light.
“A devil may not sit by a holy tree,” I pronounced.
“The tree is dying,” the greyhound said. “What difference if I’ve pissed on it?” He stuck his snout under himself, showing me whence the piss derived. “The olive trees here are rotten with disease. Anyway, I hate olives.”
“The olive is a perfect, heavenly food,” I retorted, stunned to be arguing with a greyhound about olives, but could not resist offering my opinion.
“I crushed with a paw the olives that master laid before me.”
A fast cloud rippled the sun, as though the Lord had run His fingers over the kingdom, and I felt deliriously safe. I was having a vision.
I sat in the ticklish grass, nearly swallowed by green.
“I know your master, hound of Hell.”
The dog laughed, a delicate and painful sound that dogs were never supposed to make. He panted for a minute. Then his focus turned to the eastern forest, and I took the impression some rustling had caught his eye. In that way, he was loyal to his appearance. Lazily, he rose on all fours and said:
“Follow me to Saint Guinefort.”
“There is no Saint Guinefort,” I said, almost spitting in anger.
“He’s very famous.”
“One is not a saint for being famous.”
The greyhound shrugged, inasmuch as a dog may shrug, and loped away for the forest, over a ruined stone wall. He did not have to jump.
“How far,” I gasped soon after, catching up to him.
“My master was a knight,” the greyhound spoke easily, in stride. “He left his baby in my care, but when he returned, the chamber was a frightening mess, and I had blood all over my teeth. He slew me for eating the child. Only afterward did he overturn the cradle to find his healthy, smiling boy, and a bloody viper that I had killed to save the child.”
I hitched my habit to trot along with the sleek, superior dog. As we crossed into forest shade, I saw the furred corpse of some animal, with mushrooms growing out. Any ordinary hound would’ve gone right to it. The slender canid arrowed ahead.
“If you were killed, how is it you walk alongside me?”
“I go where I please,” he said again.
“And you know Guinefort.”
“Here he is,” declared the dog.
We had come to a thicket of branches no human body could easily part. The darkness here was almost full. A spotted boulder nestled in the trees. “The absence of a saint,” I sniffed. “A place without miracles.”
“You are not permitted to see. Behind the rock and thorn is a covered well, the pit in which my bones are blackened soup. The knight was ashamed of my death, and I had no monument. After that, his home was destroyed.”
“By what?”
“I think you call it God.”
“How privileged a hound you must have been. As the Lord made nature for man to rule, and never did He punish the man who ruled it.”
“I know Proverbs as well as you, friar. A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. Whether cruelty to a beast like me demands godly justice is unknown. A similar mystery clings to this spot.”
A breath of hot air passed into the den, then expired all around, the greyhound blinking his eyes in that handsome dagger of a face. The sun was lower than it should have been. The day drew shut, and I had strayed from the paths of civilized men.
“I’ve heard enough,” I said.
“I am Saint Guinefort,” said the dog. “My tragic tale—saving the infant, then being slain—is told from the Alps to the Pyrenees. Mothers make their pilgrimage to leave sick children on this stone, believing I will heal them.”
“Barbaric. Wolves must carry them off.”
“Wolves and others,” said Guinefort. (I cannot call him otherwise.) “The hunters take their meal. And that is what the mothers want. It is an altar of sacrifice.”
“These Christian women…”
“Christ is a detour. You attempt to avoid the earth. I, the dog-saint, surpass the scripture. Because I serve the land.”
“I’ll fight no longer with a devil. Release me.”
“I have not trapped you,” said Guinefort. He leapt to the height of the mound that saw those souls forfeit. “Unless you find my words to be knots.”
It brings me no shame to admit I ran. I lunged blind into overgrowth, assailed by the whips and spikes of the woods, aiming for the last yellow gleam of the hills. I could not tell if I heard my own breath or the dog chasing me, and that made me all the quicker, all the clumsier. I tripped and caught a shoulder on peeling bark.
Next I knew, I had staggered over a bridge into Lyon, where the moon held silver court with every star in attendance. Down the cobblestone road, the inn lay open-doored to show a fire licking happily at its hearth. A chorus of song broke out inside. Confused and sore and bloodied, I gave up looking for the monastery.
The noise of sin, welcoming as it was atrocious.
“Good evening, friar!” cried the rude lady of the establishment, and half the patrons whirled their mugs about in salute.
“Would none of you inform a traveler,” I seethed, “that a monster is loose in your hills! One that fancies itself a saint, but demands the sacrifice of a newborn child?”
“Saint Guinefort?” asked a cross-eyed fellow.
“Blasphemer! You will repent.”
“Just back over?” he answered, unchastened. The whole room was chuckling now.
“Yes, on the bridge.”
“Dear friar,” the proprietress made herself say, in a tone of motherly condescension. “The bridge fell during the Crusade. You must have taken a ferry.”
“Except,” yelled the cross-eyed man, “the ferrymen are drinking here!” And the hall burst into the climax of its mirth.
“Do not tell me!” I bellowed to quiet them. “That the women of this town lay unwanted offspring for the devil’s dog, and with the silent approval of men!” The laughter wound to a stop. Some rough peasants went back to their chatter, their vulgar ballads and games, as though I’d already left. Yet a young man bade me sit on his bench. He wore shepherd’s robes and drank from a clay vessel no bigger than his thumb.
“Friar,” he said. “You must not think us heathen lunatics.”
“What is my alternative? You know, His Holiness—”
“Forgive me,” the shepherd said. “I mean to say it is a trick. No one here believes in Saint Guinefort, this talking hound. It is a joke on travelers like yourself.”
“That a so-called saint might be a dog was not conveyed to me. I met a dog, by himself, with a name I had already heard.”
“If you met a dog alone, how did you discover his name?”
For this, I had no answer. The kind shepherd, pitying a delirious man of the cloth, walked me to the monastery, across town from the inn. In the arched windows, two or three candles burned yet.
“I will not venture out for months,” I said. “And where do you go tonight, gentle brother?” The shepherd weighed my curiosity like a test.
“I go where I’m called,” he said.
And I recalled the greyhound saying:
I go where I please.
Following that echo, and gone from my companion, I felt another jolt. For if I figured him a shepherd, where had he hidden his flock?
I did spend months in the monastery. Or, to keep it true, a year. I stayed afraid of the greyhound. In my chambers, in the garden and chapel, I imagined the dog round any corner, smiling as it began to snarl. Sometimes, on a hunt, the nobles of Lyon passed on horse, always preceded by hounds, and at these times I gripped the ledge or vine close by till the chase had melted into the country. Then I mistook any innocent noise for howling off in the meadows—the dogs and men celebrating their kill.
But I forgot Guinefort, or pushed him out of mind. It was a second life of preaching and wander, bringing my inquisition to all the colonies of Christendom, before I came to remember the dog, in the castle of an heir where I administered last rites. The afflicted, no older than a boy, turned in his bed with fever, scarcely able to join or notice my prayer. His family had waited too long to fetch me. Late into the evening, however, with no one else around, he almost recovered his senses. Over and over, he whispered something, and I had to coax it out of him, leaning my face toward his.
“Tell me,” I said once more.
“Guinefort,” he said, and died.
My terror was complete. I did not console the lord and lady, which they must have deemed an outrage, except they were so lost in grief.
“Who is Guinefort?” I asked. The royals looked embarrassed. It was the duchess who summoned the right fact to relate.
“His dog,” she said. “A faithful greyhound, but he ran away. And that is when the fever took. It shattered his heart.”
“But why that name? Why Guinefort?”
“Friar, do not be upset,” her husband interceded. “For some reason, it is a favorite name for boys to give their hounds. Perhaps after a man who raised them. I am puzzled that a learned clergyman was not aware.”
“Have you met no hound called Guinefort?” his lady wondered.
I assured them I had not.
Never did I report the encounter at Lyon, even when the boy spoke that name on his deathbed. I lacked a sin to confess in the telling, and I risked a reputation. At worst, a trial within the Order, charged as the ally of superstition I had left to flourish, my brothers arguing that in cowardice, I had rendered aid to evil.
This is the sole document of the failure, and it belongs to the ash-pile. Though I have set down, in a longer treatise on myths pertaining to animals, the alleged omens of bad-tempered crows, et cetera, the real lesson of the cult of Guinefort—which I set in the town of Villeneuve, elsewhere in the diocese of Lyon.
I wrote that simpletons worshiped a demon in the guise of a spectral dog, and how I wiped out this sacrilege with an edict which forbade anyone to visit the buried well, or else abandon their holdings to a lord of that estate.
As I wrote that fable, correcting history, an abject dizziness took me. I let my vision stray to the wilderness below this room. Night had beaten the dusk, and the infinite forest cloaked the soft ground in shadow. Anything should move in that black without my seeing. Nonetheless I found white eyes, two blazing gems.
The stare of Guinefort, that wily cur?
You protest that he is no mutt, and I agree: the devil is well-bred. It is his skeletal pride, his telltale shape that makes him disconcerting to me. And the greyhound’s gait is unnatural. He walks like nothing else on legs.