No money, no Swiss; no miracles, no saint.  It is in vain that during all your life you shall have been a model of candour and virtue; it is in vain that you shall edify the universe by your piety and your good works, that you shall have resisted like St. Antony the temptations of the flesh, that you shall have covered yourself with hair-cloth like St. Theresa, with venom like St. Veuillot, with filth like St. Alacoque or with lice like St. Labre:  it is in vain that you shall have been beaten with rods like St. Roche, been scourged by your Confessor like St. Elizabeth, that finally you shall have sinned only six instead of seven times a day; if at your death you should not succeed in performing some fine miracle, you will never be admitted into the Calendar.

The Pope causes your shade to appear before his sacred tribunal, and according as the number of the dead whom you have raised to life is judged sufficient or not, as the touch of your tibia or coccyx has cured the itch or scrofula or not, you are admitted or excluded.

It is a difficult profession to be a saint, and is not for anyone who wishes it.

Therefore, the candidates who die in the odour of sanctity hasten to accomplish their regular total of prodigies, in order that our father the Pope may be pleased to assign them a place in the highest heaven.

They have hardly closed their eyes before they begin to operate.  Allured by the hope of being crowned with a glorious halo, they display infinite zeal, and we have seen them, from their tooth-stumps to their prepuce, effecting the most marvellous miracles.

That of Jesus Christ—­I speak of the prepuce—­is preserved thus in several churches; all of which contend for the honour of possessing the veritable one.  It is not yet exactly known which is the best; but all without distinction work wonders, and at certain seasons of the year, are kissed by pious young women.[1]

But this noble zeal of the saints lasts but for a time, and this is a proof of the imperfection of human kind, that our faults and whims follow us even beyond the tomb.

The saints, themselves, fall into all the little meannesses so common with the most ordinary sinners.  Like candidates who solicit the votes of the mob in order to gain power, and make the most brilliant promises which they hasten to forget as soon as they have climbed the stairs, so the candidates for canonization perform marvels at first, but once admitted into the seventh heaven, they appear to trouble themselves no more concerning lowly mortals.

Or perhaps miraculous properties are like all other faculties, as they grow old they become worn-out, and an elect who has stoutly brought the dead to life when he was only an aspirant for honours, is now only capable of curing the ringworm.

But, as I have said, it was a zealous candidate that the Abbe Ridoux had in his church.  His bones had been there for fifty years, and as the longed-for time for his canonization had not yet arrived, and he had as yet only the rank of blessed, his zeal had not grown cold.