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be my wet nurse until I was of an age for weaning. It is difficult to believe, but apparently none of those three persons who knew the truth about me ever whispered it to anyone else, either inside or outside the abbey. And, when I was perhaps four years old, a plague of disease descended upon the Burgund Kingdom. Among the inhabitants of the Balsan Hrinkhen who perished of the plague were that abbot, that infirmarian and that woman who had nursed me, so I afterward had only the vaguest recollection of them.
    Bishop Patiens of Lugdunum soon appointed a new abbot for St. Damian’s—Dom Clement, come from teaching at the seminary at Condatus—and Dom Clement naturally took me for the boy-child I seemed to be and believed myself to be. So did the other monks continue to regard me, and so did all the village people whom the pestilence had spared. Thus my equivocal nature went unnoticed or unsuspected by everybody in my small world, including myself, during another eight years or so, until the lecherous Brother Peter accidentally and gleefully discovered it.
    Life in the monastery was not easy, but neither was it unbearably onerous, for St. Damian’s did not adhere to such strict rules of asceticism and abstinence as did the much older cenobitic communities in lands like Africa, Egypt and Palestine. Our more rigorous northern climate, and the amount of physical work we did, required us of St. Damian’s to be better nourished, and even to have our inwards warmed by wine in winter or cooled by ale and beer in summer. Since our abbey lands produced quite prodigious quantities of every sort of food and drink, neither our abbot nor our bishop saw any reason to inhibit our consumption of them. Also, we worked so hard that most of us cleansed ourselves of sweat and dirt oftener than once a week. Unfortunately, not all of us did. Those brothers who bathed but seldom—and the rest of the time went about smelling like goats—said sanctimoniously that they were heeding St. Jerome’s dictum: “A clean skin means a dirty soul.”
    Every brother did obey the first two precepts of monasticism, the foremost being Obedience, which is founded on the second, Humility—but the third precept, which is Love of Silence, was not very rigidly observed at our abbey. Since the monks’ various labors required considerable communication among them, they were not bidden to be mute, although any talking not absolutely necessary was discouraged after Vespers.
    There are some monastic orders that take also a vow of poverty, but at St. Damian’s that condition was simply taken for granted, and was considered not so much a virtue as the absence of a vice. Every brother, on admission, disposed of all his worldly belongings, right down to his garments, and thereafter possessed little that he could call his own, except his two hooded burlap robes—one for daytime wear, one for after working hours—plus a light summer surcoat and a heavy woolen one for winter, his indoor sandals, his work shoes or boots, two pairs of waist-high hose and the rope girdle that he doffed only on going to his pallet at night.
    There are also communities of monks that take a vow of celibacy, in the manner of convent sisters. But at St. Damian’s that condition, like poverty, was rather taken for granted. It was only comparatively recently, just some seventy years before the time of which I write, that the Church had demanded celibacy, and then only of its bishops, priests and deacons. Thus a man in holy orders might marry while he was still a young minor clerk—a lector, an exorcist or a doorkeeper—and then could father children while he rose through the ranks of acolyte and subdeacon, and not have to part from his wife and family until he became a full deacon. Needless to remark, many clerics of all degrees have flouted both the tradition of celibacy and St. Augustine’s pronouncement that “God hates copulation.” They have had wives or concubines, or swarms of them,