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Now and then a girl of the commune had been married, and had ploughing in the fields or to her lace-weaving in the city. Bébée had thought little of it. "They marry or they do not marry. That is as it may be," said Flamen, with a smile. "Bébée, I must paint you as Gretchen before she made a love-dial of the daisies. What is the story? Oh, I have told you stories enough.
Polynesian chiefs are supposed to be imbued with a sacredness that makes contact with them dangerous, and everything that they touch becomes thereby taboo to the ordinary man; the same sort of sacredness clung to the Roman flamen dialis, to the emperor of Japan, and to many other high officials.
Lisa tossed her as she spoke a torn sheet, in which she was wrapping gentians: it was a piece of newspaper some three weeks old, and in it there was a single line or so which said that the artist Flamen, whose Gretchen was the wonder of the Salon of the year, lay sick unto death in his rooms in Paris.
"No, my lord" responded Zibya promptly "'Tis veiled in deeper mystery than usual. I have inquired of many, but in vain, and even the Chief Flamen of the Outside Court of the Temple, always drunk and garrulous as he is, can tell me naught of the holy victim's title or parentage.
"He shall have as much as Publilius, as much as Lentulus the Flamen, allow their sons." It would be interesting to know the amount, but unhappily this cannot be recovered. All that we know is that the richest young men in Rome were not to have more. These "rents" were the incomings from certain properties at Rome. "Only," he adds, "I do not think he will want a horse."
The earliest recorded instance of a priest holding a high political office is in the year B.C. 242 when the Flamen Martialis or special priest of Mars was chosen Consul; but when the gentleman in question started to go to the war, he was forbidden by the Pontifex Maximus.
Let the cross, the sword, and the arena answer, whether the world, that then was, so understood its first preachers and apostles. Cæsar and Flamen both instinctively dreaded it, not because it aimed at riches or power, but because it strove to conquer that other world in the moral nature of mankind, where it could establish a throne against which wealth and force would be weak and contemptible.
During the brief fortnight of his seventh consulship he gave him an appointment which reminds us of the boy-bishops of the middle ages. He made him flamen dialis, or priest of Jupiter, and a member of the Sacred College, with a handsome income, when he was no more than fourteen. Two years later, during the rule of Cinna, his father arranged a marriage for him with a lady of fortune named Cossutia.
There, the garlands wreathed around the columns of the hall there, gleamed still and frequent the marble statue there, amidst peals of jocund laughter, rose the music and the lay. Away with your stories of Hades, Which the Flamen has forged to affright us We laugh at your three Maiden Ladies, Your Fates and your sullen Cocytus.
The Gretchen of Scheffer tells no tale; she is a fair-haired, hard-working, simple-minded peasant, with whom neither angels nor devils have anything to do, and whose eyes never can open to either hell or heaven. But the Gretchen of Flamen said much more than this: looking at it, men would sigh from shame, and women weep from sorrow. "Count the daisies?" echoed Bébée. "Oh, I know what you mean.
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