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Updated: June 22, 2025
Sir John Paston's conversations with the Duchess of Norfolk would make less than duchesses blush now. The tales that Erasmus introduces into his writings, the jests of his Colloquies, are often quite unnecessarily coarse; but one which will illustrate our point may be repeated. One winter's morning a stately matron entered St. Gudule's at Brussels to attend mass.
"Well, Gudule, my child," the farmer asked his daughter on the day when his grandson was received into the covenant of Abraham, "well, Gudule, was the letter right?" "What letter?" asked Gudule. "That in which your husband was called a gambler." "And can you still give a thought to such a letter?" was Gudule's significant reply. Three years later, Gudule's father came to visit her.
But there was none who found favor in Gudule's eyes save "Wild Ascher," in spite of many a friendly warning to beware of him. One day, just before the betrothal of the young people, an anonymous letter was delivered at the grange. The writer, who called himself an old friend, entreated the farmer to prevent his dear child from becoming the wife of one who was suspected of being a gambler.
"Oho!" cried Gudule's brother, with big staring eyes, as he clutched his legs with both hands, "how have you managed in so short a time to save so much? D'ye know that that's a great deal of money?" "I've had good luck, uncle," said Ephraim, modestly. "You've been...playing, perhaps?"
Quentin our New York friend, you will remember made us a brief call this morning. He is quite undecided as to the length of his stay here, but I hope you will be here to see him." Then, dismissing Quentin from her mind, she sat down to dream of the one great event in her life this wonderful, glorious wedding in old St. Gudule's. Already her trousseau was on a fair way to completion.
Gudule's birthplace was far removed from the Ghetto, where Ascher had first seen the light. Her father was a wealthy farmer in a secluded village in Lower Bohemia. But distant though it was from the nearest town of any importance, the solitary grange became the centre of attraction to all the young swains far and near.
Not until the wedding-day, half an hour before the ceremony, when the marriage canopy had already been erected in the courtyard, did the farmer sum up courage to revert to the warning of the unknown letter-writer. Taking his future son-in- law aside, he said: "Ascher, is it true that you gamble?" "Father," Ascher answered with equal firmness, "Gudule's eyes will save me!"
Gudule's Cathedral. Her eyes, which he watched intently, were constantly turned toward the great personages whose presence adorned the festival the Emperor and Queen Mary of Hungary.
At other times I think: 'I shall yet grasp fortune with both hands ... and then I can face my Gudule's eyes again. But now, now ... oh, don't look at me, Gudule!" There spoke the self-reproaching voice, which sometimes burst forth unbidden from a suffering soul. As for Gudule, she already knew how to appreciate this cry of her husband's conscience at its true value.
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