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Updated: May 16, 2025
The camp which Samuel de Champlain made in the wilderness three hundred years ago, has become one of the last refuges of the romantic dream and the courtly illusion, still haunted by the shades of impecunious young noblemen with velvet cloaks and feathered hats and rapiers at their hips; of delicate, high-spirited beauties braving the snowy wildwood in their silks and laces; of missionary monks, tonsured and rope-girdled, pressing with lean faces and eager eyes to plant the banner of the Church upon the shores of the West and win the fiery crown of martyrdom.
More than twenty years since, Richard Jefferies wrote about the tonsured priest becoming a power in English country lanes. Here in the West Country hundreds of rich acres are held by the monastic orders. The country parson has now to fight against his old opponent, the Methodist or Baptist, and his older opponent, the priest of Rome.
They saw him a minute later appear in the square, having thrown aside his cassock. He made a strange lean figure of a man with his knee-breeches and dingy purple stockings, his grey flannel shirt, and the moonlight shining on his tonsured head.
With them he rests from the tribulations of all sorts save one that he has been subjected to. He would be perfectly happy if he did not have to repulse the attacks launched at him almost daily by the tonsured magicians of Rome." "Why do they attack him?" "A thorough explanation would take a long time.
Priests in black robes and tall, cylindrical hats, and others with brown robes, rope girdles and tonsured heads, were coming and going around us. Pilgrims were climbing and descending the stairs, kneeling and murmuring unintelligible devotions, kissing the star and the cleft in the rock and the icons.
But the eyes of the girl rested upon his face with a rapt expression. It was as if an angel had entered the room. Father Damon was a young man, not yet past thirty, slender, erect. He had removed as he came in his broad-brimmed soft hat. The hair was close-cut, but not tonsured. He wore a brown cassock, falling in straight lines, and confined at the waist with a white cord.
On Monday morning, after enjoying our usual breakfast at the Casa Nova of boiled eggs, rolls and pure honey, good coffee, and delicious oranges, we bade farewell to our tonsured hosts and the staff of gowned attendants. The carriages were waiting near the Jaffa Gate to convey us to the station.
He could see himself, a tonsured youth in a surplice, led to the altar by the master of ceremonies; there he knelt and bowed his head down low, while the bishop with golden scissors snipped off three locks one over his forehead, and the other two near his ears. Yet another twelvemonth, and he could again see himself in the chapel amid the incense, receiving the four minor orders.
Yes! as the form came nearer to the window, seen from the back, Lucy perceived distinctly the tonsured head and the soutane. How strange! She had heard nothing from the massaja of any other tenant. And this tall gaunt figure had nothing in common with the little smiling parroco she had seen in the crowd. She moved on, wondering. Oh, those woods!
For here was the Host itself, flower-decked in white and crimson, its gold-tasselled canopy upheld by four tonsured priests, a sheen of purple under it, the Bishop of Louisiana in his robes. "The Governor!" whispered Monsieur Vigo, and the word was passed from mouth to mouth as the people rose from their knees.
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