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"Walafrid Strabo, in his 'Hortulus, also speaks of the rose as the blood of the martyred saints," the Abbé Gévresin murmured. "'Rosae martyres, rubore sanguinis, according to the key of Saint Melito," the other priest added, in confirmation. "We will admit that shrub," cried Durtal. "Now for the lily "

Hardly pleased with the cumbersome mass of Carlovingian Latinists, the Alcuins and the Eginhards, he contented himself, as a specimen of the language of the ninth century, with the chronicles of Saint Gall, Freculfe and Reginon; with the poem of the siege of Paris written by Abbo le Courbe; with the didactic Hortulus, of the Benedictine Walafrid Strabo, whose chapter consecrated to the glory of the gourd as a symbol of fruitfulness, enlivened him; with the poem in which Ermold the Dark, celebrating the exploits of Louis the Debonair, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, almost forbidding style and in a Latin of iron dipped in monastic waters with straws of sentiment, here and there, in the unpliant metal; with the De viribus herbarum, the poem of Macer Floridus, who particularly delighted him because of his poetic recipes and the very strange virtues which he ascribes to certain plants and flowers; to the aristolochia, for example, which, mixed with the flesh of a cow and placed on the lower part of a pregnant woman's abdomen, insures the birth of a male child; or to the borage which, when brewed into an infusion in a dining room, diverts guests; or to the peony whose powdered roots cure epilepsy; or to the fennel which, if placed on a woman's breasts, clears her water and stimulates the indolence of her periods.

It bears indifferently the character of pride or of fertility; of fertility by reason of its multitude of seeds and its rapid growth, of which the monk Walafrid Strabo wrote in noble hexameters a whole chapter of his poem; and of pride by reason of its huge hollow head and its bulk; and then we also have the cedar, which Peter of Capua and Saint Melito agree in accusing of pride. "Avarice?