Curiosities of Olden Times
away into the nearest forest, where she swarmed to the tops of the highest trees and there gasped for untainted air. There for a while her relatives left her, she must starve or return to them. As Thomas of Chantpré says, she lived for a while like a bird among the boughs of the trees, and though sorely in want of food, would not return to association with odoriferous human beings.
Her biographer gives us an outrageous story which accounts for the way in which she lived; but in all likelihood she fed on eggs.
After five weeks thus spent, she was recaptured and again put in chains, stronger than before.
Again she broke loose, ran to Liège, where she rushed headlong into the Church of St. Christopher, and insisted on the priest whom she found there giving her the Holy Communion. He naturally enough demurred to do so. Her wild appearance, with hair flying, her galled wrists, her flashing, frantic eyes, the condition of dirt and raggedness in which she was, made him conclude she was an escaped maniac. He made an excuse, and she was unable to force him to act against his conscience by any representation she made. Then, as suddenly as she appeared, so suddenly did she rush away again into another church, where she frightened the priest into compliance. But what was his disgust and dismay to see the communicant jump up, leave the church in flying leaps, and run as fast as she could tear down the steep hill that falls towards the Meuse.
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