O wha-at the Hell was on God’s mind
That sixteen-sixty day,
When he daubed a Vag-a-bond’s crude form
From a lump of Thames-side clay?
Since God would ne’er set out to make
A loser of this kind
Jack’s life, if planned in Heaven, doth prove
Jehovah’s lost His mind.
Switching to Gregorian chant for the chorus:
Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…
But at this point, as they were all nearing the city gates, they encountered a southbound column of galeriens, obviously Huguenots, who were shuffling along in a syncopated gait that made their chains jingle like sleigh-bells; the guards riding behind them cracked their whips in time with a sprightly tune that the Huguenots were singing:
Chained by the necks,
Slaves of Louis the Rex,
You might think that we’ve lost our freedom,
But the Cosmos,
Like clock-work,
No more than a rock’s worth
Of choices, to people, provides!
But now at this point the grave-diggers were greeted by an equal number of fishwives, issuing from the city-gates, who paired up with them, kicked in with trilling soprano and lusty alto voices, and drowned out both the Huguenots and the Skeletons with some sort of merry Celtic reeclass="underline"
There once was a jolly Vagabond
To the Indies he did sail,
When back to London he did come
He wanted a fe-male.
He found a few in Drury-Lane
In Hounsditch found some more
But cash flow troubles made him long
For a girlfriend, not a whore.
Now Jack he loved the theatre
But didn’t like to pay
He met an Irish actress there
While sneaking in one day.
Now the Priest, far from objecting to this interruption, worked it into his solemn hymnody, albeit with a jarring change of rhythm:
He could have gone to make his peace
With Jesus and the Church
Instead he screwed a showgirl
Then he left her in the lurch.
Now God in Heaven ne’er could wish
That Irish lass so ill
Jack’s life’s proves irrefutably
Th’existence of Free Will
Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…
And the irrepressible galeriens seemed to pop their heads into the middle of this scene and take it over with the continuation of their song:
Will he, or nill he,
It’s all kinda silly
When predestination prevails!
He can’t make decisions
His will just ain’t his, and
His destiny runs on fix’d rails!
Now the Priest again:
The Pope would say, that he who blames
The Good Lord for his deeds
Is either cursed with shit for brains
Or is lost ‘mong Satan’s Weeds.
»The former group should take good care
To do as they are told
The latter’d best clean up their act
And come back to the fold.
Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…
And then the galeriens, obviously wanting to stay and continue the debate, but driven southward, ever southward, by the guards:
We’re off to row boats
Off the Rhone’s sunnycotes
Because God, long ago, said we must
If it makes you feel better
You too, Jack, are fettered
By your bodily humours and lusts.
They were now pulled “offstage,” as it were, in the following comical way: a guard rode to the front of the column, hitched the end of their chain to the pommel of his saddle, and spurred his horse forward. The tightening chain ran free through the neck-loops of the galeriens until it jerked the last man in the queue violently forward so that he crashed into the back of the slave in front of him, who likewise was driven forward into the next, et cetera in a chain reaction as it were, until the whole column had accordioned together and was dragged off toward the Mediterranean Sea.
Now at the same time the rest of the procession burst through the city-gates into lovely Paris. The skeletons, who’d been exceptionally gloomy until this point, suddenly began disassembling themselves and bonking themselves and their neighbors with thigh-bones to produce melodious xylophony. The priest jumped up on the corpse-wain and began to belt out a new melody in a comely, glass-shattering counter-tenor.
Oh, Jaaaack-
Can’t say I blame you for feeling like shit
Oh, Jaaaack-
Never seen any one step into it
Like Jaaack-
Corporal punishment wouldn’t suffice
The raaack-
Would be too good for you,
Would simply be
Too slaaack-
Even if all of the skin were whipped off of
Your baaack-
Not only evil,
But stupid to boot,
Not charismatic
And not even cute,
The brains that God granted
You now indisput-
ably gone down the tubes
And you don’t give a hoot,
You stink!
No getting round it,
It’s true, Jack, confound it,
You stink!
And so on; but then here there was a little pause in the music, occasioned by a small and perfectly adorable French girl in a white dress, which Jack recognized as the sort of get-up that young Papists wore to their first communion. Radiant-but gloomy. The priest reined in the mules and vaulted down off the corpse-wain and squatted down next to her.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned!” said the little girl.
Awww,gushed all of the skeletons, corpses, grave-diggers, fishwives, et cetera, gathered round in vast circle as if to watch an Irish brawl.
“Believe me, girl, you ain’t alone!” hollered a fishwife through cupped hands; the others grinned and nodded supportively.
The priest hitched up his muddy cassock and scooted even closer to the girl, then turned his ear toward her lips; she whispered something into it; he shook his head in sincere, but extremely short-lived dismay; then stood, drawing himself up to his full height, and said something back to her. She put her hands together, and closed her eyes. All of Paris went silent, and every ear strained to listen as she in her high piping voice said a little Papist prayer in Latin. Then she opened her baby blues and looked up in trepidation at the priest-whose stony face suddenly opened up in a big grin as he made the sign of the cross over her. With a great big squeal of delight, the girl jumped up and turned a cartwheel in the street, petticoats a-flying’, and suddenly the whole procession came alive again: the priest walking along behind the handspringing girl and the dancers, the wrapped corpses up in the cart swinging their hips in time to the music and uttering pre-verbal woo! woo! noises to fill in the chinks in the tune. The grave-diggers and fishwives, plus a number of flower-girls and rat-catchers who joined in along the way, were now dancing to the priest’s song in a medley of different dance steps, viz. high-stepping whorehouse moves, Irish stomping, and Mediterranean tarantellas.
When you have been bad
A naughty young lad
Or lass who has had
A man or two sans-marriage,
When painting the town
Carousing around
You run a child down
While driving your big-carriage,
And so on at considerable length, as they had the whole University to parade through, and then the Roman baths at Cluny. As they came over the Petit Pont, about a thousand wretches emerged from the gates of the Hotel-Dieu-that colossal poorhouse just by Notre Dame, which was where the priest, grave-diggers, and dead persons had all originated-and, accompanied by Notre Dame’s organ, boomed out a mighty chorus to ring down the curtain on this entire pageant.