"I've seen many examples."

"And in these little tiny pictures of the garden there would always be one naked man and five women dancing around a fountain within the walls of a medieval castle, or so it seemed. Magnify it five times and it was just perfect. And Father Kevin began to laugh and laugh.

" 'No wonder there isn't a single saint or biblical scene in any of this,' Father Kevin said, laughing. 'Your Wynken de Wilde was a raving heretic! He was a witch or a diabolist. And he was in love with this woman, Blanche.' He wasn't shocked so much as amused.

" 'You know, Roger,' he said, 'if you did get in touch with one of the auction houses, very likely these books could put you through Loyola, or Tulane. Don't think of selling them down here. Think about New York; Butterfield and Butterfield, or Sotheby's.'

"He had in the last two years copied out by hand about thirty-five different poems for me in English, the best sort of translation—straight prose from the Latin—and now we went over them, tracing repetitions and imagery, and a story began to emerge.

"First thing we realized was that there had been many books originally, and what we possessed were the first and third. By the third, the psalms reflected not mere adoration for Blanche, who was again and again compared to the Virgin Mary in her purity and brightness, but also answers to some sort of correspondence about what the lady was suffering at the hands of her spouse.

"It was clever. You have to read it. You have to go back to the flat where you killed me and get those books."

"Which means you didn't sell them to go to Loyola or Tulane?"

"Of course not. Wynken, having orgies with Blanche and her four friends! I was fascinated. Wynken was my saint by virtue of his talent, and sexuality was my religion because it had been Wynken's and in every philosophical word he wrote he encoded a love of the flesh!

You have to realize I didn't believe any orthodox creed really, I never had. I thought the Catholic Church was dying. And that Protestantism was a joke. It was years before I understood that the Protestant approach is fundamentally mystic, that it is aiming for the very oneness with God that Meister Eckehart would have praised or that Wynken wrote about."

"You are being generous to the Protestant approach. And Wynken did write about oneness with God?"

"Yes, through union with the women! It was cautious but clear;

'In thine arms I have known the Trinity more truly than men can teach,' like that. Oh, this was the new way, I was sure. But then I knew Protestantism only as materialism, sterility and Baptist tourists who got drunk on Bourbon Street because they could not dare do it in their hometowns."

"When did you change your opinion?" I asked.

"I'm speaking in broad generalities. I mean, I saw no hope for religions in existence in the West at our time. Dora feels very much the same, but we'll come to Dora."