“Oho, Ramezay, no wonder you write so well of myth and legend! It was St Dunstan seizing the Devil’s snout in his tongs, a thousand years after his time. Well done, well done! You met the Devil as an equal, not cringing or frightened or begging for a trashy favour. That is the heroic life, Ramezay. You are fit to be the Devil’s friend, without any fear of losing yourself to Him!”

On the third day I took farewell of him. I had managed to arrange for some chocolate to be procured when he needed more, and as a great favour the nuns took six bottles of a good wine into their care to be rationed to him as seemed best.

“Good-bye,” he cried cheerfully. “We shall probably not meet again, Ramezay. You are beginning to look a little shaky.”

“I have not yet found a God to teach me how to be old,” I said. “Have you?”

“Shhh, not so loud. The nuns must not know in what a spiritual state I am. Yes, yes, I have found Him, and He is the very best of company. Very calm, very quiet, but gloriously alive: we do, but He is. Not in the least a proselytizer or a careerist, like His sons.” And he went off into a fit of giggles.

I left him soon after this, and as I looked back from the door for a last wave, he was laughing and pinching his big copper nose with the tiny chocolate tongs. “God go with you, St Dunstan,” he called.

He was much in my mind as I tasted the pleasures of Salzburg, and particularly so after my first visit to the special display called Schöne Madonnen, in the exhibition rooms in the Cathedral. For here, at last, and after having abandoned hope and forgotten my search, I found the Little Madonna I had seen during my bad night at Passchendaele. There she was, among these images of the Holy Mother in all her aspects, collected as examples of the wood and stone carver’s art, and drawn from churches, museums, and private collections all over Europe.

There she was, quite unmistakable, from the charming crown that she wore with such an air to her foot set on the crescent moon. Beneath this moon was what I had not seen in the harsh light of the flare—the globe of the earth itself, with a serpent encircling it, and an apple in the mouth of the serpent. She had lost her sceptre, but not the Divine Child, a fat, reserved little person who looked out at the world from beneath half-closed eyelids. But the face of the Madonna—was it truly the face of Mary Dempster? No, it was not, though the hair was very like; Mary Dempster, whose face my mother had described as being like a pan of milk, had never been so beautiful in feature, but the expression was undeniably hers—an expression of mercy and love, tempered with perception and penetration.