Heptameron

Following the morning devotional study, Saffredent declares he wished the bridge would take another month to build. However, the narrator reveals the Abbot had expedited the bridge so he may quickly return to “entertain his lady pilgrims in the way he was wont” (376). Saffredent then opens the day of storytelling.

In Story 41, the Countess of Egmont, a beautiful Flemish woman, is in Cambrai for a peace conference between Margaret of Austria and Louise de Savoy. She returns home at Advent and sends for a Franciscan friar to preach and receive confessions. He hears the confessions of everyone in the house, including her daughter, and hearing the details of her private life “made our good father think he would like to risk an unusual kind of penance” (377). He tells her he must tie a cord to her naked body so she can receive absolution, but she refuses and runs off in tears. Eventually her mother hears the truth from her along with a complaint about him from the maid, so she has him beaten in the kitchens, bound hand and foot, and sent back to his Superior with a request for more respectable people to preach the word of God.