Vile Bodies in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pelèrinage de la vie humaine

Abstract

As I went down into the deep valley, I saw in my path an old crone of a different sort of ugliness than I had seen before. She was very strange, and it seemed that she was deliberately lying in wait for me as her prey, and that she was going to attack me. I do not remember ever seeing any such beast described in Daniel or in Ezekiel, and none more hideous in the Apocalypse. She was lame, crippled, and humpbacked, dressed in a big old table-cloth edged with pieces of old rags and patches of cloth. She had a sack hanging from her neck and [... ] she was stuffing brass and iron into it. She had stuck out her tongue, which was helping her to do this, but it was all leprous, ulcered and scabrous. She had six hands and two stumps. On two hands she had the claws of a griffin, and another was behind her in a sinister way. In one of her other hands she had a file [... ] and a scale, in which she was weighing the zodiac and the sun very carefully, in order to offer them for sale. In another hand she had a bowl and a sack for bread. In the fifth she had a hook. On her head she had a Maumet that made her lower her eyes and look down. She rested the sixth hand on her crippled haunch and she kept lifting it up and touching her tongue with it.