"Money, and all that comes with it, disgusts me," said Father Édouard de Gex, speaking apparently to his own boots. For he had planted one to either side of the head of the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, and clamped her head between his ankle-bones, forcing her to look up into his face. "Within living memory, men and women of noble birth did not even have to think about it. Oh, there were rich nobles and poor, just as there were tall and short, beautiful and ugly. But it would never have entered the mind of even a peasant to phant’sy that a penniless Duke was any less a Duke, or that a rich whore ought to be made a Duchess. Nobles did not handle money, or speak of it; if they were guilty of caring about it, they took pains to hide it, as with any other vice. Men of the cloth did not need money, or use it, except for a few whose distasteful duty it was to take in the tithes from the poor-box. And ordinary honest peasants lived a life blessedly free of money. To nobles, clerics, and peasants—the only people needed or wanted in a decent Christian Realm— coins were as alien, eldritch, inexplicable as communion wafers to a Hindoo. They are, I believe, an artifact of the pagan necromancers of the Romans, talismans of the subterranean Cult of Mithras, which St. Constantine, after his conversion to the True Faith, somehow forgot to eradicate, even as the temples of the idolaters were being pulled down or made over into churches. The makers, users, and hoarders of money were a cult, a cabal, a parasitical infestation, enduring through many ages, no more Christian than the Jews—indeed, many were Jews. They convened in a few places like Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, and Seville, and spun round the globe a web or net-work of links along which money flowed, in feeble and fitful pulses. This was repugnant but endurable. But what has happened of late is monstrous. The money-cult has spread faster across what used to be Christendom than the faith of Mahomet did across Araby. I did not grasp the enormity of it until you came to Versailles as an infamous Dutch whore, a plaything of diseased bankers, and shortly were ennobled—made into a Countess, complete with a fabricated pedigree—and why? Because you had noble qualities? No. Only because you were Good with Money—a high sorceress of the coin-cult—and so were adored by the same sort of degraded Versailles court-fops who would gather in abandoned churches at midnight to recite the Black Mass.