Religion: Cantalbertthe Juggler

Once upon a medieval time there was a juggler named Cantalbert. He was a good juggler. He could stand on one hand on a stool on a ball on a sword, while he twirled a hoop with his free arm and juggled ten balls with his feet. But people paid no attention. They would rather fight each other, or get drunk, or go to a witch-burning. If he were an ascetic, thought Cantalbert, perhaps Heaven would send him an audience. So he made himself a hair shirt and juggled in that, but, except for a few other ascetics, nobody paid any attention. He was a failure.

If only he were a monk, thought Cantalbert, he could live in a warm room, and have friends, and feed the birds and pray to the Holy Virgin. So he became a monk. But the other monks said Latin prayers and he knew no Latin. They chanted chants and he didn’t know how to chant. They painted frescoes or copied manuscripts, or taught Scripture or cooked, and Cantalbert didn’t know how to do any of these things. He felt more of a failure than ever, and the other monks complained about him.

When Christmastime came, the monastery hummed with activity. Each monk was hard at work preparing a present for the Virgin. The cook baked an enormous many-tiered cake called “The Church Triumphant,” the poet composed a miles-long Latin poem, Brother Arnaud presented Mary with the smallest illuminated Bible ever made, and Brother Thomas made an ivory carving of the Christ child that was so huge that a man had to stand away off to see it all. Juggler Cantalbert did not know what to do.

On Christmas morning, the monks got up early and hurried to the chapel to look at their presents again. There before the altar they saw Cantalbert’s present. “Monstrous!” they cried. “Desecration! Sacrilege! Insane!” But then came a miracle.

The legend of the lonely little juggler and the miracle that blessed him is one of the memorable stories of Christendom,*meaningful beyond theologizing, like a parable from the Bible or a legend of St. Francis. It is beautifully told again for moderns, in pictures, in a book published last week: The Juggler of Our Lady (Henry Holt; $2.50).

Robert O. Blechman, who has drawn the pictures and adapted the legend, is 23, a Jew, a private in the U.S. Signal Corps, and a graduate (last year) of Oberlin College. His squiggly, deceptively childlike drawings have appeared in such magazines as Glamour, Charm, Mademoiselle, Collier’s and Theatre Arts. But his greatest pleasure since he was a boy has been “drawing books” and circulating them among his family and friends. The Juggler of Our Lady was a logical result.

“I hope people won’t be fooled by the medieval setting,” says Artist Blechman. “Cantalbert is strictly a modern man.”

Best known in a retelling by that old freethinker, Anatole France:Our Lady’s Juggler (whose name, incidentally, was Barnaby).