The pardoners lived merrily; certainly after a well occupied day they must have been cheerful companions at the inn. The thought of the multitude of sins which they had remitted, of excommunications which they had taken off, of penalites which they had commuted--themselves simple vagabonds menaced with the gallows--the knowledge of their impurity, the singularity of their existence, the triumphant success of those mad harangues which gave them the keys of heaven, must have made their hearts swell inconceivably with coarse brutal merriment.