As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair / In leprosy.

Dear, dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms?

Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous / For a plate of turtle green and glutinous.

And from that luckless hour my tyrant fair Has led and turned me by a single hair.

where, instead of my hair falling out, I actually grew some hair.

For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.