063s
There is a light-house to the north of the village, an esplanade of beach and prickly plants. Vegetation here is as rough as the ocean.
064s
Do not look to the left; the pickets of soldiers, the huts of the bathers, the ennuyés, the children, the invalids, the drying linen, it is all as melancholy as a caserne and a hospital. But at the foot of the light-house the beautiful green waves hollow themselves and scale the rocks, scattering upon the wind their plume of foam; the billows come up to the assault and mount one upon another, as agile and hardy as charging horsemen; the caverns rumble; the breeze whispers with a happy sound; it enters the breast and expands the muscles; you fill your lungs with the invigorating saltness of the sea.Farther on, ascending towards the north, are paths creeping along the cliffs. At the bottom of the last, solitude opens out; everything human has disappeared; neither houses, nor culture, nor verdure. It is here as in the first ages, at a time when man had not yet appeared, and when the water, the stone, and the sand were the sole inhabitants of the universe. The coast stretches into the vapor its long strip of polished sand; the gilded beach undulates softly and opens its hollows to the ripples of the sea. Each ripple comes up foamy at first, then insensibly smooths itself, leaves behind it the flocks of its white fleece, and goes to sleep upon the shore it has kissed. Meanwhile another approaches, and beyond that again a new one, then a whole troop, striping the bluish water with embroidery of silver. They whisper low, and you scarcely hear them under the outcry of the distant billows; nowhere is the beach so sweet, so smiling—the land softens its embrace the better to receive and caress those darling creatures, which are, as it were, the little children of the sea.
It has rained all night; but this morning a brisk wind has dried the earth; and I have come along the coast to Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
066s
Everywhere the wasted cliffs drop perpendicularly down; dreary hillocks, crumbling sand; miserable grasses that strike their filaments into the moving soil; streamlets that vainly wind and are choked, pushed back by the sea; tortured inlets, and naked strands. The ocean tears and depopulates its beach. Everything suffers from the neighborhood of the old tyrant. As you contemplate here its aspect and its work, the antique superstitions seem true. It is a melancholy and hostile god, forever thundering, sinister, sudden in caprice, whom nothing appeases, nothing subdues, who chafes at being kept back from the land,embraces it impatiently, feels it and shakes it, and to-morrow may recapture it or break it in pieces. Its violent waves start convulsively and twist themselves, clashing like the heads of a great troop of wild horses; a sort of grizzling mane streams on the edge of the black horizon; the gulls scream; they are seen darting down into the valley that is scooped out between two surges, then reappearing; they turn and look strangely at you with their pale eyes. One would say that they are delighted with this tumult and are awaiting a prey.
A little farther on, a poor hut hides itself in a bay. Three children ragged, with naked legs, were playing there in a stream that was overflown. A great moth, clogged by the rain, had fallen into a hole. They conducted the water to it with their feet, and dabbled in the cold mud; the rain fell in showers on the poor creature, which vainly beat its wings; they laughed boisterously, stumbling about and holding on to each other with their red hands. At that age and amidst such privation nothing more was wanting to make them happy.
The road ascends and descends, winding on high hills which denote the neighborhood of the Pyrenees. The sea reappears at each turn, and it is a singular spectacle, this suddenly lowered horizon, and that greenish triangle broadening towardheaven. Two or three villages stretch along the route, their houses dropping down the heights like flights of stairs. From the white houses the women come out in black gown and veil to go to mass. The sombre color announces Spain. The men, in velvet vests, crowd to the public house and drink coffee in silence. Poor houses, a poor country; under a shed I have seen them cooking, in the guise of bread, cakes of maize and barley. This destitution is always touching. What is it that a day-laborer has gained by our thirty centuries of civilization? Yet he has gained, and when we accuse ourselves, it is because we forget history. He no longer has the small-pox, or the leprosy; he no longer dies of hunger, as in the sixteenth century, under Montluc; he is no longer burned as a witch, as happened indeed under Henry IV. here in this very place; he can, if he is a soldier, learn to read, become an officer; he has coffee, sugar, linen. Our descendants will say that that is but little; our fathers would have said that it is a good deal.
St. Jean-de-Luz is a little old city with narrow streets, to-day silent and decaying; its mariners once fought the Normans for the king of England; thirty or forty ships went out every year for the whale-fishery. Now-a-days the harbor is empty; this terrible Biscayan sea has thrice broken down its dike. Against this roaring surge, heaped up allthe way from America, no work of man holds out. The water was engulfed in the channel and came like a race-horse high as the quays, lashing the bridges, shaking its crests, grooving its wave; then it thundered heavily into the basins, sometimes with leaps so abrupt that it fell over the parapets like a mill-dam, and flooded the lower part of the houses. One poor boat danced in a corner at the end of a rope; no seamen, no rigging, no cordage; such is this celebrated harbor. They say, however, that half a league away, there are five or six barks in a creek.
069s
From the dike the tumult of the high tide was visible. A massive wall of black clouds girt the horizon; the sun blazed through a crevice like a fire through the mouth of a furnace, and overflowedupon the billow its conflagration of ferruginous flames. The sea leaped like a maniac at the entrance of the harbor, smitten by a band of invisible rocks, and joined with its white line the two horns of the coast. The waves came up fifteen feet high against the beach, then, undermined by the falling water, fell head foremost, desperate, with frightful howling; they returned however to the assault, and mounted each minute higher, leaving on the beach their carpet of snowy foam, and fleeing with the slight shivering of a swarm of ants foraging among dry leaves. Finally one of them came wetting the feet of the men who were watching from the top of the dike. Happily, it was the last; the city is twenty feet below, and would be only a mass of ruins if some great tide were urged on by a hurricane.
070s
A noble hotel, with broad halls, and grand antique apartments, displays itself at the corner of the first basin facing the sea. Anne of Austria lodged there in 1660, at the time of the marriage of Louis XIV.
071s
Above a chimney is still to be seen the portrait of a princess in the garb of a goddess. Were they not goddesses? A tapestried bridge went from this house to the little church, sombre and splendid, traversed by balconies of black oak, andloaded with glittering reliquaries. The married pair passed through it between two hedges of Swiss and bedizened guards, the king all embroidered with gold, with a hat ornamented with diamonds; the queen in a mantle of violet velvet sprinkled with fleur-de-lis, and, underneath, a habit of white brocade studded with precious stones, a crown upon her head.
072s
There was nothing but processions, entries, pomps and parades. Who of us now-a-days would wish to be a grand seigneur on condition of performing at this rate? The wearinessof rank would do away with the pleasures of rank; one would lose all patience at being an embroidered manikin, always exposed to public view and on exhibition. Then, that was the whole of life. When M. de Créqui was going to carry to the infanta the presents of the king, “he had sixty persons in livery in his suite, with a great number of noblemen and many friends.â€
073s
The eyes took delight in this splendor. Pride was more akin to vanity, enjoyments were more on the surface. They needed to display their power in order to feel it. The courtly life had applied the mind to ceremonies. Theylearned to dance, as now-a-days to reflect; they passed whole years at the academy; they studied with extreme seriousness and attention the art of bowing, of advancing the foot, of holding themselves erect, of playing with the sword, of setting the cane properly; the obligation of living in public constrained them to it; it was the sign of their rank and education; they proved in this way their alliances, their world, their place with the king, their title. Better yet, it was the poetry of the time. A fine manner of bowing is a fine thing; it recalled a thousand souvenirs of authority and of ease, just as in Greece an attitude recalled a thousand souvenirs of war and the gymnasium; a slight inclination of the neck, a limb nobly extended, a smile complaisant and calm, an ample trailing petticoat with majestic folds, filled the soul with lofty and courtly thoughts, and these great lords were the first to enjoy the spectacle they afforded. “I went to carry my offering,†said Mlle. de Montpensier, “and performed myrévérencesas did no one else of the company; I found myself suitable enough for ceremonial days; my person held its place there as my name in the world.†These words explain the infinite attention that was given to questions of precedence and to ceremonies; Mademoiselle is inexhaustible on this point; she talks like an upholsterer and a chamberlain; she isuneasy to know at what precise moment the Spanish grandees take off their hats; if the king of Spain will kiss the queen-mother or will only embrace her: these important interests trouble her. In fact, at that time they were important interests. Rank did not depend, as in a democracy, upon proved worth, on acquired glory, on power exercised or riches displayed, but upon visible prerogatives transmitted by inheritance or granted by the king: so that they fought for a tabouret or a mantle, as now-a-days for a place or for a million. Among other treacheries they plotted to lodge Mademoiselle’s sisters with the queen. “The proposition displeased me; they would have eaten with her always, which I did not. That roused my pride. I was desperate at that moment.†The warfare was yet greater when it came to the marriage. “It occurred to somebody that it was necessary to carry an offering to the queen, so I could not bear her train, and it must be my sisters who would carry it with Mme. de Carignan. As soon as there was talk of bearing trains, the Duke de Roquelaure had offered to carry mine. They sought for dukes to carry those of my sisters, and, as not one was willing to do it, Mme. de Saugeon cried aloud that Madame would be in despair at this distinction.†What happiness to walk first upon the tapestried bridge, the train held up by a duke, while, theothers go shamefully behind, with a train, but without a duke! But suddenly others put in a claim. Mme. d’Uzès comes running up in a fright: it is question of an atrocious usurpation. “The princess palatine will have a train; will you not put a stop to that?†They get together; they go to the king; they represent to him the enormity of the deed: the king forbids this new train as usurping and criminal, and the princess, who weeps and storms, declares that she will not be present at the marriage if they deprive her of her appendix. Alas! all human prosperity has its reverses; Mademoiselle, so happy in the matter of trains, could not get to kiss the queen, and, at this interdict, she remained all day plunged in the deepest grief. But, you see, the pursuits of rank had been, from infancy, her sole concern; she had wanted to marry all the princes in the world, and ever in vain; the person mattered little to her. First the cardinal infante, the reverse of an Amadis; at the age of dreams, on the threshold of youth, among the vague visions and first enchantments of love, she chose this old churl in a ruff to enthrone herself with him, in a fine arm-chair, in the government of the Low Countries. Then Philip IV. of Spain; the emperor Ferdinand, the arch-duke: negotiating with them herself, exposing her envoy to the risk of hanging. Then the king of Hungary, the future king ofEngland, Louis XIV., Monsieur, the king of Portugal.
077s
Who could count them? At a pinch, she went to work in advance: the princess of Condé being ill, then in the family way, this romantic head fancied that the prince was going to become a widower, and wanted to retain him for a husband. No one took this hand that she had stretched to all Europe. In vain she fired cannon in the Fronde; she remained to the end an adventuress, a state puppet, a weathercock, occasionally exiled, twenty times a widow, but always before the wedding, carrying over the whole of France the weariness and imaginationsof her involuntary celibacy. At last Lauzun appeared; to marry her, and secretly at that, cost him the half of his wealth; the king drew the dowry of his bastard from the misalliance of his cousin. It was an exemplary household: she scratched him: he beat her.—We laugh at these pretensions and bickerings, at these mischances and aristocratic quarrels; our turn will come, rest assured of that; our democracy too affords matter of laughter: our black coat is, like their embroidered coat, laced with the ridiculous; we have envy, melancholy, the want of moderation and of politeness, the heroes of George Sand, of Victor Hugo and of Balzac. In fact, what does it matter?
“Sifflez-moi librement; je vous le rends, mes frères.†So talked Voltaire, who gave to all the world at once the charter of equality and gayety.
078s
081s
Isaw Dax in passing, and I recall only two rows of white walls of staring brightness, into which low doorways here and there sank their black arches with a strange relief. An old and thoroughly forbidding cathedral bristled its bell-turrets and dentations in the midst of the pomp of nature and the joyousness of the light, as if the soil, burst open, had once put forth out of its lava a heap of crystallized sulphur.
The postilion, a good fellow, takes up a poor woman on the way, and sets her beside him on his seat. What gay people! They sing in patois,—there, they are singing now. The conductor joinsin, then one of the people in the impériale. They laugh with their whole heart; their eyes sparkle. How far we are from the north! In all these southern folk there isverve; occasionally poverty, fatigue, anxiety crush it; at the least opening, it Gushes forth like living water in full sunlight.
This poor woman amuses me. She is fifty years old, without shoes, garments in shreds, and not a sou in her pocket. She talks familiarly with a stout, well-dressed gentleman, who is behind her. No humility; she believes herself the equal of the whole world. Gayety is like a spring rendering the soul elastic; the people bend but rise again. An Englishman would be scandalized. Several of them have said to me that the French nation have no sentiment of respect. That is why we no longer have an aristocracy.
083s
The chain of the mountains undulates to the left, bluish and like a long stratum of clouds. The rich valley resembles a great basin full to overflowing of fruit-trees and maize. White clouds hover slowly in the depths of heaven, like a flock of tranquil swans. The eye rests on the down of their sides, and turns with pleasure upon the roundness of their noble forms. They sail in a troop, carried on by the south wind, with an even flight, like a family of blissful gods, and from up above they seem to look with tenderness upon the beautiful earth which they protect and are going to nourish.
Orthez, in the fourteenth century, was a capital; of this grandeur there remains but the wreck: ruined walls and the high tower of the castle hung with ivy. The counts of Foix had there a little state, almost independent, proudly planted between the realms of France, England and Spain. The people have gained in something, I know; they no longer hate their neighbors, and they live at peace; they receive from Paris inventions and news; peace, trade and well-being are increased. They have, however, lost in something; instead of thirty active thinking capitals, there are thirty provincial cities,torpid and docile. The women long for a hat, the men go to smoke at a café; that is their life; they scrape together a few empty old ideas from imbecile newspapers. In old times they had thoughts on politics and courts of love.
086s
The good Froissart came here in the year 1388, having ridden and chatted about arms all along the route with the chevalier Messire Espaing de Lyon; he lodged in the inn of the Beautiful Hostess, which was then called the hotel of the Moon. The count Gaston Phoebus sent in all haste to seek him: “for he was the lord who of all the world the most gladly entertained the stranger in order to hear the news.†Froissart passed twelve weeks in his hotel: “for they made him good cheer and fed well his horses, and in all things also ordered well.â€
Froissart is a child, and sometimes an old child. At that time thought was expanding, as in Greecein the time of Herodotus. But, while we feel that in Greece it is going on to unfold itself to the very end, we discover here that an obstacle checks it: there is a knot in the tree; the arrested sap can mount no higher. This knot is scholasticism.
087s
For, during three centuries already they had written in verse, and for two centuries in prose; after this long culture, see what a historian is Froissart. One morning he mounts on horseback with several valets, under a beautiful sun, and gallops onward;a lord meets him whom he accosts: “Sir, what is this castle?†The other tells him about the sieges, and what grand sword-thrusts were there exchanged. “Holy Mary,†cried Froissart, “but your words please me and do me a deal of good, while you tell them off to me! And you shall not lose them, for all shall be set in remembrance and chronicled in the history which I am pursuing.†Then he has explained to himself the kindred of the seigneur, his alliances, how his friends and enemies have lived and are dead, and the whole skein of the adventures interwoven during two centuries and in three countries. “And as soon as I had alighted at the hotels, on the road that we were following together, I wrote them down, were it evening or morning, for the better memory of them in times to come; for there is no such exact retentive as writing.†All is found here, the pell-mell and the hundred shifts of the conversations, the reflections, the little accidents of the journey. An old squire recounts to him mountain legends, how Pierre de Beam, having once killed an enormous bear, could no longer sleep in peace, but thenceforward he awaked each night, “making such a noise and such clatter that it seemed that all the devils in hell should have carried away everything and were inside with him.†Froissart judges that this bear was perhaps a knight turnedinto a beast for some misdeed; cites in support the story of Actæon, an “accomplished and pretty knight who was changed into a stag.†Thus goes his life and thus his history is composed; it resembles a tapestry of the period, brilliant and varied, full of hunting, of tournaments, battles and processions. He gives himself and his hearers the pleasure of imagining ceremonies and adventures; no other idea, or rather no idea. Of criticism, general considerations, reasoning upon man or society, counsels or forecast, there is no trace; it is a herald at arms who seeks to please curious eyes, the warlike spirit and the empty minds of robust knights, great eaters, lovers of thumps and pomps. Is it not strange, this barrenness of reason! In Greece, at the end of an hundred years, Thucydides, Plato and Xenophon, philosophy and science had appeared. By way of climax, read the verses of Froissart, those ballads, roundelays and virelays that he recited of evenings to the Count de Foix, “who took great solace in hearing them indeed,†the old rubbish of decadence, worn, affected allegories, the garrulousness of a broken-down pedant who amuses himself in composing wearisome turns of address. And the rest are all alike. Charles d’Orleans has a sort of faded grace and nothing-more, Christine de Pisan but an official solemnity.
Such feeble spirits want the force to give birth togeneral ideas; they are bowed down under the weight of those which have been hooked on to them.
090s
The cause is not far to seek; think of that stout cornific * doctor with leaden eyes, a confrère of Froissart, if you like, but how different! He holds in his hand his manual of canon-law, Peter the Lombard, a treatise on the syllogism. For ten hours a day he disputes in Baralipton on thehicaeity.
* Cornificien, a name given by Jean of Sarisberg to thosewho disfigured dialectics by their extravagant, cornusarguments.—Translator.
As soon as he became hoarse, he dippedhis nose again into his yellow folio; his syllogisms and quiddities ended by making him stupid; he knew nothing about things or dared not consider them; he only wielded words, shook formulas together, bruised his own head, lost all common sense, and reasoned like a machine for Latin verses.* What a master for the sons of noblemen, and for keen poetic minds, and what an education was this labyrinth of dry logic and extravagant scholasticism. Tired, disgusted, irritated, stupefied, they forgot the ugly dream as soon as possible, ran in the open air, and thought only of the chase, of war and the ladies; they were not so foolish as to turn their eyes a second time towards their crabbed litany; if they did come back to it, that was out of vanity; they wanted to set some Latin fable in their songs, or some learned abstraction, without comprehending a word of it, donning it for fashion’s sake, as the ermine of learning. With us of today, general ideas spring up in every mind,—living and flourishing ones; among the laity of that time their root was cut off, and among the clergy there remained of them but a fagot of dead wood. And so mankind was only the better fitted for the life of the body and more capable of violent passions; with regard to this the style of Froissart,artless as it is, deceives us. We think we are listening to the pretty garrulousness of a child at play; beneath this prattle we must distinguish the rude voice of the combatants, bear-hunters and hunters of men too, and the broad, coarse hospitality of feudal manners.
* See the discourse of Jean Petit on the assassination ofthe Duke of Orleans.
092s
At midnight the Count of Foix came to supper in the great hall. “Before him went twelve lighted torches, borne by twelve valets: and the same twelve torches were held before his table and gave much light unto the hall, which was full of knights and squires; and always there were plenty of tables laid out for any person who chose to sup.†It must have been anastonishing sight, to see those furrowed faces and powerful frames, with their furred robes and their justicoats streaked under the wavering flashes of the torches. One Christmas day, going into his gallery, he saw that there was but a small fire, and spoke of it aloud. Thereupon a knight, Ernauton d’Espagne, having looked out of the window, saw in the court a number of asses with “billets of wood for the use of the house. He seized the largest of these asses with his load, threw him over his shoulders and carried him up stairs†(there were twenty-four steps), “pushing through the crowd of knights and squires who were round the chimney, and flung ass and load, with his feet upward, on the dogs of the hearth, to the delight of the count, and the astonishment of all.†Here are the laughter and the amusement of barbaric giants. They wanted noise, and songs proportioned to it. Froissart tells of a banquet when bishops, counts, abbés, knights, nearly one hundred in number, were seated at table. “There were very many minstrels in the hall, as well those belonging to the count as to the strangers, who, at their leisure, played away their minstrelsy. Those of the duke de Touraine played so loud and so well that the count clothed them ‘with cloth of gold trimmed with ermine.’â€
“This count,†says Froissart, “reigned prudently;in all things he was so perfect that one could not praise him too much. No great contemporary prince could compare with him in sense, honor and wisdom.†In that case the great princes of the day were not worth much. With justice and humanity, the good Froissart scarcely troubles himself; he finds murder perfectly natural; indeed, it was the custom; they were no more astonished at it, than at a snap of the jaws in a wolf. Man then resembled a beast of prey, and when a beast of prey has eaten up a sheep nobody is scandalized thereby. This excellent Count de Foix was an assassin, not once only, but ten times. For example, he coveted the castle of Lourdes, and so sent for the captain, Pierre Ernault, who had received it in trust for the prince of Wales. Pierre Ernault “became very thoughtful and doubtful whether to go or not.†At last he went, and the count demanded from him the castle of Lourdes. The knight thought awhile what answer to make. However, having well considered, he said: “My lord, in truth I owe you faith and homage, for I am a poor knight of your blood and country; but as for the castle of Lourdes, I will never surrender it to you. You have sent for me, and you may therefore do with me as you please. I hold the castle of Lourdes from the king of England, who has placed me there; and to no other person butto him will I ever surrender it.†The Count de Foix, on hearing this answer, was exceedingly wroth, and said, as he drew his dagger, “Ho, ho, dost thou then say so? By this head, thou hast not said it for nothing.†And, as he uttered these words, he struck him foully with the dagger, so that he wounded him severely in five places, and none of the barons or knights dared to interfere.
095s
The knight replied, “Ha, ha, my lord, this is not gentle treatment; you sent for me here, and are murdering me.†Having received these five strokes from the dagger, the count ordered him to be cast into the dungeon, which was done; and there he died, for he was ill-cured of his wounds. This dominance of sudden passion, this violenceof first impulse, this flesh and blood emotion, and abrupt appeal to physical force, are cropping out continually in the people. At the slightest insult their eyes kindle and blows fall like hail.
096s
As we were leaving Dax, a diligence passed ours, grazing one of the horses. The conductor leaped down from his seat, a stake in his hand, and was going to fell hisconfrèr. Those lords lived and felt something like our conductors, and the Count de Foix was such an one.
I beg pardon of the conductors; I wrong them grievously. The count, not having the fear of the police before his eyes, came at once not to fisticuffs, but to stabs. His son Gaston, while on a visit to the king of Navarre, received a black powder which, according to the king, must forever reconcilethe count and his wife; the youth took the powder in a little bag and concealed it in his breast; one day his bastard brother, Yvain, saw the bag while playing with him, wanted to have it, and afterward denounced him to the count. At this the count “began to have suspicions, for he was full of fancies,†and remained so until dinner-time, very thoughtful, haunted and harassed by sombre imaginings. Those stormy brains, filled by warfare and danger with dismal images, hastened to tumult and tempest. The youth came, and began to serve the dishes, tasting the meats, as was usual when the notion of poison was not far from any mind. The count cast his eyes upon him and saw the strings of the bag; the sight fired his veins and made his blood boil; he seized the youth, undid his pourpoint, cut the strings of the bag, and strewed some of the powder over a slice of bread, while the poor youth turned pale with fear, and began to tremble exceedingly. Then he called one of his dogs to him, and gave it him to eat. “The instant the dog had eaten a morsel his eyes rolled round in his head, and he died.†The count said nothing, but rose suddenly, and seizing his knife, threw himself upon his son. But the knights rushed in between them: “For God’s sake, my lord, do not be too hasty, but make further inquiries before you do any ill to your son.â€
098s
The count heaped malediction and insult upon the youth, then suddenly leaped over the table, knife in hand, and fell upon him like a wild beast. But the knights and the squires fell upon their knees before him weeping, and saying: “Ah, ah! my lord, for Heaven’s sake do not kill Gaston; you have no other child.†With great difficulty he restrained himself, doubtless thinking that it was prudent to see if no one else had a part in the matter, and put the youth into the tower at Orthez.
He investigated then, but in a singular fashion, as if he were a famished wolf, wedded to a single idea, bruising himself against it mechanically and brutally, through murder and outcry, killing blindly and without reflecting that his killing is of no use to him. He had many of those who served hisson arrested, and “put to death not less than fifteen after they had suffered the torture; and the reason he gave was, that it was impossible but they must have been acquainted with the secrets of his son, and they ought to have informed him by saying, ‘My lord, Gaston wears constantly on his breast a bag of such and such a form.’ This they did not do and suffered a terrible death for it; which was a pity, for there were not in all Gascony such handsome or well-appointed squires.â€
When this search had proved useless he fell back upon his son; he sent for the nobles, the prelates and all the principal persons of his country, related the affair to them, and told them that it was his intention to put the youth to death. But they would not agree to this, and said that the country had need of an heir for its better preservation and defence; “and would not quit Orthez until the count had assured them that Gaston should not be put to death, so great was their affection for him.†Still the youth remained in the tower of Orthez, “where was little light,†always lying alone, unwilling to eat, “cursing the hour that ever he was born or begotten, that he should come to such an end.†On the tenth day the jailer saw all the meats that had been served in a corner, and went and told it to the count. The count was again enraged, like a beast of prey who encounters aremnant of resistance after it has once been satiated; “without saying a word,†he came to the prison, holding by the point a small knife with which he was cleaning his nails. Then striking his fist upon his son’s throat, he pushed him rudely as he said: “Ha, traitor, why dost thou not eat?†and went away without saying more. His knife had touched an artery; the youth frightened and wan, turned without a word to the other side of the bed, shed his blood and died.
100s
The count was grieved beyond measure when he heard this, for those violent natures felt only with excess and by contrasts; he had himself shaven and clothed in black. “The body of the youth was borne, with tears and lamentations, to the church of the Augustine Friars at Orthez, where it was buried.†* But such murders left an ill-healedwound in the heart; the dull pain remained, and from time to time some dark shadow crossed the tumult of the banquets. This is why the count never again felt such perfect joy as before.
* The passages from Froissart are from the version of ThomasJohnes. New York: J. Winchester, New World Press.