“that reminds me of the burning of the Seigneur d’Hymber-court’s house. There must be a big revolt over there.”
“Think you so, Maître Coppenole?” and Louis’s face beamed even brighter than the hosier’s. “Do you not think it will be difficult to check?”
“Croix-Dieu! Sire, it may cost your Majesty many a company of soldiers!”
“Ah—cost me—that’s different,” rejoined the King. “If I choose—”
“If this revolt be what I suppose,” continued the hosier boldly, “you will have no choice in the matter, Sire.”
“My friend,” said Louis XI, “two companies of my bodyguard, and the discharge of a serpentine, are amply sufficient to put a mob of common people to the rout.”
Regardless of the signs Guillaume Rym was making to him, the hosier seemed bent upon contesting the matter with the King. “Sire,” said he, “the Swiss were common people too. Monsieur the Duke of Burgundy was a great seigneur, and held the canaille of no account. At the battle of Granson, Sire, he shouted: ‘Cannoneers, fire upon these churls!’ and he swore by Saint-George. But the syndic Scharnachtal rushed upon the fine duke with his clubs and his men, and at the shock of the peasants with their bull- hides, the glittering Burgundian army was shattered like a pane of glass by a stone. There was many a knight killed there by the base-born churls, and Monsieur de Château-Guyon, the greatest lord in Burgundy, was found dead, with his great gray charger, in a little boggy field.”
“Friend,” returned the King, “you are speaking of a battle. This is but a riot, and I can put an end to it the moment I choose to lift a finger.”
To which the other replied unconcernedly, “That may be, Sire; but in that case, the hour of the people has not yet come.”
Guillaume Rym thought it time to interfere. “Maître Coppenole, you are talking to a great King.”
“I know it,” answered the hosier gravely.
“Let him speak his mind, friend Rym,” said the King. “I like this plain speaking. My father, Charles VII, used to say that truth was sick. For my part, I thought she was dead and had found no confessor. Maître Coppenole shows me I am mistaken.” Then, laying his hand on Maître Coppenole’s shoulder: “You were saying, Maître Jacques—”
“I said, Sire, that may-be you were right; that the people’s hour is not yet come with you.”
Louis XI looked at him with his penetrating gaze. “And when will that hour come, Maître?”
“You will hear it strike.”
“By what clock, prithee?”
Coppenole, with his quiet and homely self-possession, signed to the King to approach the window. “Listen, Sire! There is here a donjon-keep, a bell-tower, cannon, townsfolk, soldiers. When the tocsin sounds, when the cannons roar, when, with great clamour, the fortress walls are shattered, when citizens and soldiers shout and kill each other—then the hour will strike.”
Louis’s face clouded and he seemed to muse. He was silent for a moment, then, clapping his hand gently against the thick wall of the keep, as one pats the flank of a charger: