In Auvergne, but in a different part of it from that where we left our
party of pilgrims, rode onward a personage who seemed to think, with
Jacques, that motley is the only wear. Not that he was precisely
habited in the piebald garments of the professed fool; but yet his
dress was as many coloured as the jacket of my ancient friend
harlequin; and so totally differed from the vestments of that age,
that it seemed as if he had taken a jump of two or three centuries,
and stolen some gay habit from the court of Charles the Seventh. He
wore long tight silk breeches, of a bright flame-colour; a sky-blue
cassock of cloth girt round his waist by a yellow girdle, below which
it did not extend above three inches, forming a sort of frill about
his middle; while, at the same time, this sort of surcoat being
without sleeves, his arms appeared from beneath covered with a jacket
of green silk, cut close to his shape, and buttoned tight at the
wrists. On his head he wore a black cap, not unlike the famous
Phrygian bonnet; and he was mounted on a strong grey mare, then
considered a ridiculous and disgraceful equipage.
This strange personage's figure no way corresponded with his absurd
dress; for, had one desired a model of active strength, it could
nowhere have been found better than in his straight and muscular
limbs. His face, however, was more in accordance with the extravagance
of his habiliments; for, certainly, never did a more curious
physiognomy come from the cunning and various hand of Nature. His nose
was long, and was seemingly boneless; for, ever and anon, whether from
some natural convulsive motion, or from a voluntary and laudable
desire to improve upon the singular hideousness of his countenance,
this long, sausage-like contrivance in the midst of his face would
wriggle from side to side, with a very portentous and uneasy movement.
His eyes were large and grey, and did not in the least discredit the
nose in whose company they were placed, though they had in themselves
a manifest tendency to separate, never having any fixed and determined
direction, but wandering about apparently independent of each
other,--sometimes far asunder,--sometimes, like Pyramus and Thisbe,
wooing each other across the wall of his nose with a most portentous
squint. Besides this obliquity, they were endowed with a cold,
leadenness of stare, which would have rendered the whole face as
meaningless as a mask, had not, every now and then, a still, keen,
sharp glance stolen out of them for a moment, like the sudden kindling
up of a fire where all seems cold and dead. His mouth was guarded with
large thick lips, which extended far and wide through a black and
bushy beard; and, when he yawned, which was more than once the case,
as he rode through the fertile valleys of Limagne, a great chasm
seemed to open in his countenance, exposing, to the very back, two
ranges of very white, broad teeth, with their accompanying gums.
For some way, the traveller rode on in quiet, seeming to exercise
himself in giving additional ugliness to his features, by screwing
them into every sort of form, till he became aware that he was watched
by a party of men, whose appearance had nothing in it very consolatory
to the journeyer of those days.
The road through the valley was narrow; the hills, rising rapidly on
each side, were steep and rugged; and the party which we have
mentioned was stationed at some two or three hundred yards before him,
consisting of about ten or twelve archers, who, lurking behind a mass
of stones and bushes, seemed prepared to impose a toll upon the
highway through the valley.
The traveller, however, pursued his journey, though he very well
comprehended their aim and object, nor did he exhibit any sign of fear
or alarm beyond the repeated wriggling of his nose, till such time as
he beheld one of the foremost of the group begin to fit an arrow to
his bowstring, and take a clear step beyond the bushes. Then, suddenly
reversing his position on the horse, which was proceeding at an easy
canter, he placed his head on the saddle, and his feet in the air; and
in this position advanced quietly on his way, not at all unlike one of
those smart and active gentlemen who may be seen nightly in the
spring-time circumambulating the area of Astley's Amphitheatre.
The feat which he performed, however simple and legitimate at present,
was quite sufficiently extraordinary in those days, to gain him the
reputation of a close intimacy with Satan, even if it did not make him
pass for Satan himself.
The thunderstruck archer dropped his arrow, exclaiming, "'Tis the
devil!" to which conclusion most of his companions readily assented.
Nevertheless, one less ceremonious than the rest started forward and
bent his own bow for the shot. "If he be the devil," cried he, "the
more reason to give him an arrow in his liver: what matters it to us
whether he be devil or saint, so he have a purse?" As he spoke, he
drew his bow to the full extent of his arm, and raised the arrow to
his eye. But at the very moment the missile twanged away from the
string, the strange horseman we have described let himself fall
suddenly across his mare, much after the fashion of a sack of wheat,
and the arrow whistled idly over him. Then, swinging himself up again
into his natural position, he turned his frightful countenance to the
_routiers_, and burst into a loud horse-laugh that had something in
its ringing coppery tone truly unearthly.
"Fools!" cried he, riding close up to the astonished plunderers. "Do
you think to hurt me? Why, I am your patron saint, the Devil. Do not
you know your lord and master? But, poor fools, I will give you a
morsel. Lay ye a strong band between Vic le Comte and the lake Pavin,
and watch there till ye see a fine band of pilgrims coming down. Skin
them! skin them, if ye be true thieves. Leave them not a besant to
bless themselves!"
Here one of the thieves, moved partly by a qualm of conscience, partly
by bodily fear at holding a conversation with a person he most
devoutly believed to be the Prince of Darkness, signed himself with
the cross,--an action, not at all unusual amongst the plunderers of
that age, who, so far from casting off the bonds of religion at the
same time that they threw off all the other ties of civil society,
were often but the more superstitious and credulous from the very
circumstances of their unlawful trade. However, no sooner did the
horseman see the sign, than he affected to start. "Ha!" cried he. "You
drive me away; but we shall meet again, good friends--we shall meet
again, and trust me, I will give you a warm reception. Haw, haw, haw,
haw!" and, contorting his face into a most horrible grin, he poured
forth one of his fiendlike laughs, and galloped off at full speed.
"Jesu Maria!" cried one of the routiers, "it is the fiend certainly--I
will give him an arrow, for heaven's benison!" But whether it was that
the bowman's hand trembled, or that the horseman was too far distant,
certain it is, he rode on in safety, and did not even know that he had
been again shot at.
"I will give the half of the first booty I make to our lady of Mount
Ferrand," cried one of the robbers, thinking to appease Heaven and
guard against Satan, by sharing the proceeds of his next breach of the
decalogue with the priest of his favourite saint.
"And I will lay out six sous of Paris on a general absolution!" cried
another, whose faith was great in the potency of papal authority.
But, leaving these gentry to arrange their affairs with Heaven as they
thought fit, we must follow for a time the person they mistook for
their spiritual enemy, and must also endeavour to develope what was
passing in his mind, which really did in some degree find utterance;
he being one of those people whose lips--those ever unfaithful
guardians of the treasures of the heart--are peculiarly apt to murmur
forth unconsciously, that on which the mind is busy. His thoughts
burst from him in broken murmured sentences, somewhat to the following
effect:--"What matters it to me who is killed!--Say the villains kill
the men-at-arms.--Haw, haw! haw, haw! 'Twill be rare sport!--And then
we will strip them, and I shall have gold, gold, gold! But the
men-at-arms will kill the villains. I care not! I will help to kill
them:--then I shall get gold too.--Haw, haw, haw! The villains
plundered some rich merchants yesterday, and I will plunder them
to-morrow. Oh, rare! Then, that Thibalt of Auvergne may be killed in
the _melée_, with his cold look and his sneer.--Oh! how I shall like
to see that lip, that called me _De Coucy's fool juggler_,--how I
shall like to see it grinning with death! I will have one of his white
fore-teeth for a mouth-piece to my reed flute, and one of his arm
bones polished, to whip tops withal.--Haw, haw, haw! De Coucy's fool
juggler!--Haw, haw! haw, haw! Ay, and my good Lord de Coucy!--the
beggarly miscreant. He struck me, when I had got hold of a lord's
daughter at the storming of Constantinople, and forbade me to show her
violence.--Haw, haw! I paid him for meddling with my plunder, by
stealing his; and, because I dared not carry it about, buried it in a
field at Naples:--but I owe him the blow yet. It shall be paid!--Haw,
haw, haw! Shall I tell him now the truth of what he sent me to
Burgundy for? No, no, no! for then he'll sit at home at ease, and be a
fine lord; and I shall be thrust into the kitchen, and called for, to
amuse the noble knights and dames.--Haw, haw! No, no! he shall wander
yet awhile; but I must make up my tale." And the profundity of thought
into which he now fell, put a stop to his solitary loquacity; though
ever and anon, as the various fragments of roguery, and villany, and
folly, which formed the strange chaos of his mind, seemed, as it were,
to knock against each other in the course of his cogitations, he would
leer about, with a glance in which shrewdness certainly predominated
over idiotcy, or would loll his tongue forth from his mouth, and,
shutting one of his eyes, would make the other take the whole circuit
of the earth and sky around him, as if he were mocking the universe
itself; and then, at last, burst out into a long, shrill, ringing
laugh, by the tone of which it was difficult to tell whether it
proceeded from pain or from mirth.