“And there at their banquet in the house of that rogue De Culembourg, with that other rogue De Brederode, they drank in wooden bowls, for scorn of Messire de Berlaymont and Madame the Lady Governor. Aye, and they shouted ‘Long live the Beggars!’ Ah! if I had been the good God (with all respect), I would have caused their drink, whether it was beer or wine, to be changed into a foul and loathy dishwater, aye, into foul, abominable, stinking suds, in which they had washed their shirts and foul sheets.
“Aye, bawl, donkeys that you are, bawl ‘Long live the Beggars!’ Aye! and I am a prophet. And all the curses, miseries, fevers, plagues, conflagrations, ruins, desolations, cankers, English sweating sickness and black plagues will fall upon the Low Countries. Aye, thus will God be revenged upon your filthy braying of ‘Long live the Beggars!’ And there will not be left one stone of your houses upon another, and not a morsel of bone in your damned legs that ran to this accursed Calvinistry and preachifying. And so, so, so, so, so be it. Amen!”
“Let us go, my son,” said Ulenspiegel to Lamme.
“In a moment,” said Lamme.
And he looked and searched among the beautiful young devotees there present at the sermon, but he did not discover his wife.
XII
Ulenspiegel and Lamme came to the place called Minne-Water, Love-Water; but the great doctors and Wysneusen Pedants say it is Minre-Water, Minim-Water. Ulenspiegel and Lamme sat down upon the brink, seeing pass by beneath the trees all leafy down to their very heads, like a low roof, men, women, girls, and boys, hand in hand, garlanded with flowers, walking hip to hip, looking tenderly in one another’s eyes, without seeing anything in this world but themselves.
Ulenspiegel, thinking of Nele, gazed at them. In his melancholy, he said:
“Let us go drink.”