“There you are,” said Lamme, “meager, pale, and wretched, believing in the good faith of princes and the great ones of the earth, and disdaining, in an excessive zeal, your body, your noble body that you are leaving to perish in misery and humiliation. It was not for this that God made it with Dame Nature. Do you know that our soul which is the breath of life, needs, that it may breathe, beans, beef, beer, wine, ham, sausages, chitterlings, and rest; you, you live on bread, water, and watching.”
“Whence have you this talkative flow?” asked Ulenspiegel.
“He knows not what he says,” answered Wasteele, sadly.
But Lamme growing angry:
“I know better than you. I say that we are mad, I, you, and Ulenspiegel, to wear out our eyes for all these princes and great ones of the earth, who would laugh loudly at us if they saw us dying of weariness, losing our sleep to furbish up arms and cast bullets for their service while they drink French wine and eat German capons from golden tankards and dishes of English pewter; they will never ask whether, while we are seeking in the open wild the God by whose grace they have their power, their enemies are cutting off our limbs with their scythes and casting us into the well of death. They, in the meanwhile, who are neither Reformed, nor Calvinists, nor Lutherans, nor Catholics, but sceptics and doubters entirely, will buy or conquer principalities, will devour the wealth of the monks, abbeys, and convents, and will have all: virgins, wives, women and bona robas, and will drink from their gold cups to their perpetual jollity, and to our everlasting foolishness, simplicity, stupidity, and to the seven deadly sins which they commit, O smitte Wasteele, under the starveling nose of thy enthusiasm. Look upon the fields, the meads, look on the harvest, the orchards, the kine, the gold rising out of the earth; look at the wild things in the woods, the birds of the skies, delicious ortolans, delicate thrushes, wild boars’ heads, haunches of buck venison; all is theirs, hunting, fishing, earth, sea, everything. And you, you live on bread and water, and we are killing ourselves here for them, without sleep, without eating, and without drinking. And when we shall be dead they will fetch our carrion a kick and say to our mothers: ‘Make us more of these; those ones can do us no service now.’”
Ulenspiegel laughed and said nothing. Lamme breathed hard with indignation, but Wasteele, speaking in a gentle voice:
“Thou speakest but lightly,” said he. “I live not for ham, for beer, or for ortolans, but for the victory of freedom of conscience. The prince of freedom does even as I do. He sacrifices his wealth, his sleep and his happiness to drive out from the Low Countries the butchers and tyranny. Do as he does and try to grow thinner. ’Tis not by the belly that peoples can be saved, but by proud courage and fatigues endured even unto death without a murmur. And now go and lie down, if thou art sleepy.”
But Lamme would not, being ashamed.
And they furbished arms and cast bullets until it was morning, and thus for three days.
Then they departed for Ghent, by night, selling bird cages, mouse-traps, and olie-koekjes.