Tonin only jousted with witticisms, biting remarks and wholesome truths, brought home to his hearers with a laugh; on all these points he could make sure of the victory, for he varied them like his motto. Among all these banners, resplendent with colour and embroidery, there hung a black one without a squire to guard it. We asked M. de Rozen to whom this mournful standard belonged.
‘Do you not know?’ he replied. ‘Have you not read in the papers that a knight who wishes to remain unknown has challenged to single combat the champion sufficiently bold to dispute with him the prize of the tournament? The prize, as you are aware, is a scarf embroidered by the queen. At the time fixed for calling the roll of the knights they found his glove lying in the middle of the ring, and his black banner planted where it is now; attached to it was his buckler, with the following words on a star-spangled blue ground:
‘Tra tanti una.’
(Only one among all.)
‘To add to the strangeness of the challenge is his choice of the battle-axe, which went out of use long ago. The most curious stories are going the round in connection with the challenge of that mysterious Amadis. Among the different versions the most implicitly believed in is the following:
‘A young noble, sprung from one of the most illustrious families of Great Britain, saw the Queen at Baden when she was only Princess Dorothée-Wilhelmine. He fell deeply in love with her. Considering his rank and his immense fortune, he might possibly have aspired to her hand with success. But the two sisters of our queen having married respectively the Emperor of Russia and Maximilien de Bavière, reasons of state and the fitness of things carried her to the throne of Sweden. The young lord, unable to conquer a feeling which from that moment was shorn of all hope, was mad enough to gain admission surreptitiously to our Court, and always under a fresh disguise. He was recognised by the ladies-in-waiting of our queen, and narrowly escaped the punishment due to his foolhardiness. The rumour went that he had gone to America. Informed, no doubt, with the rest of Europe of the preparations for this tournament, he wished to make an attempt to conquer or to die under the very eyes of the woman he loves. It is even said that, knowing the chivalric spirit of Gustavus-Adolphus, he conceived the flattering hope of having a royal adversary to contend with, with the possible chance of succeeding him who, as he probably thought, robbed him at first.
‘The Comte de Torstenson, son of the field-marshal, has offered to take up the challenge. He has practised for some time with the battle-axe, and acquired marvellous skill with it.’
At that moment the harmonious strains of a hundred instruments announced the arrival of the queen, and every eye was turned towards her.
Her perfect beauty and the stateliness of her person would have revealed the sovereign under the humblest dress. Surrounded by her Court ladies, she took her seat under the canopy prepared for her. Immediately the king at the head of his nobles entered the ring and rode round it, saluting with his lance all the ladies, who had risen at his coming.
Gustavus-Adolphus IV. was at that time in his twenty-second year. He was well built, had a martial bearing, and a noble and frank countenance. He was anxious to copy Charles XII., and, to enhance the likeness, he wore, as a rule, a blue coat, buttoned to the chin, and had his hair brushed up from the roots. But with the sword that performed such wonders at Bender, he lacked the strong arm that had so often made the sword victorious, and the genius that had directed it.
When he passed before the queen, in his magnificent costume, with head erect and proud mien, and holding his lance with a firm grip, his horse reared. Gustavus tried to quiet it, but an accidental touch of the spurs made matters worse, and he was within an ace of being thrown. It was the same animal he had ridden on the day of his coronation at Upsala, and which had nearly killed him—an accident that, as a matter of course, had furnished the superstitious among his subjects with a thousand conjectures regarding the future of his reign. The cause of the mishap was, however, sufficiently simple. The groom or equerry entrusted with the training of the animal for the ceremony stopped every day before the shop of a shoemaker, whose wife, a young Finnish woman, amused herself by giving it a piece of bread and salt. The handsome charger got thoroughly used to stopping at the hospitable door, and when Gustavus, the crown on his head and sceptre in hand, proceeded to the cathedral, it refused to pass the shop without its usual ration. The king, thinking it was a mere whim on the animal’s part, put the rowels into its flesh; the horse reared, crown and sceptre rolled into the dust, and without the prompt assistance of a page walking by the monarch’s side, who by clutching at his boot restored his equilibrium, Gustavus would have gone the way of the royal insignia. At the news of the accident, the fortune-teller, Arvidson, exclaimed, it was said, with tears coursing down her cheeks: ‘The race of Wasa has ceased to reign in Sweden.’[75] At the slightest uncommon event of that reign, the prediction of the fortune-teller was ‘trotted out’; as a matter of course the spectators at the tournament at once added this omen to the rest.