"Your Royal Highness well knows that I am of no importance," Martin calmly replied. "My custom has been to hold my tongue, work my team and pay my rent. My life has been passed in hard and constant labor, and I have wronged no man. My arms are still strong and my head steady, so I plow my own fields. But a month since I stopped working and left home and family to expose myself to the raillery of the foolish and the contempt of the powerful. The people jest at me in the streets and your Royal Highness probably considers me demented."
"My good fellow," said the king, "we always overlook much in the aged—"
"Your Royal Highness, if I offend, it is because I know not the usages of courts. Consign me to punishment if I deserve it, but let me first deliver my message."
"Say what you will, Martin. We listen."
"'Tis not Martin who speaks. Of himself, Martin would not dare. My words are from heaven."
"From heaven!" mockingly echoed, in refined irony, the admirer of Voltaire. "Perchance from God himself."
"Praised ever be his name!" reverently exclaimed the peasant, upon whom the sarcasm was lost. "Let me now begin. Be it known to your Royal Highness that on the sixteenth of January while ploughing in my field, I noted that the oxen were seized with fright. I marveled and asked myself the reason of it. Turning, I beheld at my side a beautiful boy in court-dress, with long curls falling upon his shoulders. A chill seized me while I was wondering how he came there. The boy laid his hand upon me, saying: 'Martin, go to him who sits upon the throne' and, without further words, he vanished. All this occurred so rapidly that I regarded the apparition as due to my advanced age. 'Bah!' said I to myself, ''tis because of the fog. One sees all sorts of strange things in a fog.' Two days later, in the twilight, while returning home, I saw the boy again at the cross-roads. He said: 'Martin, go to him' and again he vanished. I then fell kneeling. On the following day I saw him amid the willows, near the edge of the river. Finally, on the twenty-first of January I saw him on the border of the woods, leaning upon the trunk of an oak which we call the witch's tree. He said many things that I could not understand, some of which I have forgotten. Others are in my mind now but just as though they were shut in a box. When I open the lid and speak them, they will fly away like released birds and I shall no longer remember them. But until I speak them, they are in here as though red branded," and he motioned toward his forehead.
The date January twenty-first made the monarch shudder.
"Describe the boy's appearance and do not be afraid to tell me all."
"I do not fear," declared the peasant. "What could be done to me? Might my life be taken? I am over eighty-five, a dry trunk awaiting the ax. An open grave already yawns for me. The apparition, your Royal Highness, was a beautiful creature and, excepting the dress, like the figure of the archangel Raphael in the parish church. For this reason and in order to set my conscience at rest, I consulted our priest, but he, not daring to give advice, sent me to the bishop, by whom I was told that I related only delusions. I then resolved to keep silent, but the spectre came again, pale, terrible, saying, 'Martin! Martin!' 'Twas night and I in my cot, but, in spite of the late hour, I seized my pouch and staff and, begging my bread along the roadside, journeyed to Paris."