The Jew held as much to his daughter as to his ducats. He persecuted the pretended husband with a pertinacity which eventually overcame Giles de Pontoise. A compromise was effected. The knight owed the usurer three thousand golden crowns, and had stolen from him his only daughter. Giles agreed to surrender his “lady,” on condition that the money-lender should sign an acquittance of the debt. This done, the Jew and daughter walked homeward, neither of them well satisfied with the result of their dealings with a knight.
The burnt-out Lombarder turned round at the threshold of the knight’s door, with a withering sneer, like Edmund Kean’s in Shylock when he was told to make haste and go home, and begin to be a Christian. “It is little but sorrow I get by you, at all events,” said the Jew to the Chevalier.
“Do you make so light of your grandson?” asked Giles. And with this Parthian dart he shut his door in the face of the trio who were his victims.
This knight was a victimizer; but below we have an illustration of knights victimized through too daring affection.
The great Karloman may be said to have been one of those crowned knights who really had very little of the spirit of chivalry in him, with respect to ladies. He married, successfully, two wives, but to neither did he allow the title of Empress. It is, however, not with his two wives, but his two daughters and their chevaliers par amours, with whom we have now to do.
In the Rue de la Harpe, in Paris, may be seen the remains, rather than the ruins, of the old building erected by the Emperor Julian, and which was long known by the name of the “old palace.” It served as a palace about a thousand years and half a century ago, when one night there drew up before it a couple of knights, admirably mounted, and rather roughly escorted by a mob, who held up their lanterns to examine the riders, and handled their pikes as if they were more ready to massacre the knights than to marshal them.
All the civility they received on this February night was of a highly equivocal nature. They were admitted, indeed, into the first and largest court of the palace, but the old seneschal locked and barred the gate behind them. An officer too approached to bid them welcome, but he had hardly acquitted himself of his civil mission when he peremptorily demanded of them the surrender of their swords.
“We are the King’s own messengers,” said one of the knights, rather puzzled at the reception vouchsafed to them;—“and we have, moreover, a despatch to deliver, written in our gracious master’s own hand,” remarked the second knight.
“Vive Louis le Debonnaire!” exclaimed the seneschal; “how fares it with our sovereign?”
“As well as can be,” was the reply, “with a monarch who has been engaged six whole weeks at Aix, in burying his father and predecessor, Charlemagne. Here is his missive.” This missive was from Louis the Frolicsome, or Louis the Good-Natured, or Louis of Fair Aspect. He was morose, wittily disposed, and ill-featured;—but then the poet-laureate had given him his fine name; and the king wore it as if it had been fairly won. He had clipped, shaved, and frocked, all his natural brothers, and then shut them up in monasteries. He had no more respect for treaties than he had for Mohammed, and by personal example he taught perjury and rebellion to those whom he cruelly punished when they imitated their exalted instructor. The seneschal perused the letter addressed to him by his royal correspondent, and immediately requested the two knights to enter the palace itself.