"I am sent," quoth he, "by my royal master to act in whatever capacity may be most agreeable to you. Give your orders, therefore; it is my devoir to execute them manfully."
"Then hear me," explained Aldobrandino. "It is my wish that you should carry all before you at this tournament until I ride into the field, when I will engage you, and you must suffer yourself to be vanquished, so that I may remain the victor of the day."
Thus far have we followed with exact circumstantiality the relation of the Italian writers before mentioned, to which also we shall later return; but let us, for the sake of novelty in the telling of an old story, for a little space change our view-point and give the play as it was acted before the eyes of the fair lady who was herself its heroine.
Sancie was her name, or, if you will, Sanchia, third of the four fair daughters of Raymond Berenger, Count of Provence, who had the singular fortune to marry each of the four to a king.
Perilous seemed this honour to this future father-in-law of monarchs, as he admitted to his friend, Romeo de Villeneuve, what time he ceded to St. Louis of France the strong castle of Tarascon as the dowry of his daughter Marguerite. But Villeneuve very shrewdly consoled him. "For," quoth he, "let not this great expense trouble you. If you marry your eldest high the mere consideration of that alliance will get the others husbands at less cost."
The event approved his sagacity and also the prediction of a soothsayer, to whom the four sisters had applied to know the rank of their future husbands, for, requested to draw at venture from a pack of cards, Marguerite straightway drew the king of swords, Eleanor the king of money, Sancie the king of goblets, and Beatrice the king of clubs.[5]
The witch expounded this to mean that Marguerite should wed the knightliest king in all the world and in all ages (which indeed came to pass in the person of St. Louis); that Eleanor should in her king of coins gain the monarch of the wealthiest of all realms, namely, England; that Beatrice should have the misfortune to mate with a hard-hitting savage, but still a king—a forecast fulfilled in Charles of Anjou, brother of St. Louis, who won his kingdom of the two Sicilies by as hard and as cruel fighting as ever dinted the armour or soiled the fame of a knight; and that, finally, Sancie, the third in order of birth, but last to find a lover, should of her own free will choose for her husband a king of good fellows, whose kingdom was but that of cups.
This prophecy, I say, had been more than half fulfilled. The two elder daughters were queens; the youngest was besought and contracted, when their father, fearing perchance that the prediction would be carried out in the case of his third and best-loved, set himself against fate and called a halt in its proceedings.
It was unfitting, he declared, that Beatrice should be married before her elder sister Sancie, and Charles of Anjou must perforce hold his amorous desires in leash until his prospective sister-in-law was disposed of.
This at first sight seemed no such difficult matter, for while the others had each been meted one lover, on Sancie fortune had bestowed a full half dozen. But though their numbers flattered the vanity and pleased the coquetry of the lady, the quality of no one of them was satisfactory to the father.