"I would have preferred to have dispossessed some fighting abbot. But I console myself with the thought that we are to be masters of numerous herds of swine."
"Richulf, you can think of nothing but loins of beef and ham!"
Thus gaily conversing, the warriors followed the avenue bordered with poplars. The abbey was presently descried from the distance, rising in the center of a sort of peninsula, and reached from this side by a narrow road that was built between two ponds.
"Hurrah for Charles Martel!"
"What a magnificent building! Look at it, Berthoald!"
"Vast domains! And that grand forest in the horizon—it surely all belongs to our abbey. We shall be able to hunt at our ease."
"It must be full of game. We shall hunt deer, bucks and wild boars.... Long live Charles Martel!"
"And the ponds that extend down there on either side of the road, they must be full of fish.... We shall fish carp, tench and pike that I like so well!... Long live Charles!"
"Do you not find, comrades, that this abbey has a certain martial aspect, with its high battlements, its counter forts, its ramparts, its few and narrow windows and its ponds that surround it like a natural defence?"
"So much the better! Within its walls we shall be entrenched as within a fortress; and should it please the successors of our good Charles, or the phantom kings, to dispossess us in turn, as we are about to dispossess this abbess, we shall be able to prove that we wear hose and not skirts."