"You are right, my son. We must make sure that the description sounds well to the ear. Imagine that I am the auctioneer, thus:
"No. 7. Bull; race, Breton Gaul; of great strength and very great height; aged twenty-nine years; excellent laborer; of a violent character, sulky, because of his not being accustomed to slavery, for he is still green; but he can be broken in by application of gentleness, severity, and chastisement."
"That is what is left of a free and proud man whose only crime is having defended his country against Caesar!" I cried bitterly. "And yet I did not kill that same Caesar, who has reduced our people to slavery and is now about to divide among his soldiers the lands of our fathers, I did not kill him when I was making off with him on my horse!"
"You, my fine Bull, you took great Caesar prisoner?" asked the "horse-dealer" mockingly. "It's too bad I can't proclaim that at the auction. It would make a rare slave of you."
I reproached myself for having uttered before that trafficker in human flesh words which resembled a regret or a complaint. Coming back to my first thought, which made me endure patiently the loquacity of the man, I said to him:
"When you picked me up where I fell on the battlefield, did you see hard by a war chariot harnessed to four black bulls, with a woman and two children hanging from the pole?"
"Did I see them? Did I see them!" exclaimed the "horse-dealer" with a mournful sigh. "Ah, what excellent goods lost! We counted in that chariot eleven young women and girls, all beautiful—oh, beautiful!—worth at least forty or fifty gold sous apiece—but dead. They had all killed themselves. They were no good to anyone."
"And in the chariot were there no women nor children still alive?"
"Women? No,—alas, no. Not one, to the great loss of the Roman soldiers and myself. But of children, there were, I believe, two or three who had survived the death which those fierce Gallic women, furious as lionesses, wished to inflict upon them."
"And where are they?" I exclaimed, thinking of my son and daughter, who were, perhaps, among them, "where are those children? Answer! Answer!"