"You will leave this place alive," coldly answered the prince, "and besides my words, you will report the facts to Marcel."
A prey to irrepressible agony, Jocelyn fell back upon the settee and Charles the Wicked proceeded:
"You will first of all tell Marcel that, however wily he may be, I have not been his dupe. The chiefs of the Jacques whom he sent to me as auxiliaries were expected to become my watchers, and, if need be, my butchers ... if I deviated from the path marked out by that insolent bourgeois. I was in his hands, said he to me, but an 'instrument that he would break if need be'.... Very well! I have broken one of Marcel's redoubtable instruments.... I have annihilated the Jacquerie ... and at this very moment my friends, Gaston Phoebus, the Count of Foix and the Captal of Buch are crushing in Meaux the last coils of that serpent of revolt that sought to rise against the nobility——"
"The Jacquerie crushed! annihilated!" exclaimed Jocelyn, more and more beside himself. But returning to his first suspicion, he gathered voice to say: "Charles the Wicked, you are the most cunning man on earth ... you are laying some trap for me.... If the Jacques came to Clermont to the number of eight or ten thousand, you were not in command of sufficient forces to exterminate them."
"Sir envoy, you are too hasty in your conclusions. Listen first, you will then be able to judge. I promised facts to you. Here they are. Yesterday, towards noon, I was apprised of the approach of the Jacques. The bourgeoisie of Clermont and the corporation of artisans, infected with the old communal leaven, went out to meet the malefactors and to feast them. I encouraged their plans, and while the Jacques halted in the valley near Clermont, three of their chiefs presented themselves at the drawbridge demanding to entertain me."
"What were their names?"
"William Caillet ... Adam the Devil ... and Mazurec the Lambkin.... I ordered the three Jacques chiefs to be brought to me; I received them with great courtesy; I touched their hands, called them my comrades and gave them fraternal embraces. We agreed that, obedient to Marcel's wishes, they should be my auxiliaries, and that we would speedily start on the march to Paris. In the meantime their men were to remain encamped in the valley. After issuing their orders to this effect, the three chiefs conferred with me upon the plan of campaign. So said, so done. The three chiefs returned to their encampment to order matters and came back to me. My first act then was to throw all three into prison. I knew that, deprived of their chiefs, the execrable bandits were half overcome. I then sent one of my officers, the Sire of Bigorre, to inform the Jacques that at the conference I had with their chiefs, they desired that their men should immediately begin to exercise themselves with my archers and cavalrymen, in order to accustom themselves to military manoeuvres. The Jacques tumbled into the trap, gladly accepted the proposition, and were formed into battalions."
Noticing the indignation and rage of Jocelyn, that betrayed themselves through his involuntary twitchings in his bonds, Charles the Wicked interrupted his narrative for a moment in order to interject the remark: "I congratulate myself more and more upon having had you bound fast. Waste not your fury. It will soon have stronger matter upon which to expend itself.... I now proceed.... The bourgeois and artisan guilds of Clermont had tapped a large number of barrels to feast their friends the Jacques with. Their hilarity was soon complete. With loud cries the Jacques called for their first exercise in military marching. The Sire of Bigorre, an able captain, commanded the manoeuvre. He did it in such a way that, after a few marches and countermarches, the Jacques found themselves huddled and crowded together like a herd of cattle at the bottom of the valley, an easy mark to my archers stationed on the surrounding eminences, while my cavalry occupied the only two issues from which the fleers could escape out of the deep hollow."
"You princes are experts at massacres!" cried Jocelyn, in bitter despair.
"It was a regular slaughter of wolves," answered Charles the Wicked. "The Jacques, like stupid and ferocious brutes, and full of vain-glory at parading before the bourgeois of Clermont, put out their chests, and carried their staves, forks and scythes with as much pride as if they carried the noble arms of knighthood; they even applauded the excellent order of my men-at-arms who held the crests round about the hollow in which they were penned up. Suddenly the clarions gave a signal. The music greatly delighted the revolted varlets. But their delight is soon ended. At the clarion's first notes my archers bent their bows and a hail storm of murderous bolts, shot by my soldiers from above into the compact mass of Jacques in the hollow, decimated the bandits. A panic took possession of the savage herd; the brutes sought to flee by the two issues in the valley; but there they found themselves face to face with my five hundred cavalrymen, cased in iron, who, with lances, swords and iron maces furiously charged upon the canaille, while my archers continued riddling with their bolts both the flanks of the band and those who sought to climb up the hill.... It was a superb slaughter.... The ground was heaped with the dead!"