"By my faith, seigneurs," said the seigneur of Haut-Poul, "as true as ten deniers were paid for an ass's head during the scarcity at the siege of Antioch, I have not in my life feasted like to-night. Glory to the Duke of Aquitaine!"
"Let's talk of the scarcity," rejoined Bohemond, the Prince of Taranto; "its recollection may serve to rekindle our satisfied hunger and our extinguished thirst."
"I ate up my shoes soaked in water and seasoned with spices," said the sire of Montmorency.
"Do you know, noble seigneurs," put in Walter the Pennyless, "that there are comrades, luckier or wiser than we, who never suffered hunger in the Holy Land, and whose faces are fresh and ruddy?"
"Who are they, valiant chevalier?"
"The King of the Vagabonds and his band."
"The wretches who ate up the Saracens, and regaled themselves with human flesh?"
"Seigneurs," remarked Robert Courte-Heuse, Duke of Normandy, "we must not run down Saracen flesh."
"These feasts on human flesh," explained the seigneur of Sabran, "are not at all wonderful. My grandfather once told me that, during the famous famine of 1033, the plebs fed on one another."
"I remember one evening," added Walter the Pennyless, "when I and my friend Cuckoo Peter had a famous supper——"