"If you order it, glorious King, my bear will ride on horseback on my cane, and myself holding him by the chain, he will gracefully gallop around the hall."
"Good; let us see him do it."
"Attention! Mont-Dore."
"How do you call him?"
"Mont-Dore, glorious King. I give him that name because I caught him when he was still but a cub on one of the peaks of Mont Dore."
"I am no longer surprised if your bear is ferocious. He was born in one of the most notorious lairs of the accursed Vagres, those wandering men, those wolves, those heads of wolves who haunt only rocks, forests and caverns. But as sure as this morning we put one of them to the torture, we shall end by wiping them all out, just as Count Neroweg did the other day with a band of them who took refuge in the defile of Allange."
"Oh, glorious King, may the Almighty deliver us from these pestilential Vagres! May He grant me the favor of never running across any of them except as he hangs from the gibbet—the way I saw the first and last one whom I ever laid eyes upon—it was a terrible sight! The thought of it still makes me tremble."
"Where did you see that Vagre on the gibbet?"
"Near the frontier of Limousin; over the gallows was this inscription: 'This is Karadeucq the Vagre—so shall his likes be treated.' "
"Karadeucq! The old bandit who with his bedevilled band so long raided Limousin and Auvergne!"