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In the battle of Roncevaux everything is aggrandized beyond measure. The worthies kill the entire vanguard of the Saracens, a hundred thousand men, and, afterward, the army of King Marsile, thirty battalions, each composed of ten thousand men. Roland winds his horn, and the sound travels away thirty leagues to Charlemagne, and is echoed by his sixty thousand hautboys. What visions such words awakened in those inexperienced brains! Then all at once the bow was unbent; the wounded Roland calls to mind “men of his lineage, of gentle France, of Charlemagne his lord who supports him, and cannot help but weep and sigh for them.” At the conclusion of the carnage with which they filled Jerusalem, the crusaders, weeping and chanting, went barefoot to the holy sepulchre. Later, when a number of the barons wanted to leave the crusade of Constantinople, the others went to meet them, and entreated them on their knees; then all embraced each other, bursting into sobs. Robust children: that expresses the whole truth; they killed and howled as if they were beasts of prey, then when once the fury was calmed, they were all tears and tenderness, like a child who flings himself upon his brother’s neck, or who is going to make his first communion.
VI.
I return to my Béarnais; they were the most active and circumspect of the band. The counts of Bearn fought and treated with all the world; they hover between the patronage of France, Spain and England, and are subject to no one; they pass from one to the other and always to their own advantage, “drawn,” says Matthew Paris, “by pounds sterling, or crowns, of which they had both great need and great abundance.” They are always first where fighting is to be done or money to be gained; they go to be killed in Spain or to demand gold at Poitiers. They are calculators and adventurers; from imagination and courage lovers of warfare,—lovers of necessity and reflection.
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And in this manner their Henry won the crown of France, thinking much of his interests and little of his life, and always poor. After the camp at La Fère, when he was already recognized as king, he wrote: “I have only a pretence of a horse on which to fight, and no entire armor that I can put on; my shirts are in tatters, my pourpoints out at the elbows. My saucepan is many a time upset, and now these two days I have dined and supped with one and another, for my purveyors say that they see no way of furnishing my table any longer, especially since they have received no money for six months.”
A month later, at Fontaine-Française, he charged an army at the head of eight hundred cavaliers, and fired off his pistol by way of sport, like a soldier. But at the same time this father of his people treated the people in the following manner: “The prisons of Normandy were full of prisoners for the payment of the duty on salt. They languished there in such wise that as many as six-score of their corpses were brought forth at one time. The parliament of Rouen besought His Majesty to have pity on his people; but the king had been told that a great revenue was coming from that tax, and said that he was willing that it should be raised, and seemed that he would wish to turn the rest into mockery.”